BACKGROUND An increase in asthma prevalence is reported from developed as well as developing nations, with rising costs from acute asthma and great expenditures to health care systems. Venezuela's Ministry of Health ambulatory facilities care for 80 % or more of a mostly urban and impoverished population of 26 million inhabitants, registering close to a million acute asthma visits per year; a n...

Shaded pole induction motors, despite the simplicity and low cost, are difficult to analyze particularly in the equivalent circuit methods, due to the asymmetric structure, saturation, harmonics, inaccurate estimation of leakage inductances and skew. Hence, 3D numerical methods could be very useful in the design and optimization stage. This paper presents the 3D transient finite element analysi...

BACKGROUND Nephrogenic systemic fibrosis is a debilitating and painful disorder with an increased stimulation of the connective tissue in the skin and systemic tissues. The disease is associated with exposure to gadolinium-based contrast agent used in magnetic resonance imaging in patients with renal impairment. METHODS The prevalence of nephrogenic systemic fibrosis has so far never been det...

The urban experience " An inhabited place of greater size, population, or importance than a town or village " is the Merriam-Webster Dictionary entry for " city ". Most definitions, unless referring to very particular usages (e.g.: The City as London's financial district), convey the concept of a status granted to a relatively permanent, organized human settlement. The Chambers Dictionary inclu...

In-memory key-value stores play a critical role in data processing to provide high throughput and low latency data accesses. In-memory key-value stores have several unique properties that include (1) data intensive operations demanding high memory bandwidth for fast data accesses, (2) high data parallelism and simple computing operations demanding many slim parallel computing units, and (3) a l...

In 2014, Khoo and Knorr (1) identified the global shift in population demographics as one of the twenty-first century grand challenges, which warrants research prioritization by the food and nutrition communities. A persistent global growth trend toward urbanization can be attributed to this demographic shift. Satterthwaite et al. (2) characterized urbanization as “the increasing share of a nat...

BACKGROUND Each year over five million people develop chronic non-malignant pain and can experience healthcare as an adversarial struggle. The aims of this study were: (1) to bring together qualitative evidence syntheses that explore patients' experience of living with chronic non-malignant pain and develop conceptual understanding of what it is like to live with chronic non-malignant pain for ...

The City of Barcelona has a population of just over 1.5 million inhabitants. The Metropolitan Region Barcelona (RMB) extends to some 3,236 km and according to the 2001 Census has a population of almost 4.4 million inhabitants. In recent years the population of the City of Barcelona has been in decline, in contrast to marked demographic increases in the wider metropolitan area. Indeed the RMB ha...

Economic globalization has been accompanied by a growing spatial imprint of freight distribution on the landscape, particularly for intermodal terminals such as ports, airports and railyards, but also for logistical activities, namely distribution centers. Economies that have relied on globalization to promote growth, China been the most eloquent example, have relied extensively on major interm...

SOLID ORGAN TRANSPLANTATION IN BELGIUM: HISTORYAND MILESTONES Belgium, a federal country of 11 million inhabitants (as of 2016), has been very active in the field of transplantation. Clinical transplantation activities were initiated in the early 1960s with the first, living and deceased, kidney transplantations. During these pioneering years, Belgium was recognized for carrying out the first d...