Sjögren's syndrome (SjS) is an autoimmune disease characterized by distraction of particularly salivary and lacrimal glands. The aim of the present study was to compare salivary gland scintigraphy (SGS) and salivary gland ultrasonography (SUS) in identifying salivary gland function in patients first diagnosed with SjS. We recruited 20 such patients with SjS (5 male, 15 female, aged from 35 to 6...

Rendezvous search that asks two persons to find each other among a set of possible locations has regained tremendous research interest lately in the research community of cognitive radio networks (CRNs). In a CRN, there are two types of users: primary spectrum users (PUs) and secondary spectrum users (SUs). SUs are only allowed to share spectrum with PUs provided that they do not cause any seve...

Number of complex fluids (as slurries, drilling muds, paints and coatings, many foods, cosmetics, biofluids...) can approximately be described as concentrated dispersions of Structural Units (SUs). Due to shear forces, SUs are assumed to be approximately spherical in shape and uniform in size under steady flow conditions, so that a complex fluid can be considered as a roughly monodisperse dispe...

Neural networks, a central tool in machine learning, have demonstrated remarkable, high fidelity performance on image recognition and classification tasks. These successes evince an ability to accurately represent dimensional functions, but rigorous results about the approximation error of neural networks after training are few. Here we establish conditions for global convergence standard optim...

Sulphonylureas (SUs) are widely used glucose-lowering agents in type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) with apparent declining efficacy over time. Concerns have been raised from observational retrospective studies on the cardiovascular (CV) safety of SUs but there are few long-term data on CV outcomes from randomized controlled trials (RCTs) involving the use of this class of agents. Most of the obser...

BACKGROUND Susac's syndrome (SuS) is an uncommon disease characterized by retinal microangiopathy that may be assessed more accurately with optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA), a new imaging technique which provides a retinal microvasculature map. The purpose of this case report is to describe the multimodal imaging findings of SuS correlating OCTA with functional tests. CASE PRES...

BACKGROUND Heart surgery has developed with increasing patient complexity. OBJECTIVE To assess the use of resources and real costs stratified by risk factors of patients submitted to surgical cardiac procedures and to compare them with the values reimbursed by the Brazilian Unified Health System (SUS). METHOD All cardiac surgery procedures performed between January and July 2013 in a tertia...

Cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.) seed develops single-celled long fibres (lint) from the seed-coat epidermis at anthesis. Previous studies have shown that the initiation and rapid elongation of these fibres requires the expression of sucrose synthase (Sus) and, potentially, a transient closure of plasmodesmata. This study extends the previous work to examine the patterns of Sus expression and pla...