Background: Super-paramagnetic annexin-V conjugated micro-beads are able to eliminate sperm with phosphatidylserine externalization (PSE). PSE is considered as apoptotic sperm. PES positive sperm can be removed from sperm preparations sample to enhance sperm quality for assisted medical procreation. Therefore, the efficiency of this technique over normal sperm processing procedure such as densi...

This paper presents the natural language interface for an agent-based system, called MACS (Multi-Agent Contracting System). The MACS system is designed to provide advice in the pre-award phase of a defense contract. The original version of MACS allowed the users to query using only a list of predetermined keywords using pulldown menus. The second version of MACS incorporated a natural language ...

Almost all current block-cipher-based MACs reduce their security to the pseudorandomness of their underlying block ciphers, except for a few of them to the unpredictability, a strictly weaker security notion than pseudorandomness. However, the latter MACs offer relatively low efficiency. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of constructing rate-1 MACs from related-key unpredictable blo...

BACKGROUND The original Manchester Acute Coronary Syndromes model (MACS) 'rules in' and 'rules out' acute coronary syndromes (ACS) using high sensitivity cardiac troponin T (hs-cTnT) and heart-type fatty acid binding protein (H-FABP) measured at admission. The latter is not always available. We aimed to refine and validate MACS as Troponin-only Manchester Acute Coronary Syndromes (T-MACS), cutt...

The objective of this study was to assess the utility of the magnetic-activated cell sorting (MACS) technique used for improving characteristics and quality of insemination doses by the elimination ofapoptotic rabbit spermatozoa from a heterospermic pool (Experiment 1) as well as from the ejaculates of individual bucks (Experiment 2). Superparamagnetic microbeads conjugated with annexin V elimi...

Ovarian primary mucinous adenocarcinomas (MACs) are refractory to conventional therapy. Biomarkers for ovarian MAC could facilitate prognosis and targeted therapy, but are not currently available. The expression of human epidermal growth factor 2 (HER-2) has been linked to enhanced survival of MAC patients and may hold potential as a biomarker, but this potential has not been sufficiently inves...

OBJECTIVE This study was carried out to investigate the correlations of the sperm DNA fragmentation index (DFI) with semen parameters and apoptosis, and to investigate the effects of density-gradient centrifugation (DGC) and magnetic-activated cell sorting (MACS) on reducing the proportion of sperm with DNA fragmentation and protamine deficiency. METHODS Semen analysis and a sperm DNA fragmen...

OBJECTIVE Our aim in this study was to investigate the relationship between (a) the manual abilities of children with cerebral palsy (CP), assessed with the Manual Ability Classification System (MACS) in a school rehabilitation setting, and (b) the children's performance of self-care activities at home, assessed with the Pediatric Evaluation of Disability Inventory (PEDI). In addition, we asses...

Complement membrane attack complexes (MACs) promote inflammatory functions in endothelial cells (ECs) by stabilizing NF-κB-inducing kinase (NIK) and activating noncanonical NF-κB signaling. Here we report a novel endosome-based signaling complex induced by MACs to stabilize NIK. We found that, in contrast to cytokine-mediated activation, NIK stabilization by MACs did not involve cIAP2 or TRAF3....

We propose message authentication codes (MACs) that combine a block cipher and an additional (keyed or unkeyed) permutation. Our MACs are provably secure if the block cipher is pseudorandom and the additional permutation has a small differential probability. We also demonstrate that our MACs are easily implemented with AES and its 4-round version to obtain MACs that are provably secure and 1.4 ...