Revised 8 January 2009 Accepted 8 January 2009 Published Online First 26 January 2009 ABSTRACT Background and Aim: Visceral fat accumulation reportedly increases the risk of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) development in patients with chronic liver disease. However, it has not beeen fully elucidated whether visceral fat accumulation increases the risk of HCC recurrence after curative treatment i...

OBJECTIVE To study the relationship between the prevalence of vertebral fractures (VFs) using VF assessment (VFA) in asymptomatic men and the prevalence and severity of abdominal aortic calcification (AAC). METHODS We enrolled 709 men with mean (s.d.) age 62.4 (8.6) (range 45-89) years. Lateral VFA images and scans of the lumbar spine and proximal femur were obtained using a GE Healthcare Lun...

We evaluated a low-cost virological failure assay (VFA) on plasma and dried blood spot (DBS) specimens from HIV-1 infected patients attending an HIV clinic in Harare. The results were compared to the performance of the ultrasensitive heat-denatured p24 assay (p24). The COBAS AmpliPrep/COBAS TaqMan HIV-1 test, version 2.0, served as the gold standard. Using a cutoff of 5,000 copies/mL, the plasm...

BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVES Obesity is a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease (CAD). This study was aimed to assess the risk for CAD determined by certain new and conventional body composition parameters such as visceral fat area (VFA), body mass index (BMI), waist to hip ratio (WHR), etc. METHODS We did an age and sex matched case-control study of acute myocardial infarction with 100 par...

Treatment options of ruptured vertebrobasilar fusiform aneurysms (VFA) are limited and often carry significant mortality and morbidity. We report the use of Pipeline Embolization Device (PED) to successfully treat a patient with a ruptured vertebrobasilar fusiform aneurysm (VFA) who presented with subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH). A 73 year-old man with a history of cardiac stent placement seven d...

We have developed a pig caecal cannulation model that allows us to evaluate the effects in vivo of feed withdrawal on (1) the caecal environment, including pH and volatile fatty acid (VFA) concentration, and (2) the growth of foodborne pathogens in the caecum. In vitro studies evaluated growth of Yersinia enterocolitica and Salmonella typhimurium at five concentrations of VFA at four pH levels....

The field of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in machine learning relates significantly to the domains of classical and instrumental conditioning in psychology, which give an understanding of biology’s approach to RL. In recent years, there has been a thrust to correlate some machine learning RL algorithms with brain structure and function, a benefit to both fields. Our focus has been on one such st...

Simple titration methods certainly deserve consideration for on-site routine monitoring of volatile fatty acid (VFA) concentration and alkalinity during anaerobic digestion (AD), because of their simplicity, speed and cost-effectiveness. In this study, the 5 and 8 pH point titration methods for measuring the VFA concentration and carbonate system alkalinity (H2CO3*-alkalinity) were assessed and...

The possibility of utilizing volatile fatty acids (VFA)-containing waste substrates from biotechnological and industrial processes was investigated by cultivating both oleaginous (Candida sp., Rhodotorula glutinis, Trichosporon cutaneum, Yarrowia lipolytica) and non-oleaginous (Kluyveromyces polysporus, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Torulaspora delbrueckii) yeast species on acetic acid, propionic a...

Automated reasoning about systems with infinite domains requires an extension of automata, and in particular, regular automata, to infinite alphabets. Existing formalisms of such automata cope with the infiniteness of the alphabet by adding to the automaton a set of registers or pebbles, or by attributing the alphabet by labels from an auxiliary finite alphabet that is read by an intermediate t...