Measurements of hepatic iron concentration (HIC) are important predictors of transfusional iron burden and long-term outcome in patients with transfusion-dependent anemias. The goal of this work was to develop a readily available, noninvasive method for clinical HIC measurement. The relaxation rates R2 (1/T2) and R2* (1/T2*) measured by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) have different advantages...

Ribosomal RNA genes are abundant repetitive sequences in most eukaryotes. Ribosomal DNA (rDNA) contains many insertions derived from mobile elements including non-long terminal repeat (non-LTR) retrotransposons. R2 is the well-characterized 28S rDNA-specific non-LTR retrotransposon family that is distributed over at least 4 bilaterian phyla. R2 is a large family sharing the same insertion speci...

We study the extensibility of piecewise polynomial functions defined on closed subsets of R2 to all of R2. The compact subsets of R2 on which every piecewise polynomial function is extensible to R2 can be characterized in terms of local quasi-convexity if they are definable in an o-minimal expansion of R. Even the noncompact closed definable subsets can be characterized if semialgebraic functio...

Measurements of hepatic iron concentration (HIC) are important predictors of transfusional iron burden and long-term outcome in patients with transfusiondependent anemias. The goal of this work was to develop a readily available, noninvasive method for clinical HIC measurement. The relaxation rates R2 (1/T2) and R2* (1/T2*) measured by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) have different advantages ...