The periodontal ligament (PDL) is a connective tissue located between the cementum of teeth and the alveolar bone of the mandibula. It plays an integral role in the maintenance and regeneration of periodontal tissue. The cells responsible for maintaining this tissue are thought to be fibroblasts, which can be either multipotent or composed of heterogenous cell populations. However, as no establ...

BACKGROUND Administration of topical rapamycin (RPM) suppresses the regeneration and revascularization of photocoagulated blood vessels induced by pulsed dye laser (PDL). OBJECTIVE To systematically elucidate the molecular pathophysiology of the inhibition of PDL-induced angiogenesis by topical RPM in a rodent model. METHODS The mRNA expression profiles of 86 angiogenic genes and phosphoryl...

In this report we examine results pertaining to Karl Abrahamson’s PDL‖, namely PDL with an interleaving operator, ‖, with respect to an agent programming point of view. We first establish its usefulness in such contexts, before defining a syntax and semantics for the logic, looking at its relation to the regular expression shuffle operator and to PDL itself. We also look at the practical implic...

Background: Sebaceous hyperplasia is a benign but clinically and cosmetically unappealing lesion. Historical treatments include cauterization, cryotherapy, chemical ablation, and surgical removal, all of which increase the risk for permanent post-operative adverse effects. The pulsed-dye laser (PDL) offers a safe and effective approach to the treatment of sebaceous hyperplasia in Fitzpatrick sk...

The aim of this study was to observe the time-lapse changes in the rat periodontal ligament (PDL) during function and tooth movement. Under Nembutal anaesthesia, time-lapse changes in the thickness of the PDL of the first molars were investigated in five 12-week-old adolescent rats with microcomputed tomography. Three-dimensional (3D) images were reconstructed from the data. Histological observ...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Port wine stains (PWS) are heterogeneous vascular malformations that can be treated with vascular-selective pulsed dye lasers (PDL). Hypertrophic PWS, especially in adults, are consistently less responsive to PDL. Furthermore, many PWS that respond well initially to PDL treatment may reach a response plateau, becoming unresponsive to further PDL treatments, a phenomenon...

We reformulate Pratt’s tableau decision procedure of checking satisfiability of a set of formulas in PDL. Our formulation is simpler and more direct for implementation. Extending the method we give the first ExpTime (optimal) tableau decision procedure not based on transformation for checking consistency of an ABox w.r.t. a TBox in PDL (here, PDL is treated as a description logic). We also prov...

A method for non-intrusively monitoring the polarization dependent loss (PDL) of an installed fiber-optic transmission system is proposed using live dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM)-based traffic as the probing signal. The method extracts the statistical parameters of system PDL from the measured partial PDL data. Field measurements of PDL were performed on long-haul DWDM systems deploye...

Periodontal ligament (PDL) cells maintain the attachment of the tooth to alveolar bone. These cells reside at a site in which they are challenged frequently by bacterial products and proinflammatory cytokines, such as interleukin-1beta (IL-1beta), during infections. In our initial studies we observed that IL-1beta down-regulates the osteoblast-like characteristics of PDL cells in vitro. Therefo...

It is well known that Propositional Dynamic Logic (PDL) can be seen as a fragment of the modal μ-calculus. In this paper we provide an exact syntactic characterization of the fragments of the μ-calculus that correspond to PDL and to test-free PDL. In addition we give automata-theoretic characterizations for PDL, with and without tests, which shed light on the relation between these logics and t...