It has been suggested that the inflammatory cytokine IL-15 plays an important role in the development of several autoimmune diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis. We have generated a unique lytic and antagonistic IL-15 mutant/Fcgamma2a fusion protein (CRB-15) that targets the IL-15R. In the present study we examined the effects of targeting the IL-15R on the prevention and treatment of colla...

BACKGROUND The Cervical Ripening Balloon (CRB) is a novel mechanical method for induction of labour (IOL), reducing the risks of hyperstimulation associated with pharmacological methods. However, there remains a paucity of literature on its application in high risk mothers, who have an elevated risk of uterine rupture, namely those with previous scars and grandmultiparity. METHODOLOGY A retro...

Organophosphate and carbamate are mainly used to kill insects, thereby protecting livestock, crops, homes and communities. Yet, these compounds also convey great danger. OP and CRB poisoning is an important clinical problem, often life-threatening, especially in the pediatric population in rural areas where reaching a physician or hospital on time is difficult. We present a summary of accumulat...

In this contribution we consider the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) for the estimation of the synchronization parameters of a noisy linearly modulated signal with random data symbols. We explore three scenarios, i.e., (i) joint estimation of carrier phase, carrier frequency and time delay, irrespective of the data; (ii) joint estimation of carrier frequency and time delay, irrespective of the data and ...

BACKGROUND Several scoring systems have been used to predict mortality in patients with community-acquired pneumonia. The properties of commonly used risk stratification scales were systematically reviewed. METHODS MEDLINE and EMBASE (January 1999-October 2009) were searched for prospective studies that reported mortality at 4-8 weeks in patients with radiographically-confirmed community-acqu...

Tunneled dialysis catheters (TDC) are extensively used for long-term venous hemodialysis access and their use is frequently associated with infectious complications. Catheter-related bacteremia (CRB) is the most common and important infection associated with TDC use and may be caused by a wide variety of Gram-positive or Gram-negative organisms. Prevention of CRB can be difficult despite use of...

BACKGROUND The database of the German programme for quality in healthcare including data of every hospitalised patient with community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) during a 2-year period (n = 388 406 patients in 2005 and 2006) was analysed. METHODS End points of the analysis were: (1) incidence; (2) outcome; (3) performance of the CRB-65 (C, mental confusion; R, respiratory rate >or=30/min; B, sys...

1 The localization problem is fundamentally important for sensor networks. This paper studies the Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRB) for two kinds of localization based on noisy range measurements. The first is Anchored Localization in which the estimated positions of at least 3 nodes are known in global coordinates. We show some basic invariances of the CRB in this case and derive lower and upper bo...

In this paper, we analyze the impact of compression with complex random matrices on Fisher information and the Cramér-Rao Bound (CRB) for estimating unknown parameters in the mean value function of a complex multivariate normal distribution. We consider the class of random compression matrices whose distribution is right-unitarily invariant. The compression matrix whose elements are i.i.d. stan...