5,595 research outputs found
Percutaneous pulmonary valve implantation in humans - Results in 59 consecutive patients
Background - Right ventricular outflow tract (RVOT) reconstruction with valved conduits in infancy and childhood leads to reintervention for pulmonary regurgitation and stenosis in later life.Methods and Results - Patients with pulmonary regurgitation with or without stenosis after repair of congenital heart disease had percutaneous pulmonary valve implantation (PPVI). Mortality, hemodynamic improvement, freedom from explantation, and subjective and objective changes in exercise tolerance were end points. PPVI was performed successfully in 58 patients, 32 male, with a median age of 16 years and median weight of 56 kg. The majority had a variant of tetralogy of Fallot (n = 36), or transposition of the great arteries, ventricular septal defect with pulmonary stenosis (n = 8). The right ventricular (RV) pressure (64.4 +/- 17.2 to 50.4 +/- 14 mm Hg, P < 0.001), RVOT gradient (33 +/- 24.6 to 19.5 +/- 15.3, P < 0.001), and pulmonary regurgitation ( PR) (grade 2 of greater before, none greater than grade 2 after, P < 0.001) decreased significantly after PPVI. MRI showed significant reduction in PR fraction (21 +/- 13% versus 3 +/- 4%, P < 0.001) and in RV end-diastolic volume (EDV) (94 +/- 28 versus 82 +/- 24 mL (.) beat(-1) (.) m(-2), P < 0.001) and a significant increase in left ventricular EDV ( 64 +/- 12 versus 71 +/- 13 mL (.) beat(-1.) m(-2), P = 0.005) and effective RV stroke volume ( 37 +/- 7 versus 42 +/- 9 mL (.) beat(-1) (.) m(-2), P = 0.006) in 28 patients (age 19 +/- 8 years). A further 16 subjects, on metabolic exercise testing, showed significant improvement in V(O2)max (26 +/- 7 versus 29 +/- 6 mL (.) kg(-1) (.) min(-1), P < 0.001). There was no mortality.Conclusions - PPVI is feasible at low risk, with quantifiable improvement in MRI-defined ventricular parameters and pulmonary regurgitation, and results in subjective and objective improvement in exercise capacity
Z-dependent Barriers in Multifragmentation from Poissonian Reducibility and Thermal Scaling
We explore the natural limit of binomial reducibility in nuclear
multifragmentation by constructing excitation functions for intermediate mass
fragments (IMF) of a given element Z. The resulting multiplicity distributions
for each window of transverse energy are Poissonian. Thermal scaling is
observed in the linear Arrhenius plots made from the average multiplicity of
each element. ``Emission barriers'' are extracted from the slopes of the
Arrhenius plots and their possible origin is discussed.Comment: 15 pages including 4 .ps figures. Submitted to Phys. Rev. Letters.
Also available at http://csa5.lbl.gov/moretto
Application of Information Theory in Nuclear Liquid Gas Phase Transition
Information entropy and Zipf's law in the field of information theory have
been used for studying the disassembly of nuclei in the framework of the
isospin dependent lattice gas model and molecular dynamical model. We found
that the information entropy in the event space is maximum at the phase
transition point and the mass of the cluster show exactly inversely to its
rank, i.e. Zipf's law appears. Both novel criteria are useful in searching the
nuclear liquid gas phase transition experimentally and theoretically.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure
A new measurement of antineutrino oscillation with the full detector configuration at Daya Bay
We report a new measurement of electron antineutrino disappearance using the
fully-constructed Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment. The final two of eight
antineutrino detectors were installed in the summer of 2012. Including the 404
days of data collected from October 2012 to November 2013 resulted in a total
exposure of 6.910 GW-ton-days, a 3.6 times increase over
our previous results. Improvements in energy calibration limited variations
between detectors to 0.2%. Removal of six Am-C radioactive
calibration sources reduced the background by a factor of two for the detectors
in the experimental hall furthest from the reactors. Direct prediction of the
antineutrino signal in the far detectors based on the measurements in the near
detectors explicitly minimized the dependence of the measurement on models of
reactor antineutrino emission. The uncertainties in our estimates of
and were halved as a result of these
improvements. Analysis of the relative antineutrino rates and energy spectra
between detectors gave and eV in the three-neutrino
framework.Comment: Updated to match final published versio
A side-by-side comparison of Daya Bay antineutrino detectors
The Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment is designed to determine precisely
the neutrino mixing angle with a sensitivity better than 0.01 in
the parameter sin at the 90% confidence level. To achieve this
goal, the collaboration will build eight functionally identical antineutrino
detectors. The first two detectors have been constructed, installed and
commissioned in Experimental Hall 1, with steady data-taking beginning
September 23, 2011. A comparison of the data collected over the subsequent
three months indicates that the detectors are functionally identical, and that
detector-related systematic uncertainties exceed requirements.Comment: 24 pages, 36 figure
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