INTRODUCTION Urinary recovery of enterally administered probes is used as a clinical test of intestinal mucosal permeability. Recently, evidence has been provided that the recovery of some but not all sugar probes is dependent on the amount of diuresis and renal function. The aim of this study was to assess the effect of fluid loading on the urinary recovery of sugar probes in healthy volunteer...

BACKGROUND Seronegative ocular myasthenia gravis (OMG) is diagnosed by ocular symptoms with supporting SFEMG, typically of frontalis or extensor digitorum muscles. We aimed to determine the sensitivity and specificity of orbicularis oculi SFEMG to diagnose and exclude myasthenia gravis and predict response to therapy. METHODS Orbicularis oculi SFEMG studies were conducted in 142 consecutive p...

Small intestinal motor activity is important for the optimal digestion and absorption of nutrients. These motor responses to feeding are frequently abnormal during critical illness, with the persistence of migrating bursts of contractions during enteral feeding. Whether this disturbance influences nutrient absorption is not known. In this study, the effects of small intestinal burst activity on...

Skeletal muscle accounts for a large proportion of insulin-stimulated glucose utilization. It is generally regarded that much of the control over rates of uptake is posited within the proximal steps of delivery, transport, and phosphorylation of glucose, with glucose transport as the main locus of control. Whether insulin modulates the distribution of control across these steps and in what mann...

Abstruct This paper presents the results of the EURESCOM Project 715. In February 1999, a large team of researchers from six European Public Network Operators has completed a two year period of cooperative experiments on a TINA based environment, called the EURESCOM Services Platform (ESP). This platform consists of a variety of CORBA implementations, hardware platforms, and Operating System co...

In this column, we continue our presentation of the new OMG Portable Object Adapter (POA) [1]. The POA was adopted by the OMG in mid-1997 as a replacement for the Basic Object Adapter (BOA), which was the original CORBA object adapter. As we described in our last column, the BOA was a major source of portability problems for CORBA applications due to its imprecise specification. Serious users o...

Introduction: The aim of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of acupuncture therapy on relieving ocular symptoms in resistant Ocular Myasthenia Gravis (OMG). Case: In this pilot study, three patients with OMG were offered ten sessions of acupuncture therapy, twice weekly, while they received their routine medical treatment. Their symptoms included ptosis and diplopia. Subjective impression ...

Test-driven Agile Simulation (TAS) is a general-purpose approach that combines model-driven engineering, simulation, and testing techniques to improve overall quality for the development process. TAS focuses on the construction of system and test specification models that are conform to the standards provided by the Object Management Group (OMG). Specifically, this approach aims at the detectio...

Our last two columns have explored various techniques for using distributed callbacks to decouple clients and servers and create peer-to-peer relationships between the objects in a distributed system. We’ve shown various ways to eliminate the polling required by a stock application client. All these approaches center around direct or indirect callbacks from the Stock Quote Server. Like all engi...

This is the final column in our series covering the OMG CORBA Messaging specification [1]. Our previous columns in this series covered the communications models supplied by Messaging [2], explained how to program asynchronous method invocations (AMI) in C++ [3], and described timeindependent invocation (TII) and interoperable routing [4]. We finish this series by highlighting the quality of ser...