Background: Human cornea expresses functional Fas-ligand capable of killing Fas+ activated lymphocytes. Fas expression is partly regulated by -670 A/G polymorphism in the promoter region of Fas gene. Objective: The aim of the present study is to determine the association between Fas-670A/G polymorphism and survival of corneal transplantation. Methods: In 276 graft recipients who mainly underwen...

PURPOSE To investigate multiparametric functional MRI to characterize acute rejection in a murine allogeneic renal transplant model and evaluate the effect of novel therapeutics. MATERIAL AND METHODS We performed allogeneic and syngeneic orthotopic transplantations (Balb/c to C57Bl/6 and C57Bl/6 to C57Bl/6). Allogeneic Groups (n = 5) were either treated with the anti-CCL2-Spiegelmer (mNOX-E36...

BACKGROUND Acute rejection (AR) and acute tubular necrosis (ATN) are main causes of early renal allograft dysfunction. Blood oxygen level-dependent magnetic resonance imaging (BOLD MRI) and Diffusion weighted (DW) MRI can provide valuable information about changes of oxygen bioavailability and water diffusion by measuring R2* or apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) respectively. We aimed to det...

OBJECTIVES We developed and validated an interinstrument comparison method for automatic hematology analyzers based on the 99th percentile coefficient of variation (CV) cutoff of daily means and validated in both patient samples and quality control (QC) materials. METHODS A total of 120 patient samples were obtained over 6 months. Data from the first 3 months were used to determine 99th perce...

A PLDRO (Phase Locked Dielectric Resonator Oscillator) with the output frequency of a fractional multiple of reference is proposed and implemented. The key element in the proposed PLDRO is an image rejection mixer placed between a VCDRO (Voltage Controlled Dielectric Resonator Oscillator) and SPD (Sampling Phase Detector). The image rejection mixer shifts the coupled signal from the VCDRO befor...

This paper describes a triple-band global positioning system (GPS) receiver that simultaneously covers the L1, L2, and L5 frequency bands. The proposed receiver uses an image-rejection technique that can separate signals from the three frequency bands to three corresponding ports. It uses a single RF path containing a low-noise amplifier (LNA), and active and passive mixers with a pair of local...

In this study, the separation properties of Polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) hollow fiber hemodialysis membranes were improved by optimizing membrane morphology and structure. The results showed that the PVDF membrane had better mechanical and separation properties than Fresenius Polysulfone High-Flux (F60S) membrane. The PVDF membrane tensile stress at break, tensile elongation and bursting pres...

The placement accuracy and resolution of direct-write patterning tools, in particular the atomic force microscope (AFM), is considered for application to fabricating multi-passband integrated optical filters. Because of its simpler fabrication a grating structure is proposed that consists of identical stripes that are non-periodically spaced. The recently developed pseudorandom encoding method ...

To improve the robustness of the generalized sidelobe canceller (GSC) against steering error and inevitable misdetection of adaptation mode control (AMC) in real applications, the conventional adaptive blocking matrix (ABM) consists of coefficient-constrained adaptive filters (CCAFs) which use the output of delay-and-sum fixed beamformer (FBF) as input, in order to limit the tracking range of t...

Rejection sensitivity is the heightened tendency to perceive or anxiously expect disengagement from others during social interaction. There has been a recent wave of neuroimaging studies of rejection. The aim of the current review was to determine key brain regions involved in social rejection by selectively reviewing neuroimaging studies that employed one of three paradigms of social rejection...