Density of catalytic organisms can determine the biodegradation capacity and specific biodegradation rate (SBR). A new index, biodegradation capacity utilization (BCU, %), was developed for estimating the extent of actual biodegradation of a gas compound over the full capacity. Three methanotrophic cultures were serially diluted (1-1/25), and methane SBR and BCU were measured. Consistently, bio...

OBJECTIVES Upper gastrointestinal (UGI) bleeding carries high morbidity and mortality. The use of a bleeding care pathway (BCP) may improve outcomes, but the results are inconsistent in various studies. METHODS A BCP for patients with UGI bleed with admission in a bleeding care unit (BCU) has been in use at our hospital since 2005. Prior to this, a high dependency unit was used for management...

BACKGROUND Bacterial contamination is a life-threatening risk of blood transfusion, especially with platelet (PLT) transfusions. Bacterial culturing (BCU) of PLTs as well as pathogen reduction (PRT) reduce the likelihood of such contamination. The cost-effectiveness (CE) of these interventions was analyzed after the introduction of the diversion pouch during blood collection. STUDY DESIGN AND...

The oriented diameter of a bridgeless connected undirected (bcu ) graph G is the smallest diameter among all the diameters of strongly connected orientations of G. We study algorithmic aspects of determining the oriented diameter of a chordal graph. We (a) construct a linear-time approximation algorithm that, for a given chordal bcu graph G, finds a strongly connected orientation of G with diam...

This paper shows that under some circumstances the so called BCU method may not be able to find the true CUEP for a specific fault-on trajectory of a power system. The reasons to that malfunction are analysed, and a methodology than can improve the capability of the BCU method to successfully find the CUEP is presented. Finally, several applications of the proposed method to power electrical sy...

Bone-conducted ultrasound (BCU) is perceived even by the profoundly sensorineural deaf. We have developed a novel hearing-aid using BCU perception (BCU hearing aid: BCUHA) for the profoundly deaf. In the BCUHA, ultrasonic sinusoids of about 30 kHz are amplitudemodulated by speech and presented to the mastoid. Generally, two sounds are perceived: one is a high-pitched tone due to the ultrasonic ...

Recent several years have witnessed the surge of asynchronous (async-) parallel computing methods due to the extremely big data involved in many modern applications and also the advancement of multi-core machines and computer clusters. In optimization, most works about async-parallel methods are on unconstrained problems or those with block separable constraints. In this paper, we propose an as...

Human listeners can perceive speech signals from a voicemodulated ultrasonic carrier which is presented through a boneconduction stimulator, even if they are sensorineural hearing loss patients. As an application of this phenomenon, we have been developing a bone-conducted ultrasonic hearing aid (BCUHA). This research examined whether formant space and F0 can be cues of speaker discrimination i...