AIM The objective of the present study was to evaluate the significance of pre-treatment screening for patients with esophageal cancer. PATIENTS AND METHODS A retrospective evaluation of the clinical significance of total colonoscopy in 136 patients with primary esophageal cancer was performed. RESULTS Twenty-three patients (16.9%) had diverticula, and five (3.7%) had colon cancer. Benign p...

The fundamental solution or Green's function for flow in porous media is determined using Stokesian dynamics, a molecular-dynamics-like simulation method capable of describing the motions and forces of hydrodynamically interacting particles in Stokes flow. By evaluating the velocity disturbance caused by a source particle on field particles located throughout a monodisperse porous medium at a g...

The present analysis investigates non-Darcy forced convective heat transfer in a channel confined by two parallel walls subjected to uniform heat flux in a highly porous medium saturated with a non-Newtonian power-law fluid. Extensive numerical integrations have been carried out utilizing the Brinkman-Forchheimer extension of the Darcy model in order to study the effects of pseudoplasticity, an...

For the manufacturing of composite materials with textile reinforcement, the permeability of the textile is a key characteristic. Using the law of Darcy, permeability can be derived from a numerical simulation of the fluid flow, i.e. by solving the Navier-Stokes or Brinkman equations. In this paper we present the results of simulations with two different flow solvers: a finite difference Navier...

We study the interaction between a poroelastic medium and a fracture filled with fluid. The flow in the fracture is described by the Brinkman equations for an incompressible fluid and the poroelastic medium by the quasi-static Biot model. The two models are fully coupled via the kinematic and dynamic conditions. The Brinkman equations are then averaged over the cross-sections, giving rise to a ...

The Brinkman model describes flow of fluid in complex porous media with a high-contrast permeability coefficient such that the flow is dominated by Darcy in some regions and by Stokes in others. A weak Galerkin (WG) finite element method for solving the Brinkman equations in two or three dimensional spaces by using polynomials is developed and analyzed. The WG method is designed by using the ge...

For the manufacturing of composite materials with textile reinforcement, the permeability of the textile is a key characteristic. Using the law of Darcy, permeability can be derived from a numerical simulation of the fluid flow, i.e. by solving the Navier-Stokes or Brinkman equations. In this report we present the results of simulations with two different flow solvers: a finite difference Navie...

BACKGROUND Few studies compare mood in tobacco cessation patients with mood in continuing smokers and then estimate the effects of a tobacco cessation program according to status of mood. We investigated whether mood in patients (n = 7) dependent on tobacco improved through the standard Japanese 12-week program for smoking cessation comparing smokers (n = 11) and nonsmokers (n = 16). METHODS ...

BACKGROUND Cigarette smokers have increased white blood cell (WBC) counts and the activation of tumor necrosis factor (TNF). The effect of smoking on WBC counts and TNF system activity, however, has not been separately investigated yet. SUBJECTS AND METHODS One hundred and forty-two Japanese male subjects with normal glucose tolerance were recruited. They were stratified into two groups based...