BACKGROUND Gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) is a prevalent condition leading to poor quality of life (QOL) in patients with refractory symptoms. Laparoscopic antireflux (LAR) surgery has been shown to improve QOL, and I sought to examine the surgical and QOL outcomes associated with LAR surgery over a 3-year period at a regional hospital. METHODS Patients were given GERD-health related ...

This paper is concerned with rigid formations of mobile autonomous agents using a leader-follower structure. A formation is a group of agents moving in real 2or 3dimensional space. A formation is called rigid if the distance between each pair of agents does not change over time under ideal conditions. Sensing/communication links between agents are used to maintain a rigid formation. Two agents ...

?kilemeler temelde e?, yak?n veya z?t anlaml? birden fazla sözcükten meydana gelen söz öbe?i olarak anlat?m? peki?tirmek ad?na Türk dilinde geçmi?ten günümüze s?kl?kla kullan?lan bir ifade biçimidir. Bu bak?mdan farkl? dinî ve kültürel etkile?imler ile buna ba?l? dilsel temaslar?n oldu?u Eski Uygur Türkçesi döneminde ikilemelerin kullan?m? oldukça fazlad?r. Büyük ço?unlu?u karaktere sahip olan ...

The use of octreotide-LAR and cabergoline therapy has shown great promise in adults with acromegaly; however, the experience in pediatric patients has rarely been reported. We described a clinical course of a 15-year-old boy of McCune-Albright syndrome (MAS) with pituitary gigantism. At the age of 8 years, a growth hormone (GH) and prolactin (PRL) producing pituitary adenoma was diagnosed at ou...

PURPOSE Somatostatin analogs are indicated for symptom control in patients with gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (NETs). The ability of somatostatin analogs to control the growth of well-differentiated metastatic NETs is a matter of debate. We performed a placebo-controlled, double-blind, phase IIIB study in patients with well-differentiated metastatic midgut NETs. The hypothesis wa...

We attempted to elucidate the contribution of complement to allergic asthma. Rat sensitized to OVA received repeated intratracheal exposures to OVA for up to 3 consecutive days, and pulmonary resistance was then estimated for up to 6 h after the last exposure. Whereas the immediate airway response (IAR) in terms of R(L) tended to decrease in proportion to the number of OVA exposures, late airwa...

This paper presents a method for control of formations of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in urban environments with several obstacles. Therefore the trajectories for each UAV are planned using mixed integer quadratic programming (MIQP) to describe a minimization problem. The result of this minimization problem then characterizes a collision free trajectory for each UAV using the commanded form...

In this paper, we analyze tactical conflicts between attacking formations and blocking formations in the phase of reception attack in volleyball, using a zerosum game model. In this model, we categorize the attacking formations into 9 patterns which consist of 3 moving patterns of forward players and 3 positions (right, center and left) from which the ball can be spiked. We also categorize the ...