White blood cell differentials in dogs with congestive heart failure (CHF) in comparison to those in dogs without cardiac disease

Objectives: To investigate if dogs with congestive heart failure (CHF) have significant leukogram changes and for associations between leukogram, disease severity and survival time. Methods: Retrospective study of CHF patients (n=75) due to myxomatous degenerative valvular disease (MVMD) or dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) and healthy controls (n=75). Haematology results and analyses of WBC variables were compared between CHF dogs and controls. From echocardiographic results of CHF dogs, indicators of disease severity were retrieved and associations were explored between these variables, survival time and leukogram results. Results: Total WBC count (

Comparison between echocardiographic and non-ECG-gated CT measurements in dogs

The aim of this study was to compare echocardiographic measurements with non-ECG-gated contrast-enhanced cardiac CT measurements in dogs. Fifty-seven dogs were included in the study. The following echocardiographic parameters were measured: M-mode interventricular septum in diastole and systole, left ventricular internal diameter in diastole and systole, left ventricular free wall in diastole and systole, 2D left atrial maximal diameter, 2D left atrium to aorta ratio in diastole, 2D aortic annulus in systole and 2D pulmonary annulus in diastole and systole. CT measurements were obtained from multiplanar reconstruction images, replicating the imaging planes used for 2D measurements on echocardiography. It was not possible to discriminate between systole and diastole. The results showed moderate Lin's concordance correlation coefficients between the left ventricular internal diameter in systole (0.77), the aortic annuli (0.84) and the pulmonary annuli in diastole (0.78) and systole (0.80). Low coefficients were obtained between the other parameters. Bland-Altman plots for the parameters with highest concordance correlation coefficients were calculated. They suggested equivalence between the measurements of the aortic annuli. Equivalence was not seen between the remaining echocardiographic and CT measurements. Therefore, non-ECG-gated CT is not a reliable way of quantitatively assessing cardiac size

National Travel Survey 1996-98 update

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Associations among echocardiography, cardiac biomarkers, insulin metabolism, morphology, and inflammation in cats with asymptomatic hypertrophic cardiomyopathy

Signaling is an important topic in the study of asymmetric information in economic settings. In particular, the transparency of information available to a seller in an auction setting is a question of major interest. We introduce the study of signaling when conducting a second price auction of a probabilistic good whose actual instantiation is known to the auctioneer but not to the bidders. This framework can be used to model impressions selling in display advertising. We establish several results within this framework. First, we study the problem of computing a signaling scheme that maximizes the auctioneer’s revenue in a Bayesian setting. We show that this problem is polynomially solvable for some interesting special cases, but computationally hard in general. Second, we establish a tight bound on the minimum number of signals required to implement an optimal signaling scheme. Finally, we show that at least half of the maximum social welfare can be preserved within such a scheme