BACKGROUND The requisite anesthetic concentration of sevoflurane required to obtain adequate sedation when sufficient analgesics are supplied has not been determined. The purpose of this study was to determine the requisite age-associated concentration of sevoflurane to obtain an adequate level of anesthesia during combined epidural-general anesthesia by bispectral index (BIS) monitoring. MET...

Context. A study of the structural and scaling properties of the temperature distribution of the hot, X-ray emitting intra-cluster medium of galaxy clusters, and its dependence on dynamical state, can give insights into the physical processes governing the formation and evolution of structure. Aims. Accurate temperature measurements are a pre-requisite for a precise knowledge of the thermodynam...

Introduction This essay will explore the space between mathematical realism and anti-realism, while also providing a possible answer to the "mindlessness" of natural (not necessarily mathematical) laws (Field, 1982). We will also consider biologically-inspired models of physical systems, as well as consider intentionlike goal-oriented behavior in the context of combinatorial representations. To...

Standardization of metagenomic DNA extraction protocol is a pre-requisite for a successful metagenomic study aiming to screen and exploit the variety of microorganisms inhabiting a particular soil environment. Six methods reported earlier were used for isolation of metagenomic DNA in the present study. These methods suffered with regard to either poor yield or quality of DNA. Therefore, we deve...

Optic nerve hypoplasia is a non-progressive condition characterised by subnormal vision and a subnormal number of optic nerve axons. It may be unilateral or bilateral, isolated or combined with other defects. Analysis of fundus photographs from a series of 7 patients with a stationary abnormality of different degrees showed that the functional defects could be closely correlated with defects in...

OBJECTIVE To describe the importance of bioinformatics tools to analyze the big data yielded from new "omics" generation-methods, with the aim of unraveling the biology of the pathogen bacteria Lactococcus garvieae. METHODS The paper provides the vision of the large volume of data generated from genome sequences, gene expression profiles by microarrays and other experimental methods that requ...

We apply measures of complexity, emergence, and self-organization to an urban traffic model for comparing a traditional traffic-light coordination method with a self-organizing method in two scenarios: cyclic boundaries and non-orientable boundaries. We show that the measures are useful to identify and characterize different dynamical phases. It becomes clear that different operation regimes ar...

The organization of primary visual cortex has been heavily studied for nearly 50 years, and in the last 20 years functional imaging has provided high-resolution maps of its tangential organization. Recently, however, the usefulness of maps like those of orientation and spatial frequency (SF) preference has been called into question because they do not, by themselves, predict how moving images a...

The fact that security was often neglected in the design and construction of computer software has led to significant system changes in an attempt to add desired security functionality after the fact. Four methods of implementing security functionality, from augmentation through integration, are examined with respect to implementation strategy and efficacy of the desired security functionality....

Fast self-location and collision-free navigation is a crucial pre-requisite for autonomous robots in real-world environments. Usually robots are equipped with a variety of sensors, but for obvious reasons vision systems are by far the most informative and reliable source for object location and path planning. In this paper, we present a new DSPand FPGA-based image processing system for FIRA Mir...