OBJECTIVES Ethical issues have recently been raised regarding the appropriate care of patients in persistent vegetative state (PVS) in Japan. The purpose of our study is to study the attitudes and beliefs of Japanese physicians who have experience caring for patients in PVS. DESIGN AND SETTING A postal questionnaire was sent to all 317 representative members of the Japan Society of Apoplexy w...

BACKGROUND Estimating the prevalence of persistent vegetative state (PVS) following severe traumatic brain injury (sTBI) and its change over time is important for the study of the disease. OBJECTIVE To estimate the prevalence of PVS at six months after sTBI and its trend over the past four decades, and to explore the effect of demographic data, such as age and sex, on the prevalence of PVS. ...

The primo-vascular system (PVS) is a novel network identified in various animal tissues. However, the PVS in subcutaneous tissue has not been well identified. Here, we examined the putative PVS on the surface of abdominal subcutaneous tissue in rats. Hemacolor staining revealed dark blue threadlike structures consisting of nodes and vessels, which were frequently observed bundled with blood ves...

Information about the clinical efficacy and complications of the circumferential mapping and isolation of the pulmonary veins (PVs) in patients with atrial fibrillation (AF) is still limited. The present study included 75 patients (mean age 58 +/- 11 years, 20 women) with paroxysmal (n = 69) or persistent AF (n = 6). Mapping of PVs was performed with a circumferential mapping catheter. After pr...

PURPOSE In textbooks, the perivascular space (PVS) is described as non-enhancing after the intravenous administration of gadolinium-based contrast agent (IV-GBCA). We noticed that the PVS sometimes has high signal intensity (SI) on heavily T2-weighted 3D-FLAIR (hT2-FL) images obtained 4 h after IV-GBCA. The purpose of this study was to retrospectively evaluate the contrast enhancement of the PV...

A variety of neoplasias of the skin and mucous membranes in humans and animals can be ascribed to papillomavirus infections. Some of these papillomavirus induced neoplasias can undergo malignant transformation, while most remain benign. Papillomavirus infections are often even asymptomatic. Therefore the understanding of these viruses is important for appropriate prevention, diagnostic and ther...

BACKGROUND The pulmonary veins (PVs) are important in the pathophysiology of atrial fibrillation (AF), as is atrial tachycardia (AT) remodeling. The relative importance of AT remodeling in PVs versus other atrial sites is unknown. The present study assessed AT-induced cellular changes in PVs versus left atrium (LA) and their relationship to arrhythmogenesis. METHODS AND RESULTS We studied ion...

The RPC-Memory Speciication Problem has been speciied and veriied in an assertional method, supported by the veriication system PVS. Properties of the components are expressed in the higher-order logic of PVS and all implementations have been veriied by means of the interactive proof checker of PVS. A simpliication of the memory speciication-allowing multiple atomic reads-has been proved correc...

The ASTRAL real-time formal specification language has been encoded into the PVS theorem prover. A translator has been developed to completely translate any single-level ASTRAL specification into its corresponding PVS encoding. The semantics of the ASTRAL abstract machine have been revised and expanded for use with PVS. This paper describes the encoding and semantics and explains their use alon...