The lower urinary tract (LUT) comprises a storage unit, the urinary bladder, and an outlet, the urethra. The coordination between the two structures is tightly controlled by the nervous system and, therefore, LUT function is highly susceptible to injuries to the neuronal pathways involved in micturition control. These injuries may include lesions to the spinal cord or to nerve fibres and result...

Data embedding mechanism used for authentication applications should be secure in order to prevent an adversary from forging the embedded data at his/her will. Meanwhile, semi-fragileness is often preferred to allow for distinguishing content changes versus non-content changes. In this paper, we focus on jointly enhancing the robustness and security of the embedding mechanism, which can be used...

Many modern Field Programmable Logic Arrays (FPGAs) use lookup table (LUT) logic blocks which can be programmed to realize any function of a fixed number of inputs. It is possible to employ logic blocks that realize only a subset of all functions, while the rest can be obtained by permuting and negating the inputs. Such blocks, known as Universal Logic Modules (ULMs), have already been consider...

Three ideal point-based multi-criteria decision methods (MCDM), i.e., iterative ideal point thresholding (IIPT), compromise programming (CP) and a newly-proposed CP variant, called balanced compromise programming (BCP), were applied to the Tabacay catchment in Ecuador with the aim of finding a distribution of land use types (LUT) that optimizes regional land performance. This performance was ex...

This study determined the influence of gender, menstrual phase (MP), and oral contraceptive (OC) use on immunological changes in response to endurance exercise. Twelve women and 11 men similar in age, aerobic power, and activity level cycled for 90 min at 65% maximal aerobic power. Women were OC users (n = 6) or nonusers (NOC) and cycled during the follicular (Fol) and the luteal (Lut) phases. ...

The loss of lower urinary tract (LUT) control is a ubiquitous consequence of a complete spinal cord injury, attributed to a lack of regeneration of supraspinal pathways controlling the bladder. Previous work in our lab has utilized a combinatorial therapy of peripheral nerve autografts (PNG), acidic fibroblast growth factor (aFGF), and chondroitinase ABC (ChABC) to treat a complete T8 spinal co...

Epidemiological studies suggest that consumption of vegetables rich in the xanthophylls lutein (LUT) and zeaxanthin (ZEA) reduces the risk for developing age-related cataract, a leading cause of vision loss. Although LUT and ZEA are the only dietary carotenoids present in the lens, direct evidence for their photoprotective effect in this organ is not available. The present study examined the ef...

Net surface shortwave radiation (NSSR) is a key parameter that drives the material exchange and energy balance. Herein, we propose an improved artificial neuron network (ANN) with parameterized (ANN-P) method to first calculate albedo at top of atmosphere (TOA) by considering non-Lambertian effect. Subsequently, NSSR estimated based on relationship between TOA broadband Earth's surface-absorbed...

This study utilized neuronal c-fos expression to examine the spinal pathways involved in processing nociceptive and non-nociceptive afferent input from the lower urinary tract (LUT) of the urethane-anesthetized rat. C-fos protein was detected immunocytochemically in only a small number of cells (< 2 cells/L6 section) in control animals. However, chemical irritation with 1% acetic acid or mechan...

It is difficult for LUT-based FPGA technology mapping to generate a power-minimal K-input LUT network with minimum depth at one time because a problem for power-minimization was shown to be NP-hard[5]. A problem for area-minimization is also NP-hard, and area-aware algorithms[7][8][9][10] recover area after generating a depthminimum network. On the other hand, existing poweraware algorithms[11]...