BACKGROUND Proximal femur fracture (PFF) is associated with considerable morbidity and mortality. The European Quality of Care Pathway (EQCP) study on PFF (NCT00962910) was designed to determine how care pathways (CP) for hospital treatment of PFF affect consistency of care, adherence to evidence-based key interventions, and clinical outcome. METHODS/DESIGN An international cluster-randomized...

Several studies indicate that estrogen may enhance the effects of mechanical loading on bone mineral density in elderly women. This stimulating effect of estrogen could be due to increased sensitivity of bone cells to mechanical stress in the presence of estrogen. The present study was performed to determine whether 17beta-estradiol (E2) enhances mechanical stress-induced prostaglandin producti...

This study was conducted to assess the fertilization and development of porcine oocytes matured in a solo follicular fluid (pFF) using different in vitro culture systems and insemination periods. Cumulus-oocyte complexes (COCs), follicular cells (FCs), and pFF were collected from the follicles of ovaries. The pFF was used as a maturation medium (MpFF) after supplementation with follicle stimula...

To evaluate the effect of follicular fluid on in vitro maturation, pig oocytes were cultured in the presence of hormones where 10% of fetal calf serum (FCS), 10% of follicular fluid from large follicles (l-pFF), 10% of follicular fluid from medium follicles (m-pFF) or no supplement were added. When oocytes where matured in medium containing the hormones the addition of different supplements did...

Delay faults are frequently encountered in nanometer technologies. Therefore, it is critical to detect these faults during factory test. Testing for a delay fault requires the application of a pair of test vectors in an at-speed manner. To maximize the delay fault detection capability, it is desired that the vectors in this pair are independent. Independent vector pairs cannot always be applied...

PURPOSE To develop an automatic registration-based segmentation algorithm for measuring abdominal adipose tissue depot volumes and organ fat fraction content from three-dimensional (3D) water-fat MRI data, and to evaluate its performance against manual segmentation. MATERIALS AND METHODS Data were obtained from 11 subjects at two time points with intermediate repositioning, and from four subj...

In the present study, we investigated the potential role of glucose and pyruvate in the cytoplasmic maturation of porcine oocytes by investigating the effect of glucose and/or pyruvate supplementation, in the presence or absence of 10% porcine follicular fluid (PFF), on meiotic maturation and subsequent embryo development. In the absence of 10% PFF, without exogenous addition of glucose and pyr...

DNA methylation in transcriptional regulatory regions is crucial for gene expression. The DNA methylation status of the edges of CpG islands, called CpG island shore, is involved in tissue/cell-type-specific gene expression. Haploinsufficiency diseases are caused by inheritance of one mutated null allele and are classified as autosomal dominant. However, in the same pedigree, phenotypic varianc...

A detailed investigation of the effect of hole transport material (HTM) pore fi lling on the photovoltaic performance of solid-state dye-sensitized solar cells (ss-DSCs) and the specifi c mechanisms involved is reported. It is demonstrated that the effi ciency and photovoltaic characteristics of ss-DSCs improve with the pore fi lling fraction (PFF) of the HTM, 2,2’,7,7’-tetrakis-( N , N -dip -m...

Cell-secreted vesicles, such as exosomes, have recently been recognized as mediators of cell communication. A recent study in cattle showed the involvement of exosome-like vesicles in the control of cumulus expansion, a prerequisite process for normal ovulation; however, whether this is the case in other mammalian species is not known. Therefore, this study aimed to examine the presence of exos...