AIMS Echocardiography is widely used for screening pulmonary hypertension (PH). More recently developed two-dimensional speckle-tracking echocardiography (2D-STE) can assess regional deformation of the myocardium and is useful for detecting left ventricular dysfunction. However, its usefulness to assess right ventricular (RV) dysfunction is not clear. Therefore, the aim of this study was to inv...

No large-scale population-based cohort study has ever investigated the risk of developing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in patients with Sjögren syndrome (SS). This study evaluated the risk of COPD in women with primary SS (pSS) in a nationwide population.We used the data of the National Health Insurance Research Database of Taiwan to establish a pSS group consisting of 3013 fema...

The discovery of microRNAs (miRNAs) and their critical role in genetic control opened new avenues in understanding of various biological processes including immune cell lineage commitment, differentiation, proliferation and apoptosis. However, a given miRNA may have hundreds of different mRNA targets and a target might be regulated by multiple miRNAs, thus the characterisation of dysregulated m...

Heparin and heparan sulfate mediated basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF) signaling plays an important role in skeletal muscle homeostasis by maintaining a balance between proliferation and differentiation of muscle progenitor cells. In this study we investigate the role of a synthetic mimic of heparin, poly(sodium-4-styrenesulfonate) (PSS), on myogenic differentiation of C2C12 cells. Exogenou...

The objective of this study was to develop and describe an experimental canine model of multiple acquired portosystemic shunts (PSS) similar in nature to spontaneously occurring PSS. Sixteen dogs were used and were divided into a control (n = 6) and a diseased group (n = 10). Dogs of the diseased group were administered dimethylnitrosamine (2 mg/kg of body weight, po) twice weekly, and clinicop...

A Honey Bee Mating Optimization (HBMO) technique is proposed for the optimal tuning of the Power System Stabilizer (PSS) in this paper. The design problem of robustly selecting PSS parameters is formulated as an optimization problem according to the time domain-based objective function which is solved by the HBMO technique that has a strong ability to find the most optimistic results. To achiev...

In this paper, an evolutionary algorithm-Invasive Weed Optimization (IWO) based power system stabilizer (PSS) is proposed for multi-machine power system. IWO is a derivative-free real parameter optimization technique that mimics the ecological behavior of colonizing weeds. Owing to its superior performance in comparison with many other existing meta-heuristics, it has used to search for optimal...

With a Product-Service System (PSS), the producer often has control of its products during multiple life-cycles, and thus there are more incentives for design for service and remanufacturing in comparison to traditional sales. The aim of this paper is to explore the role of PSS regarding information feedback transfer in the product life-cycle including remanufacturing. The paper explores two in...

Power system stabilizers (PSSs) must be capable of providing appropriate stabilization signals over a broad range of operating conditions and disturbances. The main idea of this paper is changing a classic PSS (CPSS) to an adaptive PSS using genetic algorithm. This new genetic algorithm based on adaptive PSS (GAPSS) improves power system damping, considerably. The controller design issue is for...

Three patients with the unusual combinations of discoid lupus, systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), and progressive systemic sclerosis (PSS) are reported. The first patient developed PSS eight years after a diagnosis of discoid lupus had been made and this was complicated by myositis six years later. The second patient developed PSS more than 20 years after being diagnosed as having SLE. The thi...