The role for ANG II in renal blood flow (RBF) autoregulation is unsettled. The present study was designed to test the effect of clamping plasma ANG II concentrations ([ANG II]) by simultaneous infusion of the angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor captopril and ANG II on RBF autoregulation in halothane-anesthetized Sprague-Dawley rats. Autoregulation was defined as the RBF response to acute ch...

When the renal nerves are stimulated with sinusoidal stimuli over the frequency range 0.04-0.8 Hz, low (< or =0.4 Hz)- but not high (> or =0.4 Hz)-frequency oscillations appear in renal blood flow (RBF) and are proposed to increase responsiveness of the renal vasculature to stimuli. This hypothesis was tested in anesthetized rats in which RBF responses to intrarenal injection of norepinephrine ...

We examined the relative contribution of renin-angiotensin system blockade and bradykinin potentiation to the renal hemodynamic effect of the angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitor enalaprilat in sodium-deprived dogs. Six conscious dogs instrumented for monitoring of blood pressure (BP) and renal blood flow (RBF) were employed in five groups of experiments. In group 1, enalaprilat alone was ad...

To test the effect of insulin on renal perfusion and the participation of NO and PG as mediators of this response, renal blood flow (RBF) was measured in sheep (n = 8) implanted with ultrasonic flow probes around renal arteries and with a systemic arterial pressure (SAP, n = 4) telemetry device. Three protocols were performed: 1) RBF and SAP were recorded (0800 to 1800 h) in fed and fasted shee...

Results-based financing (RBF) schemes-including performance based financing (PBF) and conditional cash transfers (CCT)-are increasingly being used to encourage use and improve quality of institutional health care for pregnant women in order to reduce maternal and neonatal mortality in low-income countries. While there is emerging evidence that RBF can increase service use and quality, little is...

One commonly finds in applications of smooth radial basis functions (RBFs) that scaling the kernels so they are ‘flat’ leads to smaller discretization errors. However, the direct numerical approach for computing with flat RBFs (RBF-Direct) is severely ill-conditioned. We present an algorithm for bypassing this ill-conditioning that is based on a new method for rational approximation (RA) of vec...

BACKGROUND Accurate and precise estimates of glomerular filtration rate (GFR) are essential for clinical assessments, and many methods of estimation are available. We developed a radial basis function (RBF) network and assessed the performance of this method in the estimation of the GFRs of 207 patients with type-2 diabetes and CKD. METHODS Standard GFR (sGFR) was determined by (99m)Tc-DTPA r...

Decrease in systemic blood pressure, duration of pressure decrease, and change in the activity of the renin or the sympathetic nervous system may represent mechanisms involved in resetting the renal blood flow (RBF) autoregulation found in hypertensive rats. Autoregulation of RBF, plasma renin concentration (PRC), and the time needed for resetting to take place were studied in the nonclipped ki...

A neural network model based on a chaotic particle swarm optimization (CPSO) radial basis function-back propagation (RBF-BP) was suggested to improve the accuracy of reactor temperature prediction. The training efficiency RBF-BP is influenced some degree by large randomness initial weight and threshold. To address impact threshold uncertainty combined network, this paper proposes using algorith...