BACKGROUND In idiopathic pulmonary arterial hypertension (IPAH), peripheral airway obstruction is frequent. This is partially attributed to the mediator dysbalance, particularly an excess of endothelin-1 (ET-1), to increased pulmonary vascular and airway tonus and to local inflammation. Bosentan (ET-1 receptor antagonist) improves pulmonary hemodynamics, exercise limitation, and disease severit...

The wheel tracking test (WTT) has been extensively used for laboratory characterization of permanent deformation hot mix asphalt (HMA). However, the fully-confined setup device is unable to capture tertiary zone where shear takes place. This makes resistance characteristics HMA difficult analyze. Hence, a modified tracker (MWT), with unconfined lateral sides along direction was utilized in this...

Abstract Funding Acknowledgements Type of funding sources: None. Background Limited data is available in the literature on Cardiac Magnetic Resonance (CMR) features African/Afro-Caribbeans, particular exploring differences between hypertensive heart disease (HHD) and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). Purpose To describe cardiac morphology pattern late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) patients Afri...

Powdery calcium carbonates, predominantly calcite and aragonite, with planar defects and cation-anion mixed surfaces as deposited on low-carbon steel by magnetic water treatment (MWT) were characterized by X-ray diffraction, electron microscopy, and vibration spectroscopy. Calcite were found to form faceted nanoparticles having 3x (01̄14) commensurate superstructure and with well-developed {112̄0...

Certain cognitive processes, including spatial ability, decline with normal aging. Spatial ability is also a cognitive domain with robust sex differences typically favoring males. However, tests of spatial ability do not seem to measure a homogeneous class of processes. For many, mentally matching rotated three-dimensional images is the gold standard for measuring spatial cognition in humans, w...

We consider the problem of computing all-pairs shortest paths in a directed graph with real weights assigned to vertices. For an n × n 0 − 1 matrix C, let KC be the complete weighted graph on the rows of C where the weight of an edge between two rows is equal to their Hamming distance. Let MWT (C) be the weight of a minimum weight spanning tree of KC . We show that the all-pairs shortest path p...

BACKGROUND A predictor of neonatal mortality in infants with congenital diaphragmatic hernia (CDH) is disrupted pulmonary vascular development, clinically expressed as pulmonary hypertension. OBJECTIVE To determine if prenatal corticosteroids and phosphodiesterase-5 (PDE-5) inhibitors have a beneficial effect on pulmonary vascular development in CDH lungs. METHODS We induced CDH in fetal ra...