Background: Levels of plasma brain natriuretic peptide (BNP) have been shown to be elevated in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) especially in connection with cor pulmonale (CP) and the late stages of the disease. BNP is also raised in left sided heart failure which sometimes coincides with COPD. Whether BNP is elevated in subjects with mild-moderate stable COPD and normal left ventricu

Background Metastatic melanoma is still one of the most prevalent skin cancers, which upon progression has neither a prognostic marker nor a specific and lasting treatment. Proteomic analysis is a versatile approach with high throughput data and results that can be used for characterizing tissue samples. However, such analysis is hampered by the complexity of the disease, heterogeneity of patients

Organisms have evolved the ability to tolerate toxic substances in their environments, often by producing metabolic enzymes that efficiently detoxify the toxicant. Inorganic arsenic is one of the most toxic and carcinogenic substances in the environment, but many organisms, including humans, metabolise inorganic arsenic to less toxic metabolites. This multistep process produces mono-, di-, and tri

In this paper we propose an autotuning method that combines a setup for decentralized relay autotuning of two-input two-output systems with an identification method that uses short experiments to estimate up to second-ordertime-delayed systems. A small modification of the experiment gives better low-frequency excitation and improved models. The method is successfully demonstrated in simulations an

Background: Modern anaesthesia workstations are reassuringly tight and are equipped with effective gas monitoring, thus providing good opportunities for low/minimal flow anaesthesia. A prerequisite for effective low flow anaesthesia is the possibility to rapidly increase and decrease gas concentrations in the circle system, thereby controlling the depth of anaesthesia. Methods: We studied the wash

This paper demonstrates how second-order time-delayed models adequate for PID controller synthesis can be identified from significantly shorter relay experiments, than used in previous publications to obtain first-order time-delayed models. Apart from having good noise robustness properties, the proposed method explicitly addresses non-stationary initial states of the dynamics to be identified, an

Objective: The purpose of this study was to compare postoperative rehabilitation with structured physiotherapy to the standard approach in patients with cervical radiculopathy (CR) in a prospective randomized study at 6 months follow-up based on measures of neck-related physical function, self-efficacy, and coping strategies. Methods: Patients with persistent CR and scheduled for surgery (N = 202)

With peroral levodopa treatment, a majority of patients develop motor fluctuations and dyskinesia already within a few years of therapy. Device-aided Parkinson (PD) therapies refer to deep brain stimulation (DBS), levodopa-carbidopa intestinal gel infusion (LCIG), and subcutaneous infusion of the dopamine agonist apomorphine and represent effective strategies counteracting motor fluctuations and d

Marine seismic data are distorted by ghosts as waves propagating upwards reflect downwards from the sea surface. Ghosts appear both on the source-side as well as on the receiver-side. However, whereas the receiver-side ghost problem has been studied in detail and many different solutions have been proposed and implemented commercially, the source-side ghost problem has remained largely "unsolved"

In wavefield signal apparition, acquisition with periodic variations in source activation parameters shifts all or part of a signal cone out to, e.g., the Nyquist wavenumber, enabling perfect separation of simultaneous-source (sim-source) data below a certain temporal frequency. Cyclic convolution in the spatial frequency domain is used to generalise the signal apparition concept to the case of ap

Microseismic monitoring of hydrofrac is an actively developing technology utilizing various acquizition arrays. In this paper we consider processing of microseismic data recorded by specific surface network geometry-patch arrays (far separated local receiver groups). The project aim is to produce an optimal partial stacking of the data within patches for improving a signal to noise ratio for micro

Brand Theories offers a multifaceted understanding of brands and branding. The purpose of the book is to provide the reader with a more advanced knowledge, by treating brands and branding from three differrent perspectives: a brand management perspective, a consumer perspective, and a critical perspective.By allow readers to shift perspectives, the book offers the unique opportunity to analyze and