Successful outcome of pregnancy with mechanical heart valve with home heparin therapy

There is high incidence of rheumatic valvular heart disease in developing countries like Bangladesh, for which large number of young females undergo valve replacement with mechanical prosthetic heart valve. Pregnancy with mechanical heart valve carries risk of warfarin embryopathy and increased incidence of maternal thrombo-embolism. We had successful outcome of pregnancy of a patient with mechanical prosthetic heart valve with home heparin therapy.

A method for motion compensation of a moving nematode Caenorhabditis elegans and its application to frequency analysis of pharyngeal pulsation

A new sequential image processing method for motion compensation of a moving object with stringy shape has been developed for estimating the pharyngeal pulsation of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans under several environmental conditions. The method is based on the pixel data transfer on a new image frame while changing the boundary shape and the position but preserving the conformation of the inner structure of an object. All digitized image frames of C. elegans were first converted to motion-compensated images to arrange the pulsation site in the same region of the every transformed frame. The pulsation site was then automatically detected by determining the pixels where the temporal brightness variation was much larger than that of the other pixels. Finally, the pulsation frequency was determined by the Fourier analysis. The validity of our method has been confirmed by analyzing various test data, and the method has been applied for detecting the pharyngeal pulsation frequencies of C. elegans on some environmental conditions, i.e. feed bacteria-free/rich, doping of nerve inactivating ethyl-alcohol and nerve stimulant neurochemical substance of serotonin. The motion compensation method automatically provided reasonable pulsation frequencies which were found to be comparable to those obtained by manual counting. Thus the method is useful for systematic investigations on the variation of pharyngeal pulsation associated with the activity change of the nervous system in environments.

A phenomenological model describing pharyngeal pulsing in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans anesthetized by alcohol

The recovery process of the suppressed pharyngeal pulsation in the nematode has been investigated for several concentrations of a homologous primary alcohol series (CnH2n-1OH, n = 1,2,3). A mathematical model describing the time course of the recovery process is phenomenologically constructed by using two time constants of delay time tD and recovery time tau. The values of tD and tau are obtained by fitting the equation to experimental data. The obtained values increase with increasing alcohol concentration. To observe the characteristics of tD and tau against the alcohol of order n, the inverse of these time constants are computed at 25 v/v% concentration and plotted on a semi-logarithmic scale. The plot curves decrease non-linearly and are dissimilar to the well-known curves illustrating the importance of lipid solubility in the cell membrane in anesthetic phenomena.

Glass enclosed resistance thermometer for temperature measurement inside a high-pressure vessel

A method is described for the measurement of temperature inside a high-pressure vessel to 3000 bars. This involves enclosing a Pt resistance thermometer in a soft glass tube with sealed Pt contacts. resistance thermometer in a soft glass tube with sealed Pt contacts.