Importance-performance analysis (IPA) is a simple but effective means of assisting practitioners in prioritizing service attributes when attempting to enhance service quality and customer satisfaction. As numerous studies have demonstrated, attribute performance and overall satisfaction have a non-linear relationship, attribute importance and attribute performance have a causal relationship and...

The aim of this study was to investigate expression of tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) and interleukin-6 (IL-6) in invasive pituitary adenomas (IPAs). The streptavidin peroxidase immunohistochemical method was employed to detect their expression in 40 cases of IPA and 40 of non-invasive pituitary adenoma (NIPA). TNF-α and IL-6 were found to be upregulated in IPA tissue compared with that of NIP...

Lack of accountability makes the Internet vulnerable to numerous attacks, including prefix hijacking, route forgery, source address spoofing, and DoS flooding attacks. This paper aims to bring accountability to the Internet with low-cost and deployable enhancements. We present IPA, a design that uses the readily available toplevel DNSSEC infrastructure and BGP to bootstrap accountability. We sh...

Fifty volunteers randomly assigned to one of five hand washing agents (10 subjects per agent)--a nonantiseptic liquid soap (control), an antiseptic hand rinse containing 60% isopropyl alcohol (IPA) with emollients (Alc A), an antiseptic hand rinse containing 70% IPA and 0.5% chlorhexidine gluconate with emollients (Alc B), an antiseptic containing 4% chlorhexidine gluconate and 4% IPA (CHG), an...

OBJECTIVES Invasive pulmonary aspergillosis (IPA) is associated with high mortality in high-risk (immunosuppressed) patients. Many studies have investigated whether prophylactic inhalation of amphotericin B (AMB) reduces the incidence of IPA, but no definitive conclusions have been reached. The present meta-analysis was performed to evaluate the efficacy of prophylactic inhalation of AMB for th...

The object of this study was to compare vasorelaxing responses to propofol by the intrapulmonary artery (IPA) and the extrapulmonary artery (EPA), and to identify the mechanisms of action. Rat pulmonary arterial rings were isolated and suspended in organ chambers where isometric tension development was measured under optimal resting tension. All pulmonary arterial rings were pre-contracted with...

An attenuated total reflection (ATR) sensor for water-miscible organic solvents was constructed using a combination of sol-gel processing and integrated optical waveguide (IOW) technologies. The sensor consisted of single-mode, sol-gel based planar waveguide coated with a 40 nm thick, porous sol-gel indicator layer prepared from methyltriethoxysilane and doped with methyl red. The response of t...

background: toxic alcohol poisonings are responsible for high mortality and morbidity in russia. this study was aimed to evaluate the trends of harmful ethanol (etoh) drinking as well as methanol (meoh), isopropanol (ipa) and ethylene glycol (eg) poisonings in the middle urals region of russia. methods: in this retrospective study, the medical records of patients poisoned with meoh, ipa and eg ...

It gives me enormous pleasure to introduce the three papers which have won prizes for being placed first, second and third in the 2007 International Psychogeriatric Association (IPA) Research Awards in Psychogeriatrics. As was the case in 2005, eligible entrant first authors were required to be junior investigators within five years of the award of their terminal degree who were employed at a l...