Introduction: The treatment of complicated parapneumonic effusion (PPE) and thoracic empyema (TE) is controversial; and the choice of treatment after confirming the failure of simple drainage remains unclear. The purpose of this study was to compare the outcomes of intrapleural urokinase (UK) administration and video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery (VATS) as initial treatment options for PPE and...

Background: The aim of this work was to establish how well gel dosimeters performed, as substitutes for brain tissue compared with standard phantom materials such as water, polymethyl-methacrylate (or PMMA), A150 plastic and TE- liquid phantom material for dosimetry of neutron beams in boron neutron capture therapy. Materials and Methods: Thermal neutron fluence, photon dose and epithermal neu...

Tellurium-containing phycocyanin (Te-PC) and allophycocyanin (Te-APC), two organic tellurium (Te) species, were purified from tellurium-enriched Spirulina platensis by a fast protein liquid chromatographic method. It was found that the incorporation of Te into the peptides enhanced the antioxidant activities of both phycobiliproteins. With fractionation by ammonium sulfate precipitation and hyd...

most fundamental mechanism in the origin of life and the evolution of complex biological organization, manifests itself at all scales in living systems. To grasp a specific biological structure, we must be able to disassemble and reassemble it. Only by demonstrating our ability to do so can we claim that our understanding of the rules and principles governing the functioning of tissues and orga...

Hesitations, so-called disfluencies, are a characteristic of spontaneous speech, playing a primary role in its structure, reflecting aspects of the language production and the management of inter-communication. In this paper we intend to present a database of hesitations in European Portuguese speech HESITA as a relevant base of work to study a variety of speech phenomena. Patterns of hesitatio...

Using murine monoclonal antibodies TE-4 and TE-7 raised against human thymic stroma, we identified two distinct and mutually exclusive thymic microenvironment components: the thymic endocrine epithelium (TE-4+) and mesodermal-derived fibrous stroma (TE-7+). TE-4-reactive epithelium did not react with antibody TE-7, contained thymosin alpha 1 and keratin, and expressed other known markers of thy...

The problem of path validation of a pure light-path in a Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) optical network requires the transmission of optical impairments related parameters along the provisioned route. In this paper we propose an RSVP-TE based mechanism to collect and evaluate optical impairments measured over optical nodes along the light-path.

Abstract: KLT relations almost factorize closed string amplitudes on S2 by two open string tree amplitudes which correspond to the leftand the rightmoving sectors. In this paper, we investigate string amplitudes on D2 and RP2. We find that KLT factorization relations do not hold in these two cases. The relations between closed and open string amplitudes have new forms. On D2 and RP2, the leftan...