BACKGROUND/AIMS Continuous renal replacement therapy (CRRT) is commonly used for critically ill patients with acute kidney injury. During treatment, a slow dialysate flow rate can be applied to enhance diffusive solute removal. However, due to the lack of the rationale of the dialysate flow configuration (countercurrent or concurrent to blood flow), in clinical practice, the connection settings...

 A model is developed for separation of multicomponent gas mixtures in a countercurrent hollow fiber membrane module. While the model’s solution in countercurrent module usually involves in a time consuming iterative procedure, a proper initial guess is proposed for beginning the calculation and a simple procedure is introduced for correcting the guesses, hereby the CPU time is decreased ess...

Lactobacilli, bifidobacteria and various yeasts are worldwide known as probiotic microorganisms. They are part of the natural gut microbiota of both humans and animals, they have a long history of consumption and they are present in almost all fermented foods. Recently they have been also exploited as “Effective Microorganisms” (EM) for the production of bio-fertilizers to promote plant growth ...

Recent studies of three-dimensional architecture of rat renal inner medulla (IM) and expression of membrane proteins associated with fluid and solute transport in nephrons and vasculature have revealed structural and transport properties that likely impact the IM urine concentrating mechanism. These studies have shown that 1) IM descending thin limbs (DTLs) have at least two or three functional...

BACKGROUND Rapid fluid warming has been a cardinal measure to maintain normothermia during fluid resuscitation of hypovolemic patients. A previous laboratory simulation study with different fluid infusion rates showed that a fluid warmer using magnetic induction is superior to a warmer using countercurrent heat exchange. We tested whether the simulation-based result is translated into the clini...

Renal medullary heat clearance was investigated in anesthetized dogs to evaluate countercurrent exchange of heat. Sudden changes in the temperature of renal arterial blood were induced by infusion of 3 to 7 ml/min of saline at room temperature. The resulting changes in medullary temperature, measured with fine thermocouples, started with increasing delay from cortex towards the papilla. Average...

BACKGROUND Pneumococcal pneumonia can be diagnosed by the detection of capsular antigen in sputum, serum, pleural fluid, or urine using countercurrent immunoelectrophoresis and latex agglutination. In addition, quantitative cultures of bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) fluid are also reliable for establishing the aetiology of pneumonia. This study investigated the value of rapid detection of pneumoc...

A method for driving rotation and a countercurrent flow in a fully ionized plasma centrifuge is described. The rotation is produced by radiofrequency waves near the cyclotron resonance. The wave energy is transferred into potential energy in a manner similar to the α channeling effect. The countercurrent flow may also be driven by radiofrequency waves. By driving both the rotation and the flow ...