PURPOSE Dental hygienists report a lack of confidence in initiating Tobacco Dependence Counseling (TDC) with their patients who smoke. The purpose of this study was to determine if the confidence of dental hygiene students in providing TDC can be increased by Standardized Patient (SP) training, and if that confidence can be sustained over time. METHODS This 2-parallel group randomized design...

Quantitative measurements to detect lymphedema early in persons at-risk for breast cancer (BC) treatment-related lymphedema (BCRL) can aid clinical evaluations. Since BCRL may be initially manifest in skin and subcutis, the earliest changes might best be detected via local tissue water (LTW) measurements that are specifically sensitive to such changes. Tissue dielectric constant (TDC) measureme...

INTRODUCTION Tendon tissue engineering (TTE) tries to produce tendinous tissue of high quality to replace dysfunctional tissue. One possible application of TTE might be the replacement of ruptured tissue of the rotator cuff. Autologous tenocytes seem to be most suitable as no differentiation in vitro is necessary. Today it is still uncertain if there is a difference between tendon-derived cells...

We propose using multi-scale image textures to investigate links between neuroanatomical regions and clinical variables in MRI. Texture features are derived at multiple scales of resolution based on the Laplacian-of-Gaussian (LoG) filter. Three quantifier functions (Average, Standard Deviation and Entropy) are used to summarize texture statistics within standard, automatically segmented neuroan...

A reaction model was developed for the pyrolysis of binary mixtures of compounds whose reactions can be apportioned into three or fewer parallel chains coupled by chain transfer. A representative application of this model to the pyrolysis of mixtures of the asphaltene model compounds n-pentadecylbenzene (PDB) and n-tridecylcyclohexane (TDC) illustrates its utility. The model, along with its ass...

A novel multi-stage noise-shaping (MASH) delta-sigma (∆Σ) Time-to-Digital Converter (TDC) structure is proposed for applications in continuous-time pulsed time-offlight (TOF) rangefinders for nuclear reactor remote sensing, which requires both high resolution and multi MGy gamma-dose radiation tolerance. The converter, implemented in 0.13 μm CMOS, achieves a time resolution of 5.6 ps and an ENO...

We describe an field-programmable gate arrays based (FPGA), 96-channel, Time-to-Digital converter (TDC) and trigger logic board intended for use with the Central Outer Tracker (COT) [T. Affolder et al., Nucl. Instr. and Meth. A 526 (2004) 249] in the CDF Experiment [The CDF-II detector is described in the CDF Technical Design Report (TDR), FERMILAB-Pub-96/390-E. The TDC described here is intend...

BACKGROUND The optimal therapy for preventing recurrent stroke in people with cryptogenic stroke and patent foramen ovale (PFO) has not been defined. The choice between medical therapy (antithrombotic treatment with antiplatelet agents or anticoagulants) and transcatheter device closure has been the subject of intense debate over the past several years. Despite the lack of scientific evidence, ...

BACKGROUND Dialysate-based, on-line measurements of Kt/V and protein catabolic rate (PCR) in dialysis patients have been considered more accurate compared with measurements on the blood side during dialysis. The primary aim of this study was to compare total removed urea (TRU) and PCR, normalized to body weight (nPCRw), obtained by three dialysate-based methods: (i) on-line ultraviolet (UV) abs...

A new learning scheme called time divergence-convergence – TDC – is proposed for two-layer dynamic synapse neural networks – DSNN. DSNN is an artificial neural network model, in which the synaptic transmission is modeled by a dynamic process and the information between neurons are transmitted through spike timing. In TDC, the intra-layer neurons of a DSNN are trained to map input spike trains t...