BACKGROUND Permanent pacemaker (PPM) implantation after cardiac surgery is required in 0.4-6% of patients depending on cardiac surgery type. PPM implantation in the early postoperative period may reduce morbidity and postoperative hospital stay. We performed a retrospective review of electronic medical records of adult patients with coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG), valve surgery, or both...

BACKGROUND Surface microhardness is a physical property which access the effect of chemical and physical agents on hard tissues of teeth, and a useful way to examine the resistance of fluoride treated enamel against caries. The purpose of this study was to evaluate microhardness of enamel following pH-cycling through demineralization and remineralization using suspensions of dentifrices with di...

Canthaxanthin (Cxn) is a fat-soluble red carotenoid pigment and is reported to be immunomodulatory. Broiler breeder hens were fed 0 ppm (Control), 6 ppm or 12 ppm Cxn to determine the effect of maternal dietary Cxn on chicks hatched from hens at 31 (Early), 45 (Mid) and 57 (Late) wk of age. Whole blood was obtained at 1 and 4 d of age to assess the number of cells able to engulf at least one Es...

The problem of language discrimination may arise in situations when many texts belonging to different source languages are at hand but we are not sure to which language each belongs to. This might usually be the case during information retrieval via Internet. We propose a cryptographic solution to the language identification problem: Employing the Prediction by Partial Matching (PPM) model, we ...

Hidden markov models (HMMs) and prediction by partial matching models (PPM) have been successfully used in language processing tasks including learning-based token identification. Most of the existing systems are domainand language-dependent. The power of retargetability and applicability of these systems is limited. This paper investigates the effect of the combination of HMMs and PPM on token...

AIMS Conduction abnormalities (CA) requiring permanent pacemaker (PPM) are a well-known complication after transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI). This study aimed to determine the incidence of TAVI-related PPM and reevaluate the indications for PPM after the periprocedural period. METHODS AND RESULTS A total of 258 consecutive patients underwent TAVI with the Medtronic CoreValve (MCV...

OBJECTIVE Patient-prosthesis mismatch (PPM) may affect clinical outcomes in patients with aortic valve replacement (AVR). We retrospectively examined the PPM in patients with isolated AVR in the Japan Adult Cardiovascular Surgery Database (JACVSD). METHODS We examined all patients with isolated AVR between January 1, 2008 and December 31, 2009. The JACVSD data collection form has a total of 2...

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to compare left ventricular (LV) remodeling using myocardial strain between patients with severe aortic stenosis (AS) treated with transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) with and without prosthesis-patient mismatch (PPM). METHODS AND RESULTS In a retrospective study, speckle-tracking echocardiography was used to measure global longitudinal strain (G...

Five organophosphates (OPs) (chlorpyrifos, chlorpyrifos methyl, fenthion, malathion, and temephos), 3 pyrethroids (bifenthrin, cypermethrin, and permethrin), and 2 microbial pesticides (Bacillus thuringiensis serovar.israelensis [B.t.i.] and Bacillus sphaericus) were tested as larvicides against a Florida Aedes albopictus population colonized in the laboratory. In addition, 3 insect growth regu...

The predictor proposed is a tag-based, global-history predictor derived from PPM. It features five tables. Each table is indexed with a different history length. The prediction for a branch is given by the up-down saturating counter associated with the longest matching history. For this kind of predictor to work well, the update must be done carefully. We propose a new update method that improv...