Advanced indirect method for measuring blood pressure

Presently existing blood pressure meters require trained operator otherwise do not assure accurate measurement. An easy-to-use and accurate device would help the early detection of hypertonia as well as self-monitoring at home. This latter would mean an effective aid for the general practitioner to monitor the patient; providing a feedback for treatment and medication. The paper presents the results of the research work having been carried out for an indirect blood pressure measurement procedure in the Biomedical Engineering Laboratory of the Department of Measurement and Information Systems, Budapest University of Technology and Economics. The procedure improves the classical oscillometric algorithm and identifies improperly placed cuff. It was incorporated into eight home health monitoring devices that were used for three months by patients with cardiovascular diseases. More than 1000 recordings of patients and more than 500 of healthy control subjects have been analyzed. The presented algorithm has been va lidated by means of a non-invasive blood pressure meter tester. The bulk of the 100 tester records we have made simulates some kind of artifact or cardiovascular disease

MICU1 Interacts with the D-Ring of the MCU Pore to Control Its Ca2+ Flux and Sensitivity to Ru360

Proper control of the mitochondrial Ca2+ uniporter's pore (MCU) is required to allow Ca2+-dependent activation of oxidative metabolism and to avoid mitochondrial Ca2+ overload and cell death. The MCU's gatekeeping and cooperative activation is mediated by the Ca2+-sensing MICU1 protein, which has been proposed to form dimeric complexes anchored to the EMRE scaffold of MCU. We unexpectedly find that MICU1 suppresses inhibition of MCU by ruthenium red/Ru360, which bind to MCU's DIME motif, the selectivity filter. This led us to recognize in MICU1's sequence a putative DIME interacting domain (DID), which is required for both gatekeeping and cooperative activation of MCU and for cell survival. Thus, we propose that MICU1 has to interact with the D-ring formed by the DIME domains in MCU to control the uniporter. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Semiclassical wave functions and energy levels of Bose-condensed gases in spherically symmetric traps

The WKB-approximation for the Bogoliubov-equations of the quasi-particle excitations in Bose-gases with condensate is worked out in the case of spherically symmetric trap potentials on the basis of the resulting quantization rule. The excitation spectrum is calculated numerically and also analytically in certain limiting cases. It is found that the energy levels of a Bohr-Sommerfeld type quantization may be considerably shifted when the classical turning point gets close to the surface of the condensate.Comment: 4 pages Latex, 1 ps-fil

Protected edge states in silicene antidots and dots in magnetic field

Silicene systems, due to the buckled structure of the lattice, manifest remarkable intrinsic spin- orbit interaction triggering a topological phase transition in the low-energy regime. Thus, we found that protected edge states are present in silicene antidots and dots, being polarized in valley-spin pairs. We have also studied the effect of the lattice termination on the properties of the single electron energy levels and electron density distribution of silicene antidots and dots situated in a perpendicular magnetic field. Our calculations confirmed that the topological edge states are prop- agating over the perimeter of the antidot/dot for both ideal or realistic edge termination containing roughness on the atomic length scale. The valley polarization and the slope of the energy line as a function of the magnetic field is, however, reduced when the antidot or dot has a rough edge

Clustering of Fermi particles with arbitrary spin

A single l-shell model is investigated for a system of fermions of spin s and an attractive s-wave, spin channel independent, interaction. The spectra and eigenvectors are determined exactly for different l, s values and particle numbers N. As a generalization of Cooper pairing it is shown that when N=mu(2s+1), mu=1,2,...,2l+1, the ground state consists of clusters of (2s+1) particles. The relevance of the results for more general situations including the homogeneous system is briefly discussed.Comment: Submitted for publication, 4 pages, 1 figur