INTRODUCTION We investigated the clinical and serological features of patients with antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibody (ANCA)-associated vasculitis (AAV) in Japan using data from a nationwide, prospective, inception cohort study. METHODS In total, 156 Japanese patients with newly diagnosed AAV were classified according to the European Medicines Agency (EMEA) algorithm with exploratory surrog...

INTRODUCTION Round ligament varicosities (RLV) are not well-known and they are usually caused by pregnancy. Although the groin swelling of RLV mimics an inguinal hernia, it is difficult to distinguish between them through clinical examination alone, and there have been few published reports on this topic, especially from Asia. CASE PRESENTATION A 37-year-old Japanese woman complained of left ...

Round ligament varicosity (RLV) is rare and almost all cases are pregnant women. RLV appears as a unilateral or bilateral groin swelling. Pain and tenderness may present. Clinical evaluation is inadequate for exact diagnosis because inguinal hernia has similar findings. Ultrasonography (US) is essential when a groin swelling is detected in a pregnant woman. We present gray scale US and colour D...

The Ares I-X Flight Test Vehicle is the first in a series of flight test vehicles that will take the Ares I Crew Launch Vehicle design from development to operational capability. The test flight is scheduled for April 2009, relatively early in the Ares I design process so that data obtained from the flight can impact the design of Ares I before its Critical Design Review. Because of the short t...

The planned Ares V launch vehicle with its 10 meter fairing shroud and 55,000 kg capacity to the Sun Earth L2 point enables entirely new classes of space telescopes. NASA MSFC has conducted a preliminary study that demonstrates the feasibility of launching a 6 to 8 meter class monolithic primary mirror telescope to Sun-Earth L2 using an Ares V. Specific technical areas studied included optical ...

The replacement of steam catapults with electromagnetic ones is becoming an overwhelming trend in aircraft launch systems. The Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS) offers significant benefits to the aircraft, ship, personnel, and operational capabilities. EMALS has such advantages as high thrust, good controllability, reusable, etc., as a launching motor, a double-side plate Permanent...

The main limitation of existing computational tools for continuous system reachability problems is that, due to the exponential growth of the computation with the dimension of the continuous state space, the tools can be applied effectively to relatively low dimensional problems (typically 1-4 dimensions). In this paper we adopt a two time scale approach to extend the use of continuous system r...

Intelligent Launch and Range Operations Virtual Test Bed (ILRO-VTB) is a real-time web-based command and control, communication, and intelligent simulation environment of ground-vehicie, iaunch and range operation activities. ILRO-VTB consists of a variety of simulation models combined with commercia! and indigenous sofGare devehpments (XASA AmeSj. It creates a hybrid softwarelhardware environm...