Biliary stents are approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration only to treat biliary strictures resulting from cancer. However, these devices are often used "off-label" to treat peripheral vascular disease. This study was designed to determine the number and type of malfunctions and adverse events associated with off-label use of biliary stents in the peripheral vasculature. Confirmed bil...

Rare circulating tumor cells (CTCs) have been identified in peripheral blood from cancer patients and have been proved to be a main cause of metastatic disease. Current strategies for size based on isolation of CTCs has been technically challenged owing to their overlapped size value(e.g., CTCs ~16-20μm diameter and leukocytes ~8-14 μm). Here we describe the development of a unique microfluidic...

OBJECTIVE Nucleated red blood cells (NRBCs) have been identified in maternal circulation and potentially provide a resource for the monitoring and diagnosis of maternal, fetal, and neonatal health and disease. Past strategies used to isolate and enrich for NRBCs are limited to complex approaches that result in low recovery and less than optimal cell purity. Here we report the development of a h...

Cricket females perform phonotaxis towards the specific sounds produced by male crickets. By means of a well-tuned peripheral auditory system the cricket is able to extract directional information about the sound, and the neural system can recognize the species specific characteristics of the song. Crickets use sounds coming from at least four body openings to derive the directional signal. A n...

A key task for providing high performance in cluster computers is efficiently transferring data between cluster resources. This study focuses on one component of the communication pipeline: the host to peripheral card interface. As Moore’s Law continues to progress, we are seeing successive generations of clusters with increasing compute power and communications bandwidth, but with roughly the ...

PURPOSE Homonymous hemianopia (the loss of vision on the same side in each eye) impairs the ability to navigate and walk safely. We evaluated peripheral prism glasses as a low vision optical device for hemianopia in an extended wearing trial. METHODS Twenty-three patients with complete hemianopia (13 right) with neither visual neglect nor cognitive deficit enrolled in the 5-visit study. To ex...

OBJECTIVES This cross-sectional study aimed to individually and cumulatively compare sensitivity and specificity of the (1) ankle brachial index and (2) pulse volume waveform analysis recorded by the same automated device, with the presence or absence of peripheral arterial disease being verified by ultrasound duplex scan. METHODS Patients (n=205) referred for lower limb arterial assessment u...

background and purpose: many workers are exposed to workplace hazards. many occupational diseases are preventable by personal protective devices (ppds). though many workers do not use ppds or their protection by ppds is not sufficient. this study was designed to assess the quality of ppds usage among industrial workers. materials and methods: in a cross-sectional study, 648 workers from four ma...