Introduction: Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) belong to the pervasive neurodevelopmental disorders. The prevalence of ASD has increased significantly throughout recent decades, bringing the overall estimated prevalence to 11.3 per 1000 children. ASD is characterized by severe difficulties in reciprocal social interaction, stereotyped patterns of behavior and profound impairments in verbal and n...

The bio-heat transfer equation is a macroscopic model for describing the heat transfer in microvascular tissue. So far the derivation of the Helmholtz term arising in the bio-heat transfer equation is not completely satisfactory. Here we use homogenization techniques to show that this term may be understood as asymptotic result of boundary value problems which provide a microscopic description ...

In this paper we try to improve the humanmachine interaction of a voice-activated system by adding prosodic characteristics to the system. We focus on verbal hesitation, which is manifested by speech disfluencies. In humanhuman communication recent research shows that moderate disfluencies make speakers more credible. In addition, people tend to react more leniently to an erroneous answer, if t...

Allergic asthmatic individuals are often exposed to low-doses of allergen in their everyday life. Extended exposure to allergen has lead to down-regulation of the allergic process in cell systems and in animal models. The aim of this study was to evaluate whether any such inhibitory mechanism of allergic responses can be seen in man in vivo. Patients with mild asthma were repeatedly and double-...

The HIV transmission component of a previously published HIV and HCV transmission model[1] was adapted and used in this analysis, and is described in appendix 2. The model is divided into two intervention sub-groups:no opioid substitution therapy (OST) and OST. The IDUs in the OST group are assumed to have a reduced HIV transmission risk. Initially, the model assumes that no one is in these int...

A 9-year-old girl accidentally injected her right thumb with an adult dose of epinephrine through an auto-injector syringe, delivering 0.3 mg of 1:1000 epinephrine. This injection caused immediate ischemic changes in the digit. This is the first reported case of accidental self injection by a child of an adult dose of epinephrine and its successful treatment with low-dose phentolamine simultane...

A recent major cluster randomized trial of screening, active disease treatment, and mass isoniazid preventive therapy for 9 months during 2006-2011 among South African gold miners showed reduced individual-level tuberculosis incidence but no detectable population-level impact. We fitted a dynamic mathematical model to trial data and explored 1) factors contributing to the lack of population-lev...

Comment It is a pleasure to comment on the paper by Antonio Forcina. Our comment is restricted to the example, discussed in section 3.3 of Forcina's paper, of a two-armed double-blind placebo-controlled randomized experiment in which: (i) no subject in the placebo arm takes active treatment, (ii) some subjects in the treatment arm do not comply and fail to take the active treatment, and (iii) t...