Mdpi ag aug 2018 (23 Ergebnisse)

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Thoracic outlet syndrome (TOS) is a spectrum of disorders resulting from the compression of the neurovascular structures within the thoracic outlet. The three main subtypes of TOS are defined by the anatomic structure affected by the extrinsic compression. In the most common subtype-neurogenic TOS-the brachial plexus is compressed and symptoms include pain, arm paresthesias, and sometimes weakness. Venous TOS is characterized by the compression of the subclavian vein and its resultant thrombosis. Arterial TOS is the least common and is distinguished by the compression of the subclavian artery and the development of aneurysms or stenoses with distal embolization. Treatment options include physical therapy and surgical first rib resection via the transaxillary or supraclavicular approach. The diagnosis of TOS and appropriate patient selection for intervention are challenging due to the frequent presence of vague symptoms in neurogenic TOS. Due to the relative rarity of this condition, different approaches to diagnosis and management exist, and optimum management strategies continue to evolve.The primary goals of this Special Issue on the 'Diagnosis and Treatment of Thoracic Outlet Syndrome' are to describe new and established diagnostic and treatment modalities for TOS; to discuss approaches to complex clinical situations, such as reoperative treatment; and to review new research developments in the field of TOS.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Since the launch, in 1965, of the key notion of a fuzzy subset by Lotfi A. Zadeh, this concept has succeeded in growing interest and development. Nowadays, it is undoubtedly one of the most powerful and appealing branches of mathematics. Its range of applications is wide and multidisciplinary, starting from computer sciences and artificial intelligence, but also touching on a vast set of scientific disciplines (physics, engineering, medicine, economics, social choice, etc.).The present Special Issue is devoted to introducing new trends on this theory, from an interdisciplinary point of view, and looking for a wide coverage of topics related to fuzzy set and systems.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - The properties of atmospheric particles - often also termed aerosol - have been the subject of scientific studies for several decades because of their effects on air quality, health, visibility, propagation of electromagnetic radiation in the atmosphere, and climate. However, despite intense research efforts, several knowledge gaps remain to be filled; the reason being related also to the complexity of the physical and chemical characteristics of these particles and of their dynamic interactions with the surrounding environment. One of the frontier topics in this scientific endeavor is the subject of this special issue: the morphology and mixing of atmospheric aerosol at the single particle level.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Positron emission tomography (PET) and single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) are in vivo molecular imaging techniques which are widely used in nuclear medicine for the diagnosis and treatment follow-up of many major diseases. They use biomolecules as probes, which are labeled with radionuclides of short half-lives, synthesized prior to the imaging studies. These probes are called radiopharmaceuticals. Their design and development require a rather interdisciplinary process involving many different disciplines of natural and health sciences. In addition to their diagnostic and therapeutic purposes in the field of nuclear medicine, radiopharmaceuticals provide powerful tools for in vivo pharmacology during the process of pre-clinical drug development to identify new drug targets, investigate the pathophysiology of diseases, discover potential drug candidates, and evaluate the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of drugs in vivo. Furthermore, they allow molecular imaging studies in various small-animal models of disease, including genetically engineered animals. The current collection of articles provides unique examples covering all major aspects in the field.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Natural secondary metabolite products, which are isolated from plants, animals, microorganisms, etc., are classified as polyketides, isoprenoids, steroids, aromatics, alkaloids, etc. Their chemical diversity and variety of biological activities have attracted the attention of chemists, biochemists, biologists, etc. This Special Issue on 'The Molecular Aspect of Natural Secondary Metabolite Products in Health and Disease' is intended to offer biological active natural products as candidates and/or leads for pharmaceuticals, dietary supplements, functional foods, cosmetics, food additives, etc. The research fields of this Special Issue include natural products chemistry, phytochemistry, pharmacognosy, food chemistry, bioorganic synthetic chemistry, molecular pharmacology, molecular nutritional sciences, and other related research fields of bioactive natural secondary metabolite products. Original research and review articles on all topics in these research fields are invited. I look forward to receiving many submissions from outstanding expert on these research fields.].…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Many major cities of the world face challenges arising from growing and urbanizing populations, a changing climate, and an increase in the frequency of extreme weather events. Existing centralized water services, operating at, or close to, full capacity, are not sufficient to cope with the associated increase in water demand. Replacing the entire centralized infrastructure is very difficult within the existing environmental and economic constraints. Water services can be provided through the integration of decentralized and centralized systems, which are referred to herein as hybrid water supply systems. This Special Issue presents 12 papers encompassing various aspects including challenges and experiences associated with innovations in urban water cycle management. These papers straddle physical and policy research on implementation topics. Five papers fall in the area of systems modelling, two papers deal with design criteria issues of new and modified systems, one paper is of an experimental nature and another focuses on the impact of urban systems on the estuarine environment, while two papers deal with policy and risks. The papers included in this Special Issue emanated from a large number of submissions that were subjected to a thorough peer-review process. For this effort, we thank all the authors and reviewers that have contributed to this endeavour.…

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Over the last few years, polyphenol has received a great deal of attention due to their potential beneficial effects on human health. Widely contained in foods commonly consumed in all populations worldwide, polyphenols represent an attractive explanation of the beneficial effects, not only of fruits and vegetables, characteristic components of healthy dietary patterns, but also of other plant-derived foods, such as tea, coffee, and cocoa, which only recently have been exploited as being beneficial for humans. In addition to the numerous biological properties, polyphenols have been indicated as being responsible for a decreased risk of metabolic disorders, cardiovascular disease, and certain cancers. The book addresses original research and reviews of literature concerning polyphenol-rich foods and human health.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Human cancers frequently arise from exposure to chemicals, although radiation, oxidation, and genetic factors play critical roles as well. DNA damage by these agents in a cell is an important first step in the process of carcinogenesis. DNA repair processes have evolved to repair these damages. However, the replication of damaged DNA may occur frequently prior to repair, resulting in gene mutations and the generation of altered proteins. Mutations in an oncogene, a tumor-suppressor gene, or a gene that controls the cell cycle give rise to a clonal cell population with an advantage in proliferation. The complex process of carcinogenesis includes many such events, but has been generally considered to be comprised of the three main stages known as initiation, promotion, and progression, which ultimately give rise to the induction of human cancer. The articles published in this book entitled 'Chemically-Induced DNA Damage, Mutagenesis, and Cancer' provide an overview on the topic of the 'consequence of DNA damage' in the context of human cancer with their challenges and highlights.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Aptamers are in vitro selected oligonucleotides capable of specific, high-affinity binding to a wide variety of target molecules. These features enable their application in diagnostics, therapeutics, targeted delivery, fluorescence imaging, and biosensing. Aptamers are isolated via the systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment (SELEX), an iterative cycle of selection and amplification steps that enriches a randomly synthesised oligonucleotide library to a pool of specific, high-affinity aptamers. Since the inception of aptamers in 1990, the methods by which aptamers are selected have been improved, yielding a robust system capable of producing aptamers rapidly and at low cost. Recently, there has been an explosion in the field of aptamers including innovations in enhanced selection strategies, bioinformatics approaches, riboswitches, unnatural base pairs, nucleic acid nanostructures, and DNAzymes. This book combines excellent reviews with primary research articles to provide multidisciplinary perspectives on the frontiers of aptamer science in 2018. …

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue of Crystals: High-Pressure Studies of Crystalline Materials. It also includes additional articles published in Crystals and related to the topic of the Special Issue, which have been selected based upon their relevance and scientific quality.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - A challenging frontier in modern statistical physics concerns systems with a small number of degrees of freedom, far from the thermodynamic limit. Beyond the general interest in the foundation of statistical mechanics, the relevance of this subject is due to the recent increase of resolution in the observation and manipulation of biological and man-made objects at micro- and nano-scales. A peculiar feature of small systems is the role played by fluctuations, which cannot be neglected and are responsible for many non-trivial behaviors. The study of fluctuations of thermodynamic quantities, such as energy or entropy, goes back to Einstein, Onsager, and Kubo; more recently, interest in this matter has grown with the establishment of new fluctuation-dissipation relations, and of so-called stochastic thermodynamics. This turning point has received a strong impulse from the study of systems that are far from the thermodynamic equilibrium, due to very long relaxation times, as in disordered systems, or due to the presence of external forcing and dissipation, as in granular or active matter. Applications of the thermodynamic and statistical mechanics of small systems range from molecular biology to micro-mechanics, including models of nano-transport, Brownian motors, and (living or artificial) self-propelled organisms.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Using Shannon information theory to analyse the contributions from two source variables to a target, for example, we can measure the information held by one source about the target, the information held by the other source about the target, and the information held by those sources together about the target. Intuitively, however, there is strong desire to measure further notions of how this directed information interaction may be decomposed, e.g., how much information the two source variables hold redundantly about the target, how much each source variable holds uniquely, and how much information can only be discerned by synergistically examining the two sources together.The absence of measures for such decompositions into redundant, unique and synergistic information is arguably the most fundamental missing piece in classical information theory. Triggered by the formulation of the Partial Information Decomposition framework by Williams and Beer in 2010, the past few years have witnessed a concentration of work by the community in proposing, contrasting, and investigating new measures to capture these notions of information decomposition.This Special Issue seeks to bring together these efforts, to capture a snapshot of the current research, as well as to provide impetus for and focused scrutiny on newer work, present progress to the wider community and attract further research. Our contributions present: several new approaches for measures of such decompotions; commentary on properties, interpretations and limitations of such approaches; and applications to empirical data (in particular to neural data).…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Statistical relationships among the variables of a complex system reveal a lot about its physical behavior. Therefore, identification of the relevant variables and characterization of their interactions are crucial for a better understanding of a complex system. Linear methods, such as correlation, are widely used to identify these relationships. However, information-theoretic quantities, such as mutual information and transfer entropy, have been proven to be superior in the case of nonlinear dependencies. Mutual information quantifies the amount of information obtained about one random variable through the other random variable, and it is symmetric. As an asymmetrical measure, transfer entropy quantifies the amount of directed (time-asymmetric) transfer of information between random processes and, thus, it is related to concepts, such as the Granger causality. This Special Issue includes 16 papers elucidating the state of the art of data-based transfer entropy estimation techniques and applications, in areas such as finance, biomedicine, fluid dynamics and cellular automata. Analytical derivations in special cases, improvements on the estimation methods and comparisons between certain techniques are some of the other contributions of this Special Issue. The diversity of approaches and applications makes this book unique as a single source of invaluable contributions from experts in the field. …

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Over the last few years, polyphenol has received a great deal of attention due to their potential beneficial effects on human health. Widely contained in foods commonly consumed in all populations worldwide, polyphenols represent an attractive explanation of the beneficial effects, not only of fruits and vegetables, characteristic components of healthy dietary patterns, but also of other plant-derived foods, such as tea, coffee, and cocoa, which only recently have been exploited as being beneficial for humans. In addition to the numerous biological properties, polyphenols have been indicated as being responsible for a decreased risk of metabolic disorders, cardiovascular disease, and certain cancers. The book addresses original research and reviews of literature concerning polyphenol-rich foods and human health.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Over the last few years, polyphenol has received a great deal of attention due to their potential beneficial effects on human health. Widely contained in foods commonly consumed in all populations worldwide, polyphenols represent an attractive explanation of the beneficial effects, not only of fruits and vegetables, characteristic components of healthy dietary patterns, but also of other plant-derived foods, such as tea, coffee, and cocoa, which only recently have been exploited as being beneficial for humans. In addition to the numerous biological properties, polyphenols have been indicated as being responsible for a decreased risk of metabolic disorders, cardiovascular disease, and certain cancers. The book addresses original research and reviews of literature concerning polyphenol-rich foods and human health.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - The book gathers 28 quality papers containing new and important knowledge on forest operations, engineering and management. Active forest management is indeed applied through forest engineering, and careful forest tending is conditional to the implementation of sound operational methods, which may guarantee cost-effective management while protecting environmental functionality and worker health. Efficiently managed forest operations offer the highest benefit and the lowest cost, in all fields: financial, social and environmental. While maintaining a cross-disciplinary character, forest engineering represents a special sector of interest within the field of forestry and aims at increasing the overall efficiency of forest operations. Forest engineering often deals with practical issues that have a strong economic impact, and for this reason the industry has always had a strong interest in forest engineering, which explains the close connection between scientists and economic operators. The central role of forest engineering in modern forestry is demonstrated by the many sessions gathered under this general label at the IUFRO 125th Anniversary Congress, which offered a great opportunity for catching up with the latest results of sector research. Over the years, much progress has been done in the field of forest engineering, which has been supported by the dramatic technology advances of the most recent times. The 28 papers contained in this book come from many different countries and cover a large variety of subjects, from pure productivity, to resource availability, operation planning, environmental impacts and operator safety and health. Energy biomass is also represented, as a witness to the growing role of forestry in the quest for renewable energy sources.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Natural secondary metabolite products, which are isolated from plants, animals, microorganisms, etc., are classified as polyketides, isoprenoids, aromatics (phenylpropanoids), alkaloids, etc. Their chemical diversity and variety of biological activities have attracted the attention of chemists, biochemists, biologists, etc. The Special Issue on 'Biological Activity of Natural Secondary Metabolite Products' is intended to offer biological active natural products as candidates and/or leads for pharmaceuticals, dietary supplements, functional foods, cosmetics, food additives, etc. The research fields of this Special Issue include natural products chemistry, phytochemistry, pharmacognosy, food chemistry, bioorganic synthetic chemistry, chemical biology, molecular biology, molecular pharmacology, and other related research fields of bioactive natural secondary metabolite products. Original research and review articles on all topics in these research fields are invited. I am looking forward to receiving many submissions from outstanding experts in these research fields.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - The purpose of this Special Issue, 'Prebiotics and Probiotics', is to focus on the importance of intestinal microbiota for human health and disease and the possibilities of influencing its composition and function with probiotics and prebiotics.The goal is to clarify that the microbiome in the maternal fetal and during pediatric age, as well as the immediate changes that occur as new microbes are acquired postnatally play major roles in subsequent health and disease. Rapidly developing technologies for multi-omic analyses and systems biology are shifting paradigms in both scientific knowledge and clinical care.Finally, the idea will be to provide health professionals with comprehensive, understandable and highly readable updated information on the intestinal microbiota, probiotics and prebiotics.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - This new book entitled 'Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease Research 2016' covers a selection of recent research topics and current review articles in the field of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) that have been recently published in a monographic Special Issue of the International Journal of Molecular Sciences (IJMS) journal. NAFLD is an 'umbrella' definition that encompasses a spectrum of histopathological liver changes ranging from simple steatosis to nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) with/without fibrosis, 'cryptogenic' cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. NAFLD has become one of the most common forms of chronic liver disease worldwide and its prevalence is expected to continue rising. It is now becoming increasingly clear that the clinical and economic burden of NAFLD does not only affect the liver, but also affects the risk of developing cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes mellitus, colo-rectal neoplasms, chronic kidney disease and other extra-hepatic diseases that have a considerable impact on health-care expenditures. Against this background, further research is needed to better understand the natural history, and the molecular pathogenesis of NAFLD, as well as to elucidate the underlying mechanisms by which NAFLD contributes to the increased cardiometabolic risk, and to disclose novel and effective treatment strategies for this increasingly prevalent and burdensome disease.Some of the leading international researchers in this area expressed a willingness to contribute to this book providing an updated, state-of-the-art view on the aforementioned topics, and also suggesting novel research avenues for NAFLD.…