background more than two billion people have been exposed to hepatitis b virus (hbv) worldwide. furthermore, four hundred million of them are infected with chronic hbv infection. the predominant mutation of the precore region involves a g to a change at nucleotide1896, which creates a premature stop codon at codon 28. two mutations of a1762t and g1764a are reported as the most prevalent mutatio...

The determination of porosity heterogeneity within hydrocarbon reservoirs is important because cost-effective, efficient production of hydrocarbons depends on accurate knowledge of reserve estimates, and hydrocarbon distribution. A new magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique, based on the conical SPRITE (Single-Point Ramped Imaging with T1 Enhancement) MRI method is capable of revealing the ...

OBJECTIVE To compare the diagnostic rate, patient comfort, and complications of ultrasonography-guided breast biopsy using a modified coaxial technique with ultrasonography-guided fine needle aspiration and traditional core biopsy. A secondary objective was to describe the use of the coaxial technique for the biopsy of breast lesions and our initial experience. DESIGN Retrospective study. S...

X-ray spectroscopies, when combined in laser-pump, X-ray-probe measurement schemes, can be powerful tools for tracking the electronic and geometric structural changes that occur during the course of a photoinitiated chemical reaction. X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) is considered an established technique for such measurements, and X-ray emission spectroscopy (XES) of the strongest core-to-c...

This paper proposes a new methodology for testing a core-based system-on-a-chip (SOC), targeting the simultaneous reduction of test area overhead and test application time. At the core level, testability and transparency can be achieved by reusing existing logic inside the core, and providing different versions of the core having different area overheads and transparency latencies. At the chip ...

The authors have used bone endoscopy (medulloscopy) to improve the accuracy of the conventional technique for core decompression and grafting in 36 hips with avascular necrosis of the femoral head. Endocopy was found to facilitate debridement of the necrotic bone and to decrease the risk of perforation of the cartilage during debridement. The endoscopy-assisted technique failed, however, to imp...

Efficient parallelization of genetic algorithms (GAs) on state-of-the-art multi-threading or many-threading platforms is a challenge due to the difficulty of schedulation of hardware resources regarding the concurrency of threads. In this paper, for resolving the problem, a novel method is proposed, which parallelizes the GA by designing three concurrent kernels, each of which running some depe...