The purpose of this study is to clarify the effect of direct-interrupting surgery on gastric mucosal congestion in patients with esophageal varices. Fifteen such patients underwent endoscopy in the preoperative, early postoperative and late postoperative periods. The index of local blood volume (lHb) and that of oxygen saturation (1802) were endoscopically measured using a tissue reflectance sp...

Even though the (untwisted) Whitehead doubling operation kills all known abelian invariants of knots (and makes them topologically slice), we show that it does not kill the rational function that equals to the 2-loop part of the Kontsevich integral.

The present study examined adult age differences in processing emotional faces using a psychological refractory period paradigm. We used both behavioral and event-related potential (P1 component) measures. Task 1 was tone discrimination (fuzzy vs. pure tones) and Task 2 was emotional facial discrimination ("happy" vs. "angry" faces). The stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the two tasks was...

In many situations people need to mentally adopt the (spatial) perspective of other persons, an ability that is referred to as "Level 2 perspective taking." Its underlying processes have been ascribed to mental self-rotation that can be dissociated from mental object-rotation. Recent findings suggest that perspective taking/self-rotation may not require central capacity. By using the psychologi...

The psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm is a dominant research tool in the literature on dual-task performance. In this paradigm a first and second component task (i.e., Task 1 and Task 2) are presented with variable stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) and priority to perform Task 1. The main indicator of dual-task impairment in PRP situations is an increasing Task 2-RT with decreasin...

Four reaction time experiments examined the mental rotation process using a psychological refractory period paradigm. On each trial, participants made speeded responses to both a tone (S1) and a rotated letter (S2), presented with varying stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). If mental rotation of the stimulus letter can proceed while central mechanisms are busy with S1, then the effect of orient...

We present a new methodology to derive faster composite operations of the form dP + Q, where d is a small integer ≥ 2, for generic ECC scalar multiplications over prime fields. In particular, we present an efficient Doubling-Addition (DA) operation that can be exploited to accelerate most scalar multiplication methods, including multiscalar variants. We also present a new precomputation scheme ...

background: this randomized controlled study was designed to compare the postoperative analgesic efficacy of intraperitoneal ketamine versus bupivacaine in patients undergoing laparoscopic cholecystectomy. methods: we randomly divided 60 patients undergoing elective laparoscopic cholecystectomy into two groups. the intervention group patients received intraperitoneal ketamine (0.5 mg/ kg) dilut...

In the postoperative period, 47% to 75% of the patients report some degree of pain. This study aimed to evaluate pain in the pre and postoperative period of patients submitted to craniotomy. This prospective research was carried out at the neurosurgery unit of a large Brazilian hospital. For a quantitative evaluation of pain, the verbal numeric 0-10 rating scale was used. Forty patients with a ...

In a parity judgment task, the ERPs at parietal electrode sites become more negative as more mental rotation has to be executed. This article provides a review of the empirical evidence regarding this amplitude modulation. More specifically, experiments are reported that validate both the functional relationship between mental rotation and the amplitude modulation as well as the temporal relati...