Contractile behavior of the sheep cardiac Purkinje fiber was examined under voltage-clamp conditions in Tyrode's solution. For square depolarizing clamps to a given voltage, peak twitch tension depended on clamp duration if the duration was less than 80 to 90 msec, but measurable contractions could be obtained following 2-msec square clamps. Time to peak tension at 37°C remained constant as cla...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Transient or minor ischemic stroke is associated with an early risk of deterioration. Baseline perfusion-diffusion mismatch may predict clinical deterioration and infarct growth in this population. METHODS High-risk transient ischemic attack and minor stroke (National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale ≤3) subjects were prospectively enrolled and imaged with MRI within 2...

The ability of organisms to perform at different temperatures could be described by a continuous nonlinear reaction norm (i.e., thermal performance curve, TPC), in which the phenotypic trait value varies as a function of temperature. Almost any shift in the parameters of this performance curve could highlight the direct effect of temperature on organism fitness, providing a powerful framework f...

THE SURHUSING possibility that the widening of the human pupil in the dark accurately reflects regeneration of rhodopsin in the retinal rods was first suggested by the experiments of ALPERN and CAMPBELL (1962a). They found that recovery of the pupil size in the dark after a full rhodopsin bleach was very slow. After an initial transient widening and narrowing in the first minute, the pupil retu...

The same type of objects in different images may vary in their shapes because of rigid and non-rigid shape deformations, occluding foreground as well as cluttered background. The problem concerned in this work is the shape extraction in such challenging situations. We approach the shape extraction through shape alignment and recovery. This paper presents a novel and general method for shape ali...

We studied antegrade concealed conduction of atrial extrastimuli (A2) that blocked in the atrioventricular (AV) node in eight subjects, using a third extrastimulus (A3), coupled at decreasing coupling intervals to A2. Three A1-A2 intervals were tested in each subject: late (just shorter than AV nodal effective refractory period), intermediate, and early (just longer than atrial functional refra...

We describe a novel approach to curve inference based on curvature information. The inference procedure is divided into two stages: a trace inference stage, to which this paper is devoted, and a curve synthesis stage, which will be treated in a separate paper. It is shown that recovery of the trace of a curve requires estimating local models for the curve at the same time, and that tangent and ...

Elliptic curve cryptosystems have improved greatly in speed over the past few years. Here we outline a new elliptic curve signature and key agreement implementation which achieves record speeds while remaining relatively compact. For example, on Intel Sandy Bridge, a curve with about 2250 points produces a signature in just under 52k clock cycles, verifies in under 170k clock cycles, and comput...

This paper presents a simple reduce-form approach to pricing credit derivatives. The definition of default is purely based on the market value of a risky bond and its potential recovery value. A risky bond is treated as a riskless bond with an embedded short position on a barrier option. The risky bond market implicitly prices this barrier option. The default implied volatility (DIV) curve for ...