The space around the body, i.e., peripersonal space (PPS), is conceived as a multisensory-motor interface between body and environment. PPS is represented by frontoparietal neurons integrating tactile, visual, and auditory stimuli occurring near the body. PPS is plastic, because it extends by using a tool to reach far objects. Although interactions with others occur within PPS, little is known ...

INTRODUCTION Exogenous surfactant has been explored as a potential therapy for acute lung injury (ALI) and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). In the present study, a nebuliser driven by oxygen lines found in the hospital was developed to deliver aerosolised porcine pulmonary surfactant (PPS). We hypothesised that aerosolised surfactant inhaled through spontaneous breathing may effectiv...

The study was conducted to estimate the extent to which pressure pain sensitivity (PPS) and patient factors predict pain-related disability in patients with neck pain (NP), and to determine if PPS differs by gender. Forty-four participants with a moderate level of chronic NP were recruited for this cross sectional study. All participants were asked to complete self-reported assessments of pain,...

With the desire to manage imprecise and vague information in evidential reasoning, several attempts have been made to generalize the Dempster–Shafer (D– S) theory to deal with fuzzy sets. However, the important principle of the D–S theory, that the belief and plausibility functions are treated as lower and upper probabilities, is no longer preserved in these generalizations. A generalization of...

The need for extending information management systems to handle the imprecision of information found in the real world has been recognized. Fuzzy set theory together with possibility theory represent a uniform framework for extending the relational database model with these features. However, none of the existing proposals for handling imprecision in the literature has dealt with queries involv...

A trial project to introduce a Japanese version of the diagnostic related group/prospective payment system (DRG/PPS) was conducted at ten national hospitals from November 1998. However, many problems have surfaced—foremost among them were incomplete DRG classifications, inadequate reviews of payment amounts that simply reflected the past performance of the hospitals, and incomplete databases th...

– Visualize the textual input POMDP using the DOT language. – Reduce a POMDP with a parity objective, to an equivalent POMDP with a coBüchi objective (a parity objective with only 2 priorities), and visualize the POMDP. – Given a POMDP, with a coBüchi objective, it constructs its belief-observation POMDP Ĝ, and visualizes it. – Given the belief-observation POMDP Ĝ, if there exists an almost-sur...

It was once believed that host cell injury in various infectious diseases is caused solely by pathogens themselves; however, it is now known that host immune reactions to the substances from the infectious agents and/or from the injured host cells by infectious insults are also involved. All biological phenomena in living organisms, including biochemical, physiological and pathological processe...

Proactive postsales service (PPS) refers to a supplier taking the initiative to contact a customer to provide service after a sale is complete. It is argued that PPS leads to faster delivery of service to a broader cross-section of customers than customer-initiated postsales service, or reactive postsales service. The authors argue that mental frames of customers and suppliers engaged in PPS ar...