BACKGROUND The assessment of target organ damage is important in the evaluation of a hypertensive patient as it provides information on the severity of the hypertension and the cardiovascular risk assessment. The aim of our study was to determine the usefulness of the chest radiograph in the assessment of target organ damage in hypertensive patients. METHODS Unselected patients attending an a...

Organ motion, especially respiratory motion, is a technical challenge to radiation therapy planning and dosimetry. This motion induces displacements and deformation of the organ tissues within the irradiated region which need to be taken into account when simulating dose distribution during treatment. Finite element modeling (FEM) can provide a great insight into the mechanical behavior of the ...

Egg production in oviparous vertebrates is assumed to be costly but the physiological basis of any costs remains unknown. The avian oviduct is a highly differentiated linear organ, with five functionally specific regions. Here we show that the oviduct regresses rapidly "from the top down" as soon as the more proximal regions have completed their function but while the distal regions still retai...

1. The ratios between the rates of growth of the body and of the heart, kidneys, and liver are approximately uniform between 40 gm. body weight and the body weight at maturity in the albino rat. The male and female hearts grow at 0.75 times the rate of growth of the body, the male kidneys at 0.717 times, the female kidneys at 0.648 times, and the liver at 0.838 times the rate of growth of the b...

This paper discusses the premise that the skeleton is primarily a mechanical organ, and reviews the reasons that mechanical factors play a major role in bone biology. It begins by considering three basic observations: (1) Galileo's observation that bone proportions become more robust as the species' overall size increases; (2) da Vinci's observation that larger structures are inherently weaker ...

The ability to change organ size reversibly can be advantageous to birds that perform long migrations. During winter, red knots (Calidris canutus) feed on shellfish and carry a muscular gizzard that weighs 10% of their body mass. Gizzard size decreases when these birds eat soft foods, e.g. while breeding in the tundra. We studied the reversibility and time course of such changes using ultrasono...

The mantle is an important molluscan organ. It serves as a respiratory organ in most of the pulmonates; its walls have a dense vascular network. It is an outer jacket of the visceral mass and harbors the pulmonary chamber on its right side. Mantle is the specialized organ of the gastropods for it not only bears the glands that secrete the shell but also acts as buffer between the hard calcareou...