Purpose: Biliary tract cancer (BTC)is an aggressive disease with a poor prognosis. Most patients are diagnosed at an advanced stage for which curative surgery is not possible and gemcitabine-platinum chemotherapy is the treatment of choice for advanced cases. Several studies had focused on biomarkers to predict response from platinum drugs in lung cancer, but information is limited for BTC. In ...

PURPOSE Gemcitabine-cisplatin combination chemotherapy has been regarded as standard regimen for advanced or metastatic biliary tract cancer (BTC), based on the ABC-02 trial. To date, however, no studies have compared the efficacies of gemcitabine-platinum and fluoropyrimidine- platinum combination chemotherapy, even though fluoropyrimidine has been widely used as a backbone agent for gastroint...

Few previous Reversible Visible Watermarking (RVW) schemes have both good transparency and watermark visibility. An adaptive RVW scheme that integrates Total Variation visual perception in Block Truncation Coding (BTC) compressed domain, called TVB-RVW is proposed this paper. A new mean image estimation method for BTC-compressed images first developed with the help of Variation. Then, a factor ...

A new scheme of concatenating the block turbo code (BTC) with the space-time block code (STBC) for an OFDM system in dispersive fading channels is investigated in this paper. The good error correcting capability of BTC and the large diversity gain characteristics of STBC can be achieved simultaneously. The resulting receiver outperforms the iterative convolutional Turbo receiver with maximum a ...

Herein, we report a new acylamide ligand and its application in the construction of a metal-organic framework. The resultant acylamide metal-organic framework, namely [Zn(2)(L)(OH)(btc)](n) (1, L = N(1),N(4)-bis(pyridin-3-ylmethyl) naphthalene-1,4-dicarboxamide, H(3)btc = benzene-1,3,5-tricarboxylic acid), was obtained by hydrothermal synthesis. The outstanding structural feature of it is the 0...

The title Cd(II) coordination polymer, catena-poly[[{1,4-bis-[1-(2-pyridylmeth-yl)benzimidazol-2-yl]butane}cadmium(II)]-μ-benzene-1,3-dicarboxyl-ato], [Cd(C(8)H(4)O(4))(C(30)H(28)N(6))](n), was obtained by reaction of CdCO(3), benzene-1,3-dicarboxylic acid (H(2)btc) and 1,4-bis-[1-(2-pyridylmeth-yl)benzimidazol-2-yl]butane (L). The Cd(II) cation is six-coordinated by an N(2)O(4)-donor set. L ac...

With web caching and cache-related services like CDNs and edge services playing an increasingly significant role in the modern internet, the problem of the weak consistency and coherence provisions in currently standardized web protocols is drawing greater attention. Toward this end, we propose definitions of consistency and coherence for web-like caching environments, and then present a novel ...

The problem of how one stores and transmits a digital image has been a topic of research for more than 40 years and was initially driven by military applications and NASA. The problem, simply stated, is how does one efficiently represent an image in binary form? This is the image compression problem. It is a special case of the source coding problem addressed by Shannon in his landmark paper [1...

This study used resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate whether functional connectivity is altered in people developing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following recent trauma. Sixty-two participants experienced recent acute traumatic events underwent a 7.3 minute resting fMRI scan within 2 days post-accident. Of these, 22 participants were diagnosed with...

With web caching and cache-related services like CDNs and edge services playing an increasingly significant role in the modern Internet, the problem of the weak consistency and coherence provisions in current web protocols is drawing increasing attention. Toward this end, we differentiate definitions of consistency and coherence for web-like caching environments, and then present a novel web pr...