OBJECTIVE A reliable and easy-to-perform method for measuring right ventricular (RV) afterload is desirable when scheduling patients with systolic heart failure to undergo heart transplantation. The present study aimed to investigate the accuracy of echocardiographically-derived pulmonary arterial elastance as a measurement of pulmonary vascular resistance by comparing it with invasive measures...

Acupuncture and electroacupuncture (EA) are widely used to treat a variety of diseases including pain. In preclinical research, EA is usually applied by inserting acupuncture needles into the hindlimbs of rats restrained in small tubes or bags. This restrained model of EA not only causes stress-like behaviors but also is limited in stimulating locations and intensities. In 2004, a novel, unrest...

Business and ICT strategic alignment remains an ongoing challenge facing organizations as they react to changing requirements by adapting or introducing new technologies to existing infrastructure. Activity around Enterprise Architecture (EA) has increasingly become relevant to these demands and as a consequence numerous methods and frameworks for pursuing EA have emerged. However these approac...

Giving account to the importance of enterprise architecture (EA) modeling, we identify issues in visualization handling that we came across during an extensive survey of existing tools for EA management. We then point to the fundamental principles of software cartography, an approach for EA modeling, including a method for the automatic creation of visualizations based on EA models. This approa...

The objective of this research is to tackle bargaining problems with Evolutionary Algorithms (EA). EA have been proved effective for a wide variety of problems. In this paper, we apply EA to solve Rubinstein’s Basic Alternating-Offer Bargaining Problem whose game-theoretic solution is known. Experimental outcomes suggest that EA are able to generate convincing approximations of the theoretic so...

In this article, we propose a new approach to the virus DNA–based evolutionary algorithm (VDNA-EA) to implement self-learning of a class of Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy controllers. The fuzzy controllers use T-S fuzzy rules with linear consequent, the generalized input fuzzy sets, Zadeh fuzzy logic and operators, and the generalized defuzzifier. The fuzzy controllers are proved to be nonlinear pro...

PURPOSE To investigate the anticancer activity of ellagic acid (EA) in U251 human glioblastoma cells and its possible molecular mechanism. METHODS The cells were treated with EA at various concentrations for different time periods. Cell viability and cell proliferation were detected by cell counting kit-8(CCK-8) assay and live/dead assay respectively. Cell apoptosis were measured with Annexin...

The matrix exponential is a much-studied matrix function having many applications. The Fréchet derivative of the matrix exponential describes the first-order sensitivity of eA to perturbations in A and its norm determines a condition number for eA. Among the numerous methods for computing eA the scaling and squaring method is the most widely used. We show that the implementation of the method i...

The joint replenishment of inventory problem (JRP) requires independence of minor ordering costs. In this paper we propose an evolutionary algorithm (EA) for a modification of the JRP. The modified JRP allows for interdependence of minor ordering costs. Our proposed EA (EARP) is a nested EA that searches for a solution to minimize the total cost of inventory replenishment. It combines an EA whi...