Schizophrenia is clinically heterogeneous and multidimensional, but it is not known whether this is due to etiological heterogeneity. Previous studies have not consistently reported association between any specific polymorphisms and clinical features of schizophrenia, and have primarily used case-control designs. We tested for the presence of association between clinical features and polymorphi...

This paper focuses on the radio resource management in low earth orbit-mobile satellite systems (LEOMSSs) based on a time division multiple access (TDMA) air interface. A novel demand–assignment medium access control (MAC) protocol, named DRAMAþ (dynamic resource assignment multiple access}enhanced version), is proposed, where voice and Web traffic sources obtain transmission slots through requ...

BACKGROUND As the demand for health care services increases, the need to improve patient flow between departments has likewise increased. Understanding how the master surgical schedule (MSS) affects the inpatient wards and exploiting this relationship can lead to a decrease in surgery cancellations, a more balanced workload, and an improvement in resource utilization. We modeled this relationsh...

BACKGROUND Brain atrophy is a well-accepted imaging biomarker of multiple sclerosis (MS) that partially correlates with both physical disability and cognitive impairment. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Based on MRI scans of 60 MS cases and 37 healthy volunteers, we measured the volumes of white matter (WM) lesions, cortical gray matter (GM), cerebral WM, caudate nucleus, putamen, thalamus, ve...

INTRODUCTION Tau protein is a potential marker of neuronal damage. The aim of the study is to investigate its potential role as a marker of brain atrophy in multiple sclerosis (MS). MATERIALS AND METHODS Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and blood samples were collected from 48 patients with multiple sclerosis. Total-tau (t-tau) and phospho(181Thr)-tau (p-tau) concentrations were assayed with commerc...

Cortical microcircuits are nonrandomly wired by neurons. As a natural consequence, spikes emitted by microcircuits are also nonrandomly patterned in time and space. One of the prominent spike organizations is a repetition of fixed patterns of spike series across multiple neurons. However, several questions remain unsolved, including how precisely spike sequences repeat, how the sequences are sp...

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune neuro-inflammatory disease arising from complex interactions of genetic, epigenetic, and environmental factors. Variations in genes of some microRNAs--key post-transcriptional regulators of many genes--can influence microRNAs expression/function and contribute to MS via expression changes of protein-coding target mRNA genes. We performed an association s...

Load sharing in mobile computing environments is challenged by frequent network disconnections, widely varying bandwidths among wired and wireless links, limited computing power of Mobile Hosts (MHs) and transient servers due to frequent hand-off. We consider a three-layered network architecture consisting of Mobile Hosts (MHs), Mobile Support Stations (MSSs) and Supervisory Hosts (SHs). We out...

BACKGROUND Chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency (CCSVI) is a vascular condition characterized by anomalies of the primary veins outside the skull that has been reported to be associated with MS. In the blinded Combined Transcranial (TCD) and Extracranial Venous Doppler Evaluation (CTEVD) study, we found that prevalence of CCSVI was significantly higher in multiple sclerosis (MS) vs. healt...

The impact of glutathione S-transferases (GSTs) detoxification pathway on complex pathogenesis and heterogeneity of clinical findings in multiple sclerosis (MS), particularly the exact correlation between indicators of clinical severity and different GST genotypes, has not yet been fully elucidated. The aim of the study was to assess the relationship between disability level in multiple scleros...