AIMS Alcohol misuse is now regarded as an important risk factor for development of chronic pancreatitis (CP). However, not every alcohol misuser develops CP and it therefore might be suggested that susceptibility could be further influenced by inter-individual variations in the activities of alcohol-metabolizing enzymes. Several genetic polymorphisms that may affect the activities of alcohol-me...

Electroglottographic and acoustic data for Catalan three-consonant clusters composed of a wordand syllable-final C1C2 sequence and an underlyingly voiced C3 in wordand syllable-initial position were collected in order to verify whether a regressive voicing assimilation process operates on all obstruents placed at the C2 and C1 sites. Data reveal the presence of low percentages of vocal fold vib...

BACKGROUND Cytochrome P450 2E1 (CYP2E1) might be involved in the development of bladder cancer. However, previous studies of any association between CYP2E1 RsaI/PstI polymorphism and bladder cancer risk have yielded conflicting results. In this study, we performed a more precise estimation of the relationship by a meta-analysis based on the currently available evidence from the literature. ME...

Introduction Odontoideum bone or the mobile odontoid process is one of the rarest malformations of the cervico-occipital hinge. It exposes to the atlo-axial instability and to the risk of bulbo-medullary compression threatening then the vital and functional prognosis. We report the case of a 16-year-old patient who was the victim of a raod accident resulting in acervical spine injury. Radiologi...

According to previous investigations of gestural patterning, consonant gestures exhibit less temporal overlap in a syllable/word onset than in a coda or across syllables. Additionally, front-to-back order of place of articulation in stop-stop sequences (labial-coronal, coronal-dorsal, labial-dorsal) exhibits more overlap than the opposite order. One possible account for these differences is tha...

Video abstraction allows searching, browsing and evaluating videos only by accessing the useful contents. Most of the studies are using pixel domain, which requires the decoding process and needs more time and process consuming than compressed domain video abstraction. In this paper, we present a new video abstraction method in H.264/AVC compressed domain, AVAIF. The method is based on the norm...

Due to high speed computer networks, the use of digitally formatted data has increased many folds.The digital data can be duplicated and edited with great ease which has led to a need for effectivecopyright protection tools. Digital Watermarking is a technology of embedding watermark withintellectual property rights into images, videos, audios and other multimedia data by a certainalgorithm .Di...

Optogenetics is by now a well-established field within neuroscience where neuro-response is controlled at the molecular level using the photochemical properties of channelrhodopsin (ChR). In this study the recently published X-ray structure of retinal inside the ChR binding pocket serves as the basis for conducting high-level polarizable embedding quantum mechanical/molecular mechanical (QM/MM)...