BACKGROUND Parachute mitral valve (PMV) is defined as a unifocal attachment of the mitral valve chordae to a single or dominant papillary muscle and may cause subvalvar obstruction. We sought to determine factors associated with outcomes. METHODS AND RESULTS Patients (n=84; 64% male) who presented between 1977 and 2001 at a median age of 3 days (range, birth to 5.4 years) were assessed with P...

Ensuring thermal comfort is an important goal in the operation of any office building. Often these buildings are therefore controlled according to the predicted mean vote (PMV) model which is also adopted as the ISO 7730 norm. This model predicts the mean thermal preferences of an average group of people that would satisfy the thermal comfort needs of about 80% of the occupants. It is derived f...

BACKGROUND Circadian rhythm regulates many physiologic and immunologic processes. Disruption of these processes has been demonstrated in acutely ill, mechanically ventilated patients in the ICU setting. Light has not been studied as an entraining stimulus in the chronically mechanically ventilated patient. The purpose of this study was to determine the association of naturally occurring ambient...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Patients requiring prolonged mechanical ventilation (PMV) are frequently deconditioned because of respiratory failure precipitated by the underlying disease, the adverse effects of medications, and a period of prolonged immobilization. The effects of 6 weeks of physical training on the strength of respiratory and limb muscles, on ventilator-free time, and on functional st...

OBJECTS ARE REMINISCENT OF ACTIONS OFTEN PERFORMED WITH THEM knife and apple remind us on peeling the apple or cutting it. Mnemonic representations of object-related actions (action codes) evoked by the sight of an object may constrain and hence facilitate recognition of unrolling actions. The present fMRI study investigated if and how action codes influence brain activation during action obser...

A central problem in motor research has been to understand how sensory signals are transformed to generate a goal-directed movement. This problem has been formulated as a set of coordinate transformations that begins with an extrinsic coordinate frame representing the spatial location of a target and ends with an intrinsic coordinate frame describing muscle activation patterns. Insight into thi...

BACKGROUND Therapist-implemented protocols have been used to extubate or wean patients in the ICU setting. Barlow Respiratory Hospital (BRH) functions as a center for weaning patients from prolonged mechanical ventilation (PMV) in the post-ICU setting of a long-term acute-care (LTAC) facility. A therapist-implemented patient-specific (TIPS) weaning protocol was developed at BRH to standardize w...

We previously demonstrated that major membrane protein II (MMP-II) is one of the immunodominant antigens (Ags) of Mycobacterium leprae capable of activating T cells through Toll-like receptor 2. Based on the observation that Mycobacterium bovis BCG secreting a 30-kDa protein offered better protection against tuberculosis, we constructed a recombinant BCG strain (BCG-SM) that secretes MMP-II to ...

The ventral premotor cortex (PMv) and the primary motor cortex (MI) of monkeys participate in various sensorimotor integrations, such as the transformation of coordinates from visual to motor space, because the areas contain movement-related neuronal activity reflecting either visual or motor space. In addition to relationship to visual and motor space, laterality of the activity could indicate...