conclusions tlr8 rs3764880 and tlr9 rs148805533 polymorphisms may not be risk factors for susceptibility to tuberculosis in a sample of iranian population. larger studies are required to validate our findings. results the allelic and genotypic frequencies of the tlr8 rs3764880 did not differ significantly between ptb and the controls. no significant difference was found between the groups regar...

This article adopts a family of surrogatebased optimization approaches to approximate the response surface for the transportation simulation input– output mapping and search for the optimal toll charges in a transportation network. The computational effort can thus be significantly reduced for the expensive-toevaluate optimization problem. Meanwhile, the random noise that always occurs through ...

Background: Hepatic encephalopathy is defined as a neuropsychiatric brain dysfunction in acute or chronic liver failure. Infection and inflammation have crucial role in its pathophysiology. The purpose of our study was to demonstrate the relationship between toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) expression and the encephalopathy induced with endotoxin in biliary cirrhotic rats. Methods: The present stud...

We study the performance issues of a realistic simulation of the German toll system for heavy trucks using a discreteevent system (DES) simulation. The article first introduces the German toll system and the simulation framework developed to analyze the systems’ behavior. A number of performance limitations of several commercial and non-commercial DES simulation kernels are described, measured ...

We consider price and service-quality setting in oligopolistic markets for congestible services, applied to the case of private roads. Previous studies show that parallel competitors set a volume/capacity ratio (and thereby a travel time or service quality) that is socially optimal if they take the actions of the others as given. We find that this result does not hold when capacity and toll set...