PURPOSE To investigate an association between the levels of serum thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH)-receptor autoantibodies (TRAbs) and Graves' orbitopathy (GO) activity/severity scores, and compare the performance of three different TRAb assays in assessing the clinical manifestations of GO. MATERIALS AND METHODS Cross-sectional study. Medical records of 155 patients diagnosed with GO betwee...

The stability of phytoplankton biomass is important in maintaining the health of an aquatic ecosystem. In this study, the main environmental factors and phytoplankton biomass were investigated monthly from May 2011 to April 2013 in a eutrophic lake. The influence of both the mean values and variability (standard deviation) of environmental factors on the temporal stability index (TSI, measured ...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The risk of stroke shortly after transient ischemic attack with infarction on diffusion-weighted images, also known as transient symptoms with infarction (TSI), is substantially higher than is the risk after imaging-normal transient ischemic attack. We sought to assess the utility of a Web-based recurrence risk estimator (RRE; http://www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/RRE/) original...

Treatment failures in head and neck cancer patients are mainly related to locoregional tumor recurrence. The objective of the present study was to evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of model-free dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) to detect local recurrence during the surveillance of head and neck cancer patients.Our retrospective study enrolled 24 patients with primar...

We present a novel method for computing the information content of an image. We introduce the notion of task-specific information (TSI) in order to quantify imaging system performance for a given task. This new approach employs a recently-discovered relationship between the Shannon mutual-information and minimum estimation error. We demonstrate the utility of the TSI formulation by applying it ...

the present study aimed to investigate the characteristics of occupational accidents and frequency and severity of work related accidents in the construction industry among iranian insured workers during the years 20072011.the iranian social security organization (isso) accident database containing 21,864 cases between the years 2007-2011 was applied in this study. in the next step, total accid...

Interdisciplinary design methods used in the development of the Constructed Narratives project, which is a tangible social interface (TSI). The TSI is designed to enable users to collaboratively construct and negotiate their social and knowledge networks based upon their preferences and user profiles. [13]

PURPOSE Trachoma is a fibrotic disease of the conjunctiva initiated by Chlamydia trachomatis infection. This blinding disease affects over 40 million people worldwide yet the mechanisms underlying its pathogenesis remain poorly understood. We have investigated host microRNA (miR) expression in health (N) and disease (conjunctival scarring with (TSI) and without (TS) inflammation) to determine i...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Brains of patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) characteristically have "black holes" (BHs), hypointense lesions on T1-weighted (T1W) spin-echo (SE) images. Although conventional MR imaging can disclose chronic BHs (CBHs), it cannot stage the degree of their pathologic condition. Tissue-specific imaging (TSI), a recently introduced MR imaging technique, allows selective v...