The use of deep brain stimulation (DBS) to control severely disabling neurological and psychiatric conditions is an exciting and fast emerging area of neuroscience. Deep brain stimulation has generally the same clinical effects as a lesion with respect to the improvement of clinical disability, but has more advantages such as its adjustability and reversibility. To this day, fundamental knowled...

Severe obesity is a chronic disease requiring continuing care. Optimal outcomes of laparoscopic adjustable gastric banding using the LAP-BAND (INAMED Health, Santa Barbara, CA) depend on accurate placement of the band and excellent postplacement care, which requires a long-term commitment from both the patient and the bariatric surgical team. Adjustability is a key feature of the LAP-BAND syste...

The simple UART (Universal Asynchronous Receiver and Transmitter) encoding is used in two novel fieldbus protocols for real-time systems, the Local Interconnect Network (LIN) and the Time-Triggered Protocol for SAE class A applications (TTP/A). These protocols use a time-triggered communication schedule to achieve a predictable timing behavior. The employment of standard components like a stand...

Periods of biological clocks are close to but often different from the rotation period of the earth. Thus, the clocks of organisms must be adjusted to synchronize with day-night cycles. The primary signal that adjusts the clocks is light. In Neurospora, light transiently up-regulates the expression of specific clock genes. This molecular response to light is called light adaptation. Does light ...

The purpose of the present study was to develop an ankle-foot orthosis (AFO) that satisfies the requirements for an AFO for patients with hemiplegia as determined in a previous study. An oil damper has been introduced as an assistive device. The oil damper provides a resistive moment to plantar flexion of the ankle joint during initial stance on the paretic side. This function improves the insu...

The LCLS generates linearly polarized, intense, high brightness x-ray pulses from planar fixed-gap undulators. While the fixed-gap design supports a very successful and tightly controlled alignment concept, it provides only limited taper capability (up to 1% through canted pole and horizontal position adjustability) and lacks polarization control. The latter is of great importance for soft x-ra...

The quality control for video coding usually absents from many traditional fast block motion estimators. In this letter, a novel block-matching algorithm for fast motion estimation named the adjustable partial distortion search algorithm (APDS) is proposed. It is a new normalized partial distortion comparison method capable of adjusting the prediction accuracy against searching speed by a quali...

With recent advances in neuroimaging and neurosurgical techniques as well as better understanding of functional motor brain circuits, there is increasing evidence that electrical deep brain stimulation (DBS) can be a powerful and safe therapeutic option for medically intractable movement disorders and neuropsychiatric diseases. For more than half a century, the ventrolateral (VL) nucleus of the...

OBJECTIVES The study sought to determine the level of musculoskeletal disorders among working oral hygienists in South Africa and potential determinants that are associated with these disorders. METHODS Oral hygienists registered with the HPCSA were requested to complete an anonymous questionnaire. Apart from demographic information they were asked to report on any musculoskeletal symptoms ex...