Anterior cervical discectomy and fusion (ACDF) has been widely performed for the treatment of multilevel cervical degenerative disc disease (CDDD). In recent decades, cervical disc arthroplasty (CDA) and hybrid surgery (HS) have been developed to overcome the shortcomings of ACDF. Controversy still remains with regard to the optimal surgical procedure for skip-level CDDD.A total of 55 patients ...

This paper builds on previous papers describing our ongoing research in automated market-mechanism design: using a genetic algorithm (GA) to find optimal parameter-settings for softwareagent traders that operate in virtual “e-marketplaces”, where the rules of the marketplaces are also under simultaneous control of the GA. The aim is that the GA automatically designs new agentbased e-marketplace...

Adult T-cell leukemia-lymphoma (ATL) is resistant to currently available chemotherapy and has a poor prognosis. We describe here a patient with ATL successfully treated with 2-chlorodeoxyadenosine (2-CdA). A 75-year-old Japanese male with an acute type of ATL, who had become resistant to the initial cytotoxic chemotherapy, was treated with 2-CdA administered by continuous drip infusion of 0.09 ...

STING signaling induces interferon-b production by intratumoral dendritic cells (DCs), driving T cell priming within the tumor microenvironment. However, the impact of antigen-specific tolerance on this process is not well studied. We therefore examined the efficacy of in situ tumor delivery of a potent STING-activating CDN ligand (ML-RR-S2 CDA) in both non-tolerant parental FVB/N and the immun...

The objective of the present study was to investigate the biochemical pharmacology of 2-chloro-2'-arabino-fluoro-2'-deoxyadenosine (CAFdA)--a fluorinated analogue of cladribine [2-chloro-2'-deoxyadenosine, Leustatin (CdA)] with improved acid and metabolic stability--in human leukemic cell lines and in mononuclear cells isolated from patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) and acute mye...

This paper introduces Forensic Feature Extraction (FFE) and Cross-Drive Analysis (CDA), two new approaches for analyzing large data sets of disk images and other forensic data. FFE uses a variety of lexigraphic techniques for extracting information from bulk data; CDA uses statistical techniques for correlating this information within a single disk image and across multiple disk images. An arch...

Soil organic carbon (SOC) plays a key role in soil fertility, hydrology, contaminants control and acts as a sink or source of terrestrial carbon content that can affect the concentration of atmospheric CO2. SOC supports the sustainability and quality of ecosystems, especially in semi-arid region. This study was conducted to determine relative importance of 13 different exploratory climatic, soi...

PURPOSE We tested the hypotheses that the mismatch between the clinical disc margin (CDM) and Bruch's membrane opening (BMO) is a function of BMO area (BMOA) and is affected by the presence of glaucoma. METHODS A total of 45 normal eyes (45 subjects) and 53 glaucomatous eyes (53 patients) were enrolled and underwent radial optic nerve head (ONH) imaging with spectral domain optical coherence ...

Computation Decomposition and Alignment (CDA) is a new loop transformation framework that extends the linear loop transformation framework and the more recently proposed Computation Alignment frameworks by linearly transforming computations at the granularity of subexpressions. It can be applied to achieve a number of optimization objectives, including the removal of data alignment constraints,...

Plackett-Burman design and Box-Behnken response surface methodology (RSM) was employed to optimize the medium components for the chitin deacetylase (CDA) activity from Bacillus amyloliquefaciens Z7. Plackett-Burman design was applied to determine the specific medium components affecting CDA activity and found that starch, chitin and MgSO4 were critical in augmenting CDA activity. These signific...