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In recent years great emphasis has been placed on the role of arterial stiffness in the development of cardiovascular diseases. The present article is an abridged version of an expert consensus document reporting the proceedings of several meetings of the European Network for Non Invasive Investigation...

Due to the increasingly strict word/character restrictions enforced by most scientific publications, we identified a need for a master document illustrating the “Scientific Methods” that may be applicable to the majority of observational and registry-based studies in hematopoietic cell transplantation...

Sepsis is a life-threatening organ dysfunction caused by a deregulated host response to infection, and is the most common cause of death in the intensive care unit. Although the pathogenesis of sepsis has made substantial progress, the current clinical treatment of sepsis is basically symptomatic treatment,...

Global contractors operate in an environment that has a variety of alternatives and uncertain circumstances that requires constant circumvention and adjustment. It is not uncommon that a contractor conducting an international project does not comprehensively evaluate the local environments and identify...

This paper proposes a method for detecting anomaly stop events from GPS logs of a vehicle recorded by smartphone. Despite of many researches of strong braking event detection are proposed, they cannot discriminate between a normal and an abnormal braking event. Our proposal includes an IMAC model for...

In natural disaster risk assessment, it is referred to as integrated model which is used to integrate information. The statistical model is essentially integrated model. Usually, people try to search the reasons that choose a model from the theory or case. Based on the thinking of experimental riskology,...

On April 20, 2010, British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded, creating the largest oil spill in U.S. history. Analysis of 1,161 BP tweets during the crisis response reflected unexpected reputation repair strategies and responsibility attribution. Situational Crisis...

We investigate the symmetry properties of hierarchies of non-linear Schrödinger equations, introduced in [2], which describe non-interacting systems in which tensor product wave-functions evolve by independent evolution of the factors (the separation property). We show that there are obstructions to...

Today’s IT infrastructure is under tremendous pressure and is finding it difficult to keep up. In distributed computing environments, up to 85 percent of computing capacity sits idle. 66 percent of every dollar on IT is spent on maintaining current IT infrastructures versus adding new capabilities. In...

The data associating blood pressure to salt intake in humans comes from randomized clinical trials of interventions on dietary salt intake and population studies. Generally, estimates from meta-analyses are similar to those derived from prospective population studies (1.7 mm Hg change in systolic blood...

Vascular dysfunction and remodelling due to elevated blood pressure constitutes an early step in the pathogenesis of atherosclerotic disease. Microvascular remodelling reduces tissue perfusion and impedes blood-tissue exchange. These processes could lead to inadequate perfusion and tissue hypoxia in...

It has been documented that absolute aldosterone excess in patients with primary aldosteronism (PA) has been associated with higher risk of heart, vascular and kidney damage independent on blood pressure and resulting in increased total cardiovascular risk. Structural (left ventricular hypertrophy) and...

The 24-hour brachial ambulatory blood pressure measurement (ABPM) has the unique ability to provide information on 24-hour averaged blood pressure (BP), on nocturnal BP and day–night BP changes, as well as on 24-hour BP variability, which all provide independent prognostic information over that provided...

Feature selection (FS) is a crucial data pre-processing process in classification problems. It aims to reduce the dimensionality of the problem by eliminating irrelevant or redundant features while achieve similar or even higher classification accuracy than using all the features. As a variant of particle...

Histograms are an intuitively understandable tool for graphically presenting frequency data that is available for and useful in modern data-analysis, this also makes comparing histograms an interesting field of research. The concept of similarity and similarity measures have been gaining in importance,...

In Cloud environments, the relationship between resources and users is more ad hoc and dynamic. The role-based access control (RBAC) model is an appropriate access control model for Cloud environments. When using the RBAC model in Cloud environments, some new elements should be considered. This paper...

This study examined correlations of historical changes in diet and physical inactivity with the rise of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) in Kenya. Historical data on diet, wage jobs by industry, urbanization, gross domestic product (GDP), and morbidity due to NCDs were extracted from Kenya Statistical...

Land surface processes have become a great concern in the context of global change and increased natural hazards all over the world. In this paper, dynamic characteristics of land cover changes have been investigated over a period of about three and half decades (1972–2016). This study focuses on the...

We construct a theoretical model that examines the relationship between HIV/AIDS and foreign direct investment and employ panel data from 41 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) to test the implications of the model. We find that HIV/AIDS has a negative but diminishing effect on FDI. Furthermore, the...

This paper uses new measures of value added in exports in two sectors (textiles and clothing, and agriculture) to examine the linkages between trade facilitation and infrastructure on the one hand, and value chain participation on the other. It applies network analysis methods to derive a summary measure...

This paper uses a novel manufacturing firm-level survey data in 19 sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries to explore the linkages among a number of export-market destinations (e.g., China, India, other Asia, EU, US, MENA, SSA excluding South Africa, and South Africa) and performance. The paper also examines...

How will Brexit impact on Africa? This paper looks at the available empirical evidence and carries out a Computable General Equilibrium simulation, focusing particularly on the prospects for the East African Community (EAC). The paper makes three main points. First, while the direct impacts through investment,...

In this work, a new four-parameter zero-truncated Poisson Topp Leone Burr XII distribution is defined and studied. Various structural mathematical properties of the proposed model including ordinary and incomplete moments, residual and reversed residual life functions, generating functions, order statistics...

Important challenges facing global healthcare include the increase in the number of people affected by escalating healthcare costs, chronic and infectious diseases, the need for better and more affordable elderly care and expanding urbanisation combined with air and water pollution. Recent advances in...

This study aims to identify the key dimensions that constitute a mature e-Government ecosystem through a systematic review of the existing e-Governance maturity models and a meta-ethnographic approach. The study identifies online presence, facilitating interaction, integrated ecosystem, online payments,...

Objectives: Trial registration has a great potential to increase research transparency and public access to research results. This study examined the availability of results either in journal publications or in the trial registry from all studies registered at ClinicalTrials.gov. Methods: All 137,612...

This study aims to systematically shed light on what kind of effects are brought about by the film techniques in individual commercial messages. Based on audiovisual experiments, with positive factors as the evaluation index, we considered what could be analyzed from film techniques and their effects....

This paper studies the Bayes estimator, the maximum likelihood estimator and the approximate likelihood estimator of the scale parameter for the Marshall-Olkin exponential distribution under the progressive type-II censored sample. All the estimators, Bayes estimator, maximum likelihood estimator and...

This paper devotes to the problem of ellipse-to-ellipse coplanar rendezvous, where the solution and distribution of Hohmann-type optimal impulsive rendezvous are investigated. The analytical relation between the initial states and rendezvous time are derived for Hohmann-type, and the optimal impulse...

We have proposed a distributed storage system which autonomously migrates data blocks into a suitable storage node by considering their access frequency and read/write ratio. In this paper, we show that revised data migration policies can rapidly distribute input/output (I/O) hot spot over the storage...

Background: Angioplasty with stenting is one of the primary treatment for coronary artery disease, hence, performance of the stent is deemed important. Bioabsorbable stents are the new generation of stents. Bioabsorbable magnesium alloys are a promising solution for adverse effects of long-term usage...

Background: The evidence that the combination of elastic and weight resistance training acutely affects or improves resultant responses to conduit artery function is anecdotal. The aim of this study was to examine brachial artery flow-mediated vasodilation (FMD) before and after acute exercise when performed...

Background: Resistance training postures trigger different results on endothelial function: however, the acute effect of resistance training on upper body muscle in active and inactive persons is inconclusive. The present study aimed to investigate the acute effects of 2 different types of upper body...

We investigate the effect of renal artery angle variation and Reynolds number on the probability of formation of atherosclerosis-prone regions at the abdominal aorta-renal artery junction. The rheologically accurate shear-thinning Yeleswarapu model for blood is used to simulate flow in a 3-Dimensional...

Objective: Fatty acid composition of Low-density lipoprotein (LDL) particle is an effective factor in LDL oxidation and atherosclerotic plaques formation. This study evaluates the relationship between LDL fatty acid composition and coronary artery disease (CAD). Methods: 42 men with coronary artery...

Previous studies have demonstrated that the compliance of peripheral artery changes with arm movement. This study aimed to quantify the bilateral difference in radial artery pulse morphology with one-side arm movement. Twenty-four healthy subjects were recruited. Radial artery pulses were synchronously...

Background: Chronic systemic inflammatory diseases (CSID) are associated with increased cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. Widening of retinal venular calibers has been independently associated with systemic inflammation and cardiovascular risk in the general population. We aimed to test the hypothesis...

Pressure measured with a cuff and sphygmomanometer in the brachial artery is accepted as an important predictor of future cardiovascular (CV) events. However, recent clinical evidence suggests that central aortic pressure (CAP) provides additional information for assessing CV risk than brachial blood...