Impaired endothelial barrier function resulting in increased vascular permeability is a characteristic vascular response in preeclampsia, a hypertensive and multiple systemic disorder of human pregnancy. During the last two decades, endothelial function in preeclampsia has been intensively studied and significant progress has been made in understanding the cellular and molecular bases of the al...

Although loss of endothelial barrier function is a hallmark of every acute inflammation and contributes to fatal loss of organ function during severe infections, there is no sufficient therapy for stabilization of endothelial barrier function. Endogenous peptide adrenomedullin (AM) serum levels were shown to be increased during severe infection including sepsis and septic shock. In different in...

We propose a new algorithm for general constrained derivative-free optimization. As in most methods, constraint violations are aggregated into a single constraint violation function. As in filter methods, a threshold, or barrier, is imposed on the constraint violation function, and any trial point whose constraint violation function value exceeds this threshold is discarded from consideration. ...

A progressive hedging method incorporated with self-concordant barrier functions has been developed by Zhao [23] for solving multistage stochastic programs. The method relaxes the nonanticipativity constraints by the Lagrangian dual approach and smooths the Lagrangian dual function by self-concordant barrier functions. This paper discusses in detail the implementation of this method and reports...