BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to compare the efficacy of verteporfin photodynamic therapy (PDT), intravitreal injections of bevacizumab (IVB) and transpupillary thermotherapy (TTT) in patients with neovascular age-related macular degeneration (AMD). MATERIAL/METHODS The study design was a prospective, interventional, comparative case series. Between December 2006 and March 2009, 426 ey...

PURPOSE To compare the anterior lens capsulotomy edge tear strength created by manual continuous curvilinear capsulorhexis (CCC), femtosecond laser capsulotomy (FSLC), and a new automated precision pulse capsulotomy (PPC) device. DESIGN A 3-arm study in paired human cadaver eyes. PARTICIPANTS A total of 44 eye specimens from 22 donors in the United States. METHODS Capsulotomy was performe...

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to explore the option of stimulating calf muscle contraction through externally applied neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES) and to measure venous blood flow response to this stimulation. METHODS Ten patients with class 6 chronic venous disease (CEAP clinical classification) were recruited. Measurements of peak venous velocities in the popliteal vei...

BACKGROUND Despite evidence that altered membrane porins may impair microbial drug uptake thereby potentially compounding efflux pump-mediated multidrug resistance, few studies have evaluated gene transcription to identify multidrug-resistance-associated porins and other potential drug targets. METHODS Genes that encode six membrane porins (fadL, lamB, ompC, ompF, ompW and yiaT) and two membr...

BACKGROUND The therapeutic effects of Meriva®, a curcumin-phospholipid (lecithin) delivery system (formulated as Norflo® tablets), on visual acuity and retinal thickness in patients with acute and chronic central serous chorioretinopathy was previously investigated in a six-month open-label study. METHODS In this follow-up study, visual acuity was again assessed by ophthalmologic evaluation a...

PURPOSE To study age-related changes in corneal deformation response to air-puff applanation tonometry. METHODS Fifty healthy subjects were recruited for a prospective study and divided into two equal age groups (≤ 28 and ≥ 50 years old). Up to three measurements by a corneal deformation analyser based on the Scheimpflug principle were performed on the left eye of each subject. Raw Scheimpflu...

t-Tests are widely used by researchers to compare the average values of a numeric outcome between two groups. If there are doubts about the suitability of the data for the requirements of a t-test, most notably the distribution being non-normal, the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney test may be used instead. However, although often applied, both tests may be invalid when discrete and/or extremely skew data...

BACKGROUND A knowledge-based radiation therapy (KBRT) treatment planning algorithm was recently developed. The purpose of this work is to investigate how plans that are generated with the objective KBRT approach compare to those that rely on the judgment of the experienced planner. METHODS Thirty volumetric modulated arc therapy plans were randomly selected from a database of prostate plans t...

UNLABELLED In the last few years, numerous methods have been proposed for microarray-based class prediction. Although many of them have been designed especially for the case n << p (much more variables than observations), preliminary variable selection is almost always necessary when the number of genes reaches several tens of thousands, as usual in recent data sets. In the two-class setting, t...

Abstract: We extend to rank-based tests of multivariate independence the Chernoff-Savage and Hodges-Lehmann classical univariate results. More precisely, we show that the Taskinen, Kankainen and Oja (2004) normal-score rank test for multivariate independence uniformly dominates – in the Pitman sense – the classical Wilks (1935) test, which establishes the Pitman non-admissibility of the latter,...