The surfactant lining the walls of the alveoli in the lungs increases pulmonary compliance and prevents collapse of the lung at the end of expiration. In premature born infants, surfactant deficiency causes problems, and lung surfactant replacements are instilled to facilitate breathing. These pulmonary surfactants, which form complex structured fluid-fluid interfaces, need to spread with great...

We present a general method for incorporating an “expert” model into a Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) system, in order to improve its performance on a particular “area of expertise”, and apply this method to the specific task of finding adequate replacements for Out-of-Vocabulary (OOV) words. Candidate replacements are paraphrases and entailed phrases, obtained using monolingual resource...

The human thromboxane A2 receptor (TP), belongs to the prostanoid subfamily of Class A GPCRs and mediates vasoconstriction and promotes thrombosis on binding to thromboxane (TXA2). In Class A GPCRs, transmembrane (TM) helix 4 appears to be a hot spot for non-synonymous single nucleotide polymorphic (nsSNP) variants. Interestingly, A160T is a novel nsSNP variant with unknown structure and functi...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Drug-based treatment of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) has evolved markedly over the past 2 decades. Using nationwide register data, we studied how this has affected the rates of hip, knee, shoulder, and elbow replacement from 1995 to 2010. METHODS The number of primary joint replacements was obtained from the Finnish Arthroplasty Register. To test the hypothesis that improv...

In recent years, pervious concrete (PC) has gained much attention as one of the strategies for low-impact development (LID) in pavements due to its structural, economic, and road-user benefits. This study sought review evaluate changes mechanical, hydraulic, durability performance PC produced with cement aggregate replacements. A meta-analysis was conducted elucidate feasible range replacement ...

A study of excision arthroplasty (Girdlestone's pseudarthrosis) for infected total hip replacements is presented. Twenty-two patients were reviewed with a minimum follow-up of one year. Reduction in pain was significant but the functional results were poor. Factors contributing to poor function were old age, poor medical condition and arthritis of the contralateral hip; these were in addition t...

For many years CFCs were used in a vast range of applications, but the adverse environmental impact of their release into the atmosphere [1,2] has led to an international effort to replace them with acceptable alternatives. The Montreal Protocol [3] led to the phase out of CFCs in industrialized countries because of their elevated ozone depletion and global warming potentials (ODP and GWP). Dev...

1 Reducing variation in total knee replacements A new study in the journal Health Affairs of total knee replacement (TKR) confirms that wide variations in care exist among hospitals based on factors such as geographic location. The High Value Healthcare Collaborative found significant variations in TKR among the 5 participating health care systems. Among these were length of stay (LOS), where p...

In this paper, we propose a formal framework for specifying rule replacements in nonmonotonic logic programs within the answer-set programming paradigm. Of particular interest are replacement schemas retaining specific notions of equivalence, among them the prominent notions of strong and uniform equivalence, which have been introduced as theoretical tools for program optimization and verificat...

After the rapid growth in the use of CoCrMo metal-on-metal hip replacements since the second generation was introduced circa 1990, metal-on-metal hip replacements have experienced a sharp decline in the last two years due to biocompatibility issues related to wear and corrosion products. Despite some excellent clinical results, the release of wear and corrosion debris and the adverse response o...