This article summarizes the long-term clinical results of the Food and Drug Administration-approved heart valves, provides current updates to the objective performance criteria (OPC) used to evaluate new heart valve prostheses, and documents the steps that the International Organization for Standardization Committee used to arrive at the updated OPC. Data were extracted from 19 Food and Drug Ad...

Differential-quadrature phase-shift-keying (DQPSK) can, unlike on-off-keying (OOK), be impaired by nonlinear phase noise (NPN). It has been shown that optical phase conjugation (OPC) is an effective compensation scheme for NPN resulting from the ASE of EDFAs (ASE-NPN). In this paper we discuss the influence of NPN resulting from modulator imperfections (MI-NPN). We show that MI-NPN can be compe...

Current manufacturing and production are changing more and more into a flexible and adaptable factory layout that requires rapid changeover and short reconfiguration times of machines. Additionally the setup time for new devices should be as short as possible. In this paper we propose a hierarchical architecture for a multi-level Plug & Produce system and evaluate the proposed structure using o...

Oropharyngeal candidiasis (OPC) occurs in a diverse group of patients. Risk factors for OPC include the use of dentures, corticosteroid inhalers, cigarettes, broad-spectrum antibiotics, and immunosuppressive and chemotherapeutic agents. Patients with HIV, diabetes, and iatrogenic or autoimmune-induced dry mouth are also at substantial risk for OPC. This infection is caused primarily by Candida ...

Urinary exosomes are small vesicles secreted into urine from all renal epithelial cell types and known to contain proteins that are involved in renal secretion and reabsorption. Among these proteins, urinary exosomal aquaporin-2 (AQP2) has been suggested to be useful for diagnosis of renal disease. However, the mechanisms underlying the excretion of urinary exosomal AQP2 are largely unknown. In...

A selective V, antagonist, l-{l-[4(3-acetylaminopropoxy)benzoyl]-4-piperidyl}-3,4-dihydro-2(l//)-quinolinone (OPC-21268), which is nonpeptide and orally effective, has been recently synthesized. We studied the effects of vasopressin and OPC-21268 on cell contraction with a video motion detector and cytosolic Ca concentration ([Ca]i) by using indo-1 in cultured rat vascular smooth muscle cells a...

Trophic coupling between cerebral endothelium and their neighboring cells is required for the development and maintenance of blood-brain barrier (BBB) function. Here we report that oligodendrocyte precursor cells (OPCs) secrete soluble factor TGF-β1 to support BBB integrity. Firstly, we prepared conditioned media from OPC cultures and added them to cerebral endothelial cultures. Our pharmacolog...

This study investigates the utilization of slag and fly ash (FA) as alternative cementitious binder. Combination of 60% slag and 40% FA was used as new binder. In addition, for activation of slag and FA, sodium hydroxide and calcium hydroxide was used as a chemical activator by 5% weight of the binder, separately. Water to binder and sand to binder ratios was kept 0.55 and 3 in mortar preparati...

The etiopathogenesis of squamous cell carcinoma is important as HPV-associated OSCC and OPC have higher cures rates than OSCC and OPC associated with tobacco and alcohol risk factors.3 Unfortunately, approximately 2/3 of lesions are identified at an advanced stage, thus affecting treatment options, requiring more complex therapy and increasing the morbidity of treatment and cost of care. The ex...