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Objectives: The occlusion of the internal carotid artery (ICA) frequently leads to stroke and develops most commonly as a consequence of arterial embolism or atherosclerotic thrombosis. Following acute care, if the patient’s general condition makes it possible, the patient is emitted from the hospital...

Background: The clinical significance of pressure-dependent intra-beat changes in local pulse-wave velocity (C) has recently come to light [1]. While reported methods require arterial pressure and diameter measurements from a single site to assess intra-beat changes in C, we present an image-free fast...

Our aim is to develop methodology for recognition of Internet portal users on the base of their browsing patterns. This is a classification task in which we have thousands values of decision attribute and objects are described by means of sequences of symbols. We develop feature selectors which make...

Introduction: Clinic blood pressure (BP) is performed by inflation of an upper-arm cuff, but this itself may induce a reactive change in BP that could influence diagnosis. This study aimed to determine if a reactive BP change to cuff inflation occurs. Methods: Cuff BP and beat-to-beat invasive aortic...

Purpose: Arterial stiffness is a well-established marker for cardiovascular health assessment. Current methods rely on expensive imaging systems and specialised operators to perform local stiffness evaluation from the common carotid artery (CCA) and cannot be used for ambulatory monitoring in chronic...

Background: Daily assessment of vascular health may predict cardiovascular incidence. Vascular aging index (VAI) calculated from second derivative of photoplethysmogram (SDPTG) is a simple, non-invasive measure possibly reflecting vascular stiffness. However, the effects of daily life events such as...

Background: Advanced glycation end products (AGEs) are involved into several pathophysiologic processes in vascular diseases, including progressive loss of elasticity of vessel wall (arterial stiffness). Circulating soluble receptor for AGEs (sRAGE) act as a decoy and counterbalanced the harmful properties...

Introduction: Inaccurate determination of arterial path-length by surface-distance (SD) measurement is an inherent source of error in calculating carotid-femoral pulse wave velocity (CFPWV). A recent development in calculating arterial path-length by a simple distance formula (DF) for CFPWV has been...

Background: Large artery stiffening, as indexed by carotid-femoral pulse wave velocity (cfPWV), may vary substantially among individuals. The present study aimed to characterize the arterial mechanical properties of the macro- and microvasculature in subjects with early or healthy vascular aging (EVA,...

Many previous studies have shown that class classification can be greatly improved by kernel Fisher discriminant analysis (KDA) technique. However, KDA only captures global geometrical structure and disregards local geometrical structure of the data. In this paper, we propose a new feature extraction...

The aim of this study is to assess whether the effect of gender on the excessive daytime sleepiness (EDS) is influenced by two confounders (age and hours of sleep per night). A cross-sectional study was conducted at King Abdulaziz Medical City-Riyadh (KAMC-R). A total of 2095 respondents answered a questionnaire...

Background: Identification of intraplaque haemorrhage using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is expensive, technically demanding and sometimes uncomfortable. Photoacoustic imaging (PAI) is a new non-invasive technique combining multi-wavelength infrared laser light and ultrasound (US) imaging, able to...

Objectives: Carotid-femoral pulse wave velocity (cfPWV) approximates aortic stiffness and is a predictor of cardiovascular events. Despite the literature highlighting the clinical relevance of cfPWV, there is minimal integration of this parameter in clinical assessments. An underlying reason may stem...

The concern over security in all fields has intensified over the years. The prefatory phase of providing security begins with authentication to provide access. In many scenarios, this authentication is provided by biometric systems. Moreover, the threat of pandemic has made the people to think of hygienic...

Purpose/Background/Objectives: TASK-1 (TWIK-related acid-sensitive potassium) channels conduct background K+ currents in smooth muscle cells of pulmonary arteries suppressing vasocontraction. However, the vasomotor role of TASK-1 channels in systemic arteries as well as their regulation by the endothelium...

This paper proposes a novel hybrid forecasting model combining autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) and artificial neural network (ANN) with incorporating moving average and the annual seasonal index for Thailand's cassava export (i.e., native starch, modified starch, and sago). The...

Reference intervals (RI) of 24-h central blood pressure (24CBP) obtained from large healthy population are lacking in Russia. We had to generated 24CBP percentile curves and RI adjusted to each level of age and/or body height and gender of each time of monitoring (24-h, daytime or nighttime). Our database...

Background: Preeclampsia is a common pregnancy disease characterized by hypertension and kidney failure. Recent studies have shown that even in the case of successful delivery, preeclampsia could induce long-term effects in the offspring. Nevertheless, the effects of preeclampsia on the cardiovascular...

Background: Peripheral arterial disease (PAD) is a manifestation of atherosclerosis. Adipose tissue (AT) and skeletal muscle (SM) are endocrine organs with vascular effects. The objective is to compare the quantity and function of AT and SM between two groups: intermittent claudication (IC) and critical...

Objectives: To determine how orthostatic changes in body position alter BP and estimation of pulse wave velocity (PWV) and Augmentation Index (AIx), when changing from supine to the sitting position [1]. Also, to analyze the effect of a short physical exercise and of physical training status on PWV/AIx...

In contrast to abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA), aneurysms of the thoracic ascending aorta (TAA) are not associated with a mural thrombus. Mechanistic understanding of the involvement of vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMCs) in thrombus formation is lacking. We aim to determine (i) whether thrombin generation...

Objectives: Non-invasive methodologies for assessing arteriosclerosis, including carotid intimal-medial thickness (cIMT) for assessing subclinical atherosclerosis and carotid-femoral pulse wave velocity (cfPWV) for measuring arterial stiffness, are well established and validated in adults [1, 2]. However,...

Risk Management is one of the key cares of any organization strategic management; proper benefit of risk management is finding risks and their solutions. In this article, we will suggest a new Strategic Risk Reduction technique for producing optimal risk reduction strategies; which reduce risk exposure...

It has been demonstrated that arterial stiffness is linked to arterial fibrosis manifested by increased collagen and other extracellular matrix synthesis in smooth muscle cells (SMC). Transmembrane receptors integrins mediating cell-cell and cell-matrix signalling pathways are involved in tissue fibrosis....

Background and Objectives: Von Willebrand factor (VWF) is a plasma glycoprotein involved in primary hemostasis but recent data suggest additional roles beyond hemostasis in angiogenesis and potentially in vascular smooth muscle cell (VSMC) proliferation. Our aim was to investigate how VWF can modulate...

Dynamic Optimization Problems (DOPs) have attracted a growing interest in recent years. This interest is mainly due to two reasons: their closeness to practical real conditions and their high complexity. The majority of the approaches proposed so far to solve DOPs are population-based methods, because...

Background/Objectives: Myeloid cells are crucial for the development of vascular inflammation. Low-density lipoprotein receptor-related protein 8 (LRP8) or Apolipoprotein E receptor 2 (ApoER2), is expressed by macrophages, endothelial cells and platelets and has been implicated in the development of...

This paper suggests five new contributions with respect to the state-of-the-art. First, the optimal tuning of cost-effective fuzzy controllers represented by Takagi–Sugeno–Kang proportional-integral fuzzy controllers (TSK PI-FCs) is carried out using a fresh metaheuristic algorithm, namely the Slime...

Semantic annotation of named entities for enriching unstructured content is a critical step in development of Semantic Web and many Natural Language Processing applications. To this end, this paper addresses the named entity disambiguation problem that aims at detecting entity mentions in a text and...

In recent years a lot of attention and efforts have been dedicated on optimizing the design and quality of coffee pods. These would be applicable on professional as well as on household machines such as Senseo or Nestle. By providing a new method to describe the mechanisms of the brewing process within...

The quality of reconstructed images is an important and direct criterion to quantitatively evaluate the effectiveness of reconstruction algorithms in electrical tomography (ET). Unfortunately, there lacks of effective and efficient approach to assessing the quality of ET images in literature and practices....

Background: Studies in endothelial cell cultures show that oscillating flow pattern leads to endothelial dysfunction [1]. The only factor known to contribute towards oscillatory flows is peripheral arterial conductance [2]. However, contribution of alterations in central arterial properties to oscillatory...

Objectives: Cannabinoid receptors CB1R and CB2R are expressed in the vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMCs) and may contribute to vascular remodeling process (O’Sullivan, 2015). This study aimed to investigate the implication of CB1R and CB2R in the regulation of matrix metalloproteases MMP2 and MMP9,...

Proximal support vector machine via generalized eigenvalue (GEPSVM) is a recently proposed binary classification technique which aims to seek two nonparallel planes so that each one is closest to one of the two datasets while furthest away from the other. In this paper, we proposed a novel method called...

Cloud computing is defined as an on-demand large-scale distributed network to provide and realize computational resources. This flexibility expectation of cloud products forces cloud service providers (CSPs) to tailor their products to the needs of their customers. The framework in this paper proposes...

Background: Arterial stiffness (e.g., as measured by carotid-femoral pulse wave velocity (cfPWV)) changes acutely with blood pressure (BP). High cfPWV at high BP could be due to structural arterial changes or acute BP effects. Various parameters have been proposed as BP-independent parameters of arterial...

Environment: It has been described that muscular arteries behaviour is different from aorta, and regional parameters like IMT, atherosclerotic plaques burden, PWV-c and endothelial function are related with age and risk factors and are powerful prognostic markers but it is not the case of local parameters...

The glycosylation with O-linked-N-acetylglucosamine (O-GlcNAc) is an enzymatic process found on nuclear and cytoplasmic proteins. Augmented levels of O-GlcNAc-modified proteins have been associated to cardiovascular disease (CD) in male. However, the association of O-GlcNAc and CD in females it’s not...

Reactive oxygen species (ROS) produced by NADPH-oxidase (NOX) participate in vascular tone control, but their effects in the arteries of respiratory muscles is poorly understood. Possible targets of vasoregulatory ROS influence are NO-pathway in the endothelium and Rho-kinase pathway in smooth muscle...

A qualitative study was carried out to explore the health status of people with diabetes during Ramadan. Fifteen patients participated in two focus group discussions. Most respondents reported lack of knowledge regarding their own conditions and do not follow the medical advice of not fasting during...

Purpose: Vascular age may be a better marker of cardiovascular risk than age. It has been proposed that vascular age could be assessed easily and inexpensively from the photoplethysmogram (PPG) pulse wave, which is measured by pulse oximeters and fitness bands. Our aim was to assess the performance of...

Purpose/Background/Objectives: Tissue transglutaminase (TG2) is a highly expressed protein especially in endothelial cells. TG2 has several functions including transamidation activity which is important in several processes such as extracellular matrix remodeling [1]. TG2 activity takes place in aortic...

The knowledge about the required quantity of blood to irrigate an angiosome is important on ischemia (disruption on blood perfusion) prediction, diagnosis and treatment. An angiosome (or flap) is an anatomic unity (or flap) of tissue, it is constituted by skin, subcutaneous tissue and muscle, it is irrigated...

Pulse wave velocity (PWV) has been used to evaluate arterial stiffness of large arteries. Here, we examine the feasibility of radial-digital PWV (RD-PWV) as a measure of stiffness of smaller arteries, and its response to changes in local mean arterial pressure. In 29 healthy subjects, we used Complior...