The characteristics of 214 episodes of invasive bacterial infection among 176 patients with homozygous sickle cell (SS) disease were examined. Streptococcus pneumoniae occurred in 81 episodes, Salmonella spp in 70, Haemophilus influenzae type b in 30, Escherichia coli in 24, and Klebsiella spp in nine. The cumulative incidence showed that S pneumoniae and H influenzae occurred predominantly bef...

Scatter search (SS) and path relinking (PR) are evolutionary methods that have been successfully applied to a wide range of hard optimization problems. The fundamental concepts and principles of the methods were first proposed in the 1970s and 1980s, and were based on formulations, dating back to the 1960s, for combining decision rules and problem constraints. The methods use strategies for sea...

The Interaction Picture (IP) method is a valuable alternative to Split-step methods for solving certain types of partial differential equations such as the nonlinear Schrödinger equation or the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. Although very similar to the Symmetric Split-step (SS) method in its inner computational structure, the IP method results from a change of unknown and therefore do not involve ...

Epidural steroid injection (ESI) is known to be an effective treatment for neck or radicular pain due to herniated intervertebral disc (HIVD) and spinal stenosis (SS). Although repeat ESI has generally been indicated to provide more pain relief in partial responders after single ESI, there has been little evidence supporting the usefulness of this procedure. The purpose of this study, therefore...

This paper presents a novel blind watermark detection/decoding scheme for spread spectrum (SS) based watermarking exploiting the fact that the embedded watermark and the host signal are mutually independent. The proposed detector assumes that the host signal and the watermark obey non-Gaussian distributions. The proposed scheme employs the theory of blind source separation (BSS) using independe...

INTRODUCTION The aim of this study was to evaluate the amount of dentine removed after canal preparation using stainless steel (SS) hand instruments or rotary ProFile instruments. MATERIALS AND METHODS Thirty-six extracted human teeth with root canal curvatures less than 30º were embedded in clear polyester resin. The roots were cut horizontally at apical 2, 4 and 7 mm. Dentin thickness was m...

BACKGROUND Non alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) encompasses a wide spectrum of liver disorders ranging from simple steatosis (SS) to cirrhosis. In addition, increasing evidence indicates that hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) may represent a late complication of NAFLD. Alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) serum levels can rise in adults with HCC. AIM In the present study, we aimed to investigate circula...

The influence of the anatomical location of single large hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) on outcomes following hepatic resection (HR) is still unclear. This study examined the role of anatomical location profiles as prognostic markers for patients with single large HCC undergoing HR.A total of 374 consecutive patients with single large HCC undergoing HR between January 2009 and July 2013 were in...

Renal denervation (RDN) has recently been shown to be effective in patients without antihypertensive medication. However, about 30% of patients do not respond to RDN, and therefore, there exists a need to find predictors of response. Individuals are either salt-sensitive (SS) or non-salt-sensitive (NSS) in terms of their blood pressure (BP) regulation. The sympathetic nervous system can influen...

An abundance of information regarding the structure of a finite group can be obtained by studying its irreducible characters. Of particular interest are monomial characters — those induced from a linear character of some subgroup — since Brauer has shown that any irreducible character of a group can be written as an integral linear combination of monomial characters. Our primary focus is the cl...