Purpose: To evaluate the corneal asphericity, volume, thickness and keratometry and the correlation among these variables in keratoconus patients. Materials and methods: A total of 1,071 eyes of 810 patients diagnosed with keratoconus were evaluated with a Pentacam (Oculus Optikgerate GmbH). Five groups were established according to the mean keratometry readings: Very mild [K < 44.0 diopters (D...

Metacomputing is the seamless application of geographically-separated distributed computing resources to user applications. We consider the scheduling of metaapplications; applications consisting of multiple components that may communicate and interact over the course of the application. Components may be schedulable computations, remote servers or databases, remote instruments, humans-in-the-l...

Cell signaling is an essential requirement for mammalian cell invasion by Trypanosoma cruzi. Depending on the parasite strain and the parasite developmental form, distinct signaling pathways may be induced. In this short review, we focus on the data coming from studies with metacyclic trypomastigotes (MT) generated in vitro and tissue culture-derived trypomastigotes (TCT), used as counterparts ...

Attenuation correction is very important for quantitative SPECT imaging. We designed an uncollimated non-uniform line array source (non-uniform LAS) for attenuation correction based on transmission computed tomography (TCT) using Tc-99m and compared its performance with an uncollimated uniform line array source (uniform LAS) in a thorax phantom study. This non-uniform LAS was attached to one ca...

The tube coagulase test (TCT) performed directly from positive blood culture bottles has been used to reduce the turnaround time for identifying Staphylococcus aureus. Most reports have shown the test to be specific but often lacking sufficient sensitivity to be useful. In a prospective study of blood culture bottles (BCB) signaling positive, with a Gram-stained smear showing gram-positive cocc...

AIM To compare the anterior segment measurements obtained by rotating Scheimpflug camera (Pentacam) and Scanning-slit topography (Orbscan IIz) in keratoconic eyes. METHODS A total of 121 patients, 71 males (58.7%) and 50 females (41.3%) (214 eyes) with the diagnosis of keratoconus (KC) were enrolled in this study. Following diagnosis of KC by slit-lamp biomicroscopic examination, central corn...

Broad-scale monitoring of varying moisture levels of leaves has ramifications for understanding fire potential, biogeochemistry, and ecosystem dynamics. Five different shortwave infrared (SWIR)-derived spectral indices, principal components analysis (PCA), and the tasseled cap transformation (TCT), derived from Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) and Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection...

BACKGROUND Chronic proximal hamstring tendinopathy is an overuse syndrome that is usually managed by nonoperative methods. Shockwave therapy has proved to be effective in many tendinopathies. HYPOTHESIS Shockwave therapy may be more effective than other nonoperative treatments for chronic proximal hamstring tendinopathy. STUDY DESIGN Randomized controlled clinical study; Level of evidence, ...

We demonstrate that an unlexicalized PCFG with refined conjunction categories can parse much more accurately than previously shown, by making use of simple, linguistically motivated state splits, which break down false independence assumptions latent in a vanilla treebank grammar and reflect the Chinese idiosyncratic grammatical property. Indeed, its performance is the best result in the 3nd Ch...

Data comparing emission computed tomography (ECT), transmission computed tomography (TCT), and radionuclide scintigraphy suggest that in many patients more accurate diagnostic information may be available from emission tomography. ECT was performed during a 4-mo period on 200 of 235 patients referred for brain scans. The data suggest that ECT has a 10% greater sensitivity than scintigraphy, and...