Background/introduction Anti-tumor immune response caused by High Intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU) therapy has been a subject of controversy. Most agree that the response is more likely to be induced by mechanical, rather than thermal effects of HIFU. The goal of the current work was to study the effect of HIFU-induced liquefaction of a tumor on tumor-specific and non-specific T-cell mediate...

Training L2 learners’ pronunciation by using a controlled perception procedure has long been the mainstream of L2 speech pedagogy research. However, endeavors have also been done to explore more communicative teaching methods. The current study presents a paradigm that tests both communicative teaching methods’ renderings of pronunciation pedagogy and a form-focused instruction which is less us...

Framed under a cognitive approach to task-based L2 learning, this study used a pedagogical approach to investigate the effects of three vocabulary lessons (one traditional and two task-based) on acquisition of basic meanings, forms and morphological aspects of Spanish words. Quantitative analysis performed on the data suggests that the type of pedagogical approach had no impact on immediate ret...

This study investigates the impact of three types of focus-on-form instruction (FFI) on learners’ reading comprehension and their development of the English past unreal conditional. The study also investigates whether the learners’ grammar development is implicit or explicit in nature. Fifty-one intermediate-level ESL learners were distributed into three groups. Each group read passages with di...

We report on a pilot experiment conducted in order to investigate whether computer-based conversational focused tasks promote acquisition of forms. The structure we targeted was the German dative case in prepositional phrases. The goal of the task we designed was two-fold: First, learners should improve their overall communicative skills in the scenario and, second, expand their mastery of the ...

This study examines the effect of Form-Focused Instruction (FFI) on the learning of weak forms in L2 pronunciation pedagogy. FFI treatment was designed to encourage learners to notice the gap of the target pronunciation, negotiate its phonetic form, and correct the output by themselves. Results of the treatment were compared with the non-FFI treatment involving sixty elementary to low intermedi...

BACKGROUND High-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) is a promising, non-invasive technique in treating benign thyroid nodules (TNs). The aim of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of HIFU to induce clinically meaningful shrinkage in benign predominantly solid TNs and to identify variables that influence or predict the magnitude of TN volume reduction. METHODS For each of ten subjects, HIF...

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Ultrasound (US) is used in the clinical setting not only for diagnosis but also for therapy. As a therapeutic US technique, high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) can be applied to treat cancer in a clinical setting. Microbubbles increased temperature and improved the low therapeutic efficiency under HIFU; however, microbubbles have room for improvement in size, stability, and targeting abili...