BACKGROUND Leukocyte telomere length (LTL) is considered a biomarker of human aging and based on cross-sectional studies it shortens with age. However, longitudinal studies reported that many adults display LTL lengthening. METHODS Using Southern blots, we compared cross-sectional rates of age-related LTL change across a ∼20 year age range with those based on longitudinal evaluations in three...

Given strings S1, S2, and a regular expression R, we introduce regular expression constrained sequence alignment as the problem of finding the maximum alignment score between S1 and S2 over all alignments such that in these alignments there exists a segment where some substring s1 of S1 is aligned with some substring s2 of S2, and both s1 and s2 match R, i.e. s1, s2 ∈ L(R) where L(R) is the reg...

PURPOSE Children's blood changes during angiocardiography may not be only due to the contrast media (CM). METHODS We studied the presence and severity of changes in those parameters in 35 pediatric patients undergoing angiocardiography with ioxaglate aiming to identify independent variable responsible for those changes. Blood samples were taken at the beginning of the procedure (SI), at the e...

Search in cyclic AND/OR graphs was traditionally known to be an unsolved problem. In the recent past several important studies have been reported in this domain. In this paper, we have taken a fresh look at the problem. First, a new and comprehensive theoretical framework for cyclic AND/OR graphs has been presented, which was found missing in the recent literature. Based on this framework, two ...

In this paper, we introduce a diamond episode of the form s1 → E → s2, where s1 and s2 are events and E is a set of events. The diamond episode s1 → E → s2 means that every event of E follows an event s1 and is followed by an event s2. Then, by formulating the support of diamond episodes, in this paper, we design the algorithm FreqDmd to extract all of the frequent diamond episodes from a given...

OBJECTIVES With the introduction of smaller probes (S1, S2), the use of transient elastography has been expanded to children. Accordingly, we aimed to address points of consideration in probe choice and interpretation of measured liver stiffness by applying and comparing FibroScan S and M probes in biliary atresia. METHODS Using S1, S2, and M probes, 3 liver stiffness measurements, success ra...

Sensory gating deficit in schizophrenia patients has been well-documented. However, a central conceptual issue, regarding whether the gating deficit results from an abnormal initial response (S1) or difficulty in attenuating the response to the repeating stimulus (S2), raise doubts about the validity and utility of the S2/S1 ratio as a measure of sensory gating. This meta-analysis study, theref...

Event-related potential (ERP) studies of working memory have used delayed S1-S2 match-to-sample tasks in which S1 is held in memory for comparison with S2. ERP negativities in the S1-S2 interval have been interpreted either in terms of working memory operations, or in terms of general preparatory motor processing. Two experiments (N = 20 each) were carried out to explore the nature of ERP negat...

In this paper we provide an achievable rate region for the discrete memoryless multiple access channel with correlated state information known non-causally at the encoders using a random binning technique. This result is a generalization of the random binning technique used by Gel’fand and Pinsker for the problem with non-causal channel state information at the encoder in point to point communi...