Respiratory muscle training (RMT) has been proposed as an effective means to increase the strength of the inspiratory muscles and improve exercise performance. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of RMT on cycling time to exhaustion (TTE) and to determine any potential sex effect. We hypothesized that RMT would improve maximal inspiratory pressure (MIP) and TTE to a similar degr...

Despite advances in medical care, hip fracture surgery remains one of the commonest and highest risk surgical procedures (10% in-hospital mortality and 25% at one year), representing a major economic cost to our community and a World health care burden. Hip fracture patients are usually elderly and chronic cardiovascular disease is common. Due to urgency of surgery, frequent patient cognitive i...

In this paper we use the statistics provided by a field experiment to explore the utility of supplying machine translation suggestions in a computer-assisted translation (CAT) environment. Regression models are trained for each user in order to estimate the time to edit (TTE) for the current translation segment. We use a combination of features from the current segment and aggregated features f...

The optimal surgical technique for the potentially curative treatment of patients with esophageal cancer is still under debate. The transhiatal esophagectomy (THE) with limited lymphadenectomy mainly focuses on a decrease of postoperative morbidity and mortality by preventing a formal thoracotomy. The transthoracic esophagectomy (TTE) with extended two-field lymphadenectomy attempts to improve ...

BACKGROUND Our purpose was to investigate the feasibility of transthoracic echocardiographic (TTE) guidance for minimally invasive periventricular device closure of perimembranous ventricular septal defects (VSDs). METHODS From June 2011 to September 2011, we enrolled 18 young children with perimembranous VSDs to receive minimally invasive device closure in our hospital. All of the patients w...

OBJECTIVES To assess the safety and effectiveness of transthoracic echocardiography (TTE) in monitoring transcatheter closure of atrial septal defect (ASD), in comparison with conventional technique using transesophageal echocardiography (TEE).  Methods: A retrospective review of all cases of transcatheter closure of isolated ostium secundum ASDs operated from 2005 to 2015, at the Pediatric Int...