OBJECTIVES Improvements in perioperative pain management for lower abdominal operations has been shown to reduce morbidity, induce early ambulation, and improve patients' long-term outcomes. Dexmedetomidine, a selective alpha-2 agonist, has recently been used intrathecally as adjuvant to spinal anesthesia to prolong its efficacy. We compared two different doses of dexmedetomidine added to hyper...

Shape is one of the primary low level image features in the newly emerged Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR). Many shape representations have been proposed, and they are generally classified into contour-based methods and region-based methods. Contour-based methods capture shape boundary features while ignore shape inner content. Region-based methods capture shape inner features while do not ...

A good charge transfer efficiency is very important for high-speed application CMOS image sensors. This paper presents a method to optimize the pinned-photodiode (PPD) shape, which is implemented in the 4T CMOS pixel for reducing the image lag of large area photodiode pixels. The new design allows combining a better light sensitivity with a good charge transfer. A CMOS image sensor test chip is...

Decapping enzymes are required for the removal of the 5'-end cap of mRNAs. These enzymes exhibit a specific hydrolase activity, resulting in cleavage between the alpha- and beta-phosphates of the m7GpppN cap to generate both m7GDP and monophosphorylated RNA products. Decapping enzymes have been found in humans, plants and yeasts, and have been discovered more recently in vaccinia virus (D10 pro...

D10.G4.1 (D10) cells, a murine conalbumin-reactive Th2 cell line, made to overexpress the beta(2) integrin LFA-1 by pharmacological manipulation or by transfection become autoreactive and are capable of inducing in vivo autoimmunity. However, whether this is specific to LFA-1 and whether overexpression of other T cell integrin molecules has the same effect are unknown. We examined the functiona...

With recent improvements in methods for the acquisition and rendering of shapes, the need for retrieval of shapes from large repositories of shapes has gained prominence. A variety of methods have been proposed that enable the efficient querying of shape repositories for a desired shape or image. Many of these methods use a sample shape as a query and attempt to retrieve shapes from the databas...

We have reported previously that 100% of the incidence of malignant endotheliomas and angiosarcomas was developed in specific-pathogen-free BALB/c mice given s.c. injections of 1,2-dimethylhydrazine dihydrochloride. These tumors appeared selectively in the liver. In the present study, we have successfully established two cell lines in vitro (D10 and D14) from some of these tumors and have chara...

Herein we report on the semisynthesis and biological evaluation of β-amino alcohol derivatives of the natural product totarol and other simple aromatic systems. All β-amino alcohol derivatives of totarol exhibited higher antiplasmodial activity than totarol [IC(50): 11.69 μM (K1, chloroquine and multi-drug resistant strain), and 11.78 μM (D10, chloroquine sensitive strain)]-12e was the most act...