Background: Many studies have been conducted on the accuracy of prenatal ultrasound diagnosis of foetal CNS-malformations. These studies were mostly hospital-based or, sometimes, multicentre studies. We present here a population-based study of the prenatal diagnosis of spina bifida in Sweden over a period of 31 years. Methods: We compared the number of newborns with spina bifida and the elective t

Objective: To investigate the effects of treatment with paraffin bath in patients with systemic sclerosis (scleroderma). Methods: In 17 patients with scleroderma one hand was treated daily with paraffin bath in combination with hand exercise. The other hand was treated with exercise only and was considered a control. Hand function was estimated before treatment and after 1 month of treatment, conc

[1] This paper takes a novel approach to a known basic difficulty with computer simulations of nonlinear dynamical systems relevant to climate modeling. Specifically, we show by minimal examples how small systematic modeling errors might survive averaging over an ensemble of initial conditions. The resulting predictive errors can grow slowly enough initially that they may be overlooked without con

An improved Volume of Fluid (VOF) method is presented which is applicable to high density ratio 3D flows for a large range of bubble Reynolds number (Re). The method is based on the Navier-Stokes equations for incompressible multi-phase flows which are discretized on a Cartesian staggered grid. The multi-grid technique together with the pressure-velocity coupling scheme for multi-phase flows have

In numerous medical and scientific fields, knowledge of the optical properties of tissues can be applied. Among many different ways of determining the optical properties of turbid media; integrating sphere measurements are widely used. However, this technique is associated with bulky equipment, complicated measuring techniques, interference compensation techniques, and inconvenient sample handling

alpha-Microglobulin, a 26 kDa lipocalin present in plasma and tissues, carries a set of unknown chromophores, bound to C34, K92, KI 18 and KI 30, which cause its charge and size heterogeneity. In man, the protein is found in two forms, full length and lacking the C-terminal tetrapeptide LIPR (t-alpha(1)-microglobulin), both which are heme-binding and the latter with heme-degrading properties. We r

Previous work has demonstrated that most strains of the human pathogen Streptococcus pyogenes bind kininogens through M protein, a fibrous surface protein and virulence determinant. Here we find that strains of several other pathogenic bacterial species, both Gram-positive and Gram-negative, isolated from patients with sepsis, also bind kininogens, especially kininogen (HK). The most pronounced in

The present study is one of a few that have used "sense of coherence" (SOC) as a dependent variable in an explanatory model. After studying three different samples - 680 students, 180 parents and 315 couples - we conclude that family relational and psychopathological variables contribute significantly to the explanation of SOC (explained variance between 10-27 and 26-50 per cent). In total, we obt

We derive a new model for the description of large amplitude internal waves in a two-fluid system. The displacement of the interface between the two fluids is assumed to be of small slope, but no smallness assumption is made on the wave amplitude. The derivation of the model is based on the perturbation theory for Hamiltonian systems. In the case of a single fluid layer, the model reduces to the c

During biosynthesis of bacteriochlorophyll or chlorophyll, three protein subunits of 140, 70, and 42 kDa interact to insert Mg2+ into protoporphyrin IX. The semi-dominant Chlorina-125,-157, and -161 mutants in barley are deficient in this step and accumulate protoporphyrin IX after feeding on 5-aminolevulinate. Chlorina-125,-157, and -161 are allelic to the recessive xantha-h mutants and contain G

AIM: To infect mice with atypical Campylobacter concisus (C concisus) for the first time. METHODS: Three separate experiments were conducted in order to screen the ability of five clinical C concisus isolates of intestinal origin and the ATCC 33237 type strain of oral origin to colonize and produce infection in immunocompetent BALB/cA mice. The majority of the BALB/cA mice were treated with cyclop

We present a physiologically stable porcine model designed for sequential assessments of pharmacological effects on mean hemispheric cerebral blood flow (CBF) and cerebral metabolic rate for oxygen (CMRO2) at sustained normocapnia. The dynamic influence of continuously administered fentanyl (0.040 mg.kg-1.h-1 i.v.), nitrous oxide (70%) and pancuronium (0.30 mg.kg-1.h-1 i.v.) on these variables was

This paper proposes a simple residual-based panel CUSUM test of the null hypothesis of cointegration. The test has a limiting normal distribution that is free of nuisance parameters, it is robust to heteroskedasticity and it allows for mixtures of cointegrated and spurious alternatives. Our Monte Carlo results suggest that the test has small-size distortions and reasonable power. In our empirical

A spin-echo single-shot echo-planar imaging (SS-EPI) technique with a reduced field of view (FOV) in the phase-encoding direction is presented that simultaneously reduces susceptibility effects and motion artifacts in diffusion-weighted (DW) imaging (DWI) of the spinal cord at a high field strength (3T). To minimize aliasing, an outer volume suppression (OVS) sequence was implemented. Effective fa

Twenty-two patients with recurrent dislocation after primary total hip arthroplasty (THA) were compared with 43 randomly selected, stratified THA patients without dislocation with regard to radiographic cup position; body composition of bone, fat, and muscle (lean body mass) as determined by dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry; strength in abduction and adduction; range of motion; balance; and vibrat

The stability of single crystals and monolayers of Mn-12 single molecule magnets under the influence of X-ray radiation and other possibly disruptive influences has been investigated by means of synchrotron radiation. Clear evidence for radiation induced sample degradation was found for both single crystals and monolayers. The comparison with spectra obtained after damaging the molecules by Ar+ sp

A tree t-spanner T of a graph G is a spanning tree of G whose max-stretch is t, i.e., the distance between any two vertices in T is at most t times their distance in G. If G has a tree t-spanner but not a tree (t - 1)-spanner, then G is said to have max-stretch of t. In this paper, we study the Max-Stretch Reduction Problem: for an unweighted graph G = (V, E), find a set of edges not in E original

Dragon is a word oriented stream cipher submitted to the ECRYPT project, it operates on key sizes of 128 and 256 bits. The original idea of the design is to use a nonlinear feedback shift register (NLFSR) and a linear part (counter), combined by a filter function to generate a new state of the NLFSR and produce the keystream. The internal state of the cipher is 1088 bits, i.e., any kinds of TMD at