OBJECTIVE Our treatment strategy for pulmonary atresia with ventricular septal defect (VSD) and major aortopulmonary collateral arteries is a staged repair that comprises the first complete unifocalization (UF) with 'unification' of intrapulmonary arteries and then the definitive repair. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the outcome of our staged repair strategy with complete UF and to d...

OBJECTIVES The study objective was to identify the size of different hospital financing sources for different hospital services and their impact on the uninsured. METHODS A panel dataset of 84 public general hospitals (2005-2008) with cross-section data on hospital activity and hospital revenue was created and used to calculate unit costs of different hospital services by applying multiple re...

Background Recent randomized controlled trials suggest that sufficiently high convection post-dilutional haemodiafiltration (HC-HDF) improves survival in dialysis patients, consequently this technique is increasingly being adopted. However, when performing HC-HDF, rigorous control systems of the ultrafiltration setting are required. Assessing the global ultrafiltration coefficient of the dialys...

In this paper, we report on an optimized union-find (UF) algorithm that can label the connected components on a 2D image efficiently by employing GPU architecture. The proposed method comprises three phases: UF-based local merge, boundary analysis, and link. The coarse labeling in local merge, which makes computation efficient because the length of the labelequivalence list is sharply suppresse...

Patients with schizophrenia and healthy control subjects underwent both neuropsychological evaluation and magnetic resonance diffusion tensor imaging, during which the cingulum bundle (CB) and the uncinate fasciculus (UF) were defined with fiber tractography and their integrity was quantified. On the basis of prior findings, it was hypothesized that neuropsychological disturbance in schizophren...

Cyclic voltammetry of the non-heme diiron enzyme porcine purple acid phosphatase (uteroferrin, Uf) has been reported for the first time. Totally reversible one-electron oxidation responses (FeIII-FeII --> FeII-FeIII) are seen both in the absence and in the presence of weak competitive inhibitors phosphate and arsenate, and dissociation constants of these oxoanion complexes formed with uteroferr...

The impact of a urea-formaldehyde (UF) fertilizer on bacterial diversity in onion bulbs and main roots of sugar beet were examined using a 16S rRNA gene clone library. The UF fertilizer markedly increased bacterial diversity in both plants. The results of principal coordinates analysis (PCoA) revealed that nearly 30% of the variance observed in bacterial diversity in both the onion and sugar be...

Description: This course is specifically designed for healthcare professionals who have an interest in sports medicine. The course will encompass presentations on diagnosis, treatment, research, education and prevention of athletic injuries presented by experts from many different areas of Running Medicine. The format consists of lectures and breakout sessions, and will include ample time for p...

Description: This course is specifically designed for healthcare professionals who have an interest in sports medicine. The course will encompass presentations on diagnosis, treatment, research, education and prevention of athletic injuries presented by experts from many different areas of Running Medicine. The format consists of lectures and breakout sessions, and will include ample time for p...

This study investigates the performance of ultrafiltration (UF) by membranes coated with titanium dioxide (TiO2) photocatalyst under ultraviolet (UV) illumination in removing natural organic matter (NOM) and possibly in reducing membrane fouling. Experiments were carried out using heat-resistant ceramic disc UF membranes and humic acids as model substances representing naturally occurring organ...