The advantages of gallium lanthanum sulphide (GLS) based glass over other competing glasses for active and infrared applications are evident through its low-phonon energy, high rare-earth solubility, high transition temperature and non-toxicity. However this glass often devitrifies during fibre drawing due to a small separation between the crystallisation and fibre drawing temperatures. Improvi...

OBJECTIVES The aim of the study was to determine whether longitudinal left ventricular (LV) function provides prognostic information in a large cohort of patients with systemic light-chain (AL) amyloidosis. BACKGROUND AL amyloidosis is associated with a high incidence of cardiovascular events. Reduced myocardial longitudinal function is one of the hallmarks of myocardial involvement in this r...

BACKGROUND Increased muscle mass index of the left ventricle (LVMi) is an independent predictor for the development of symptoms in patients with asymptomatic aortic stenosis (AS). While the onset of clinical symptoms and left ventricular systolic dysfunction determines a poor prognosis, the standard echocardiographic evaluation of LV dysfunction, only based on measurements of the LV ejection fr...

OBJECTIVES We assessed the value of speckle tracking imaging performed early after a first ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) in order to predict infarct size and functional recovery at 3-month follow-up. METHODS 44 patients with STEMI who underwent revascularization within 12 h of symptom onset were prospectively enrolled. Echocardiography was performed 3.9 ± 1.2 days after m...

BACKGROUND Although left ventricular (LV) global systolic longitudinal strain (GLS) reliably and accurately assesses LV systolic function and is also a powerful prognostic predictor, the importance and prognostic value of GLS in end-stage renal disease patients receiving maintenance peritoneal dialysis (PD) remain unclear. This study sought to determine the prognostic value of GLS in chronic PD...

In this report, we examine the potential use of Guided Local Search (GLS) for function optimization. In order to apply GLS, the function to be minimized is augmented with a set of penalty terms that enable local search to escape from local minima. The function F6 is used to demonstrate the proposed technique.

BACKGROUND The aim of the study was to assess the correlation of the selected biomarkers and collagen turn-over indices with advanced echocardiographic parameters among patients with preserved and reduced ejection fraction (EF). METHODS We included 62 patients with the symptomatic heart failure. The patients were divided in to two groups according to the evaluated ejection fraction (EF - Simp...

Recent studies showed that Brassica vegetables are rich in numerous health-promoting compounds such as carotenoids, polyphenols, flavonoids, and glucosinolates (GLS), as well as isothiocyanates (ITCs) and are involved in health promotion upon consumption. ITCs are breakdown products of GLS, and typically used in the food industry as a food preservative and colouring agent. They are also used in...

Developed from constraint satisfaction as well as operations research ideas, Guided Local Search (GLS) and Fast Local Search are novel meta-heuristic search methods for constraint satisfaction and optimisation. GLS sits on top of other local-search algorithms. The basic principle of GLS is to penalise features exhibited by the candidate solution when a localsearch algorithm settles in a local o...

Glucosinolates (Gls) constitute a major group of natural metabolites represented by three major classes (aliphatic, indolic and aromatic) of more than 120 chemical structures. In our previous work, soluble proteins and metabolites in Arabidopsis mutants deficient of aliphatic (myb28/29) and indolic Gls (cyp79B2B3) were analyzed. Here we focus on investigating the changes at the level of membran...