Dynamic van der Waals Theory of two-phase fluids in heat flow

We present a dynamic van der Waals theory. It is useful to study phase separation when the temperature varies in space. We show that if heat flow is applied to liquid suspending a gas droplet at zero gravity, a convective flow occurs such that the temperature gradient within the droplet nearly vanishes. As the heat flux is increased, the droplet becomes attached to the heated wall that is wetted by liquid in equilibrium. In one case corresponding to partial wetting by gas, an apparent contact angle can be defined. In the ther case with larger heat flux, the droplet completely wets the heated wall expelling liquid.Comment: 6pages, 8figure

TARGET(R) Intracranial Aneurysm Coiling Prospective Multicenter Registry: Final Analysis of Peri-Procedural and Long-Term Safety and Efficacy Results

Background and Purpose: To describe the final results of the TARGET Registry, a multicenter, real-world study of patients with intracranial aneurysms treated with new generation TARGET Coils. . Methods: The TARGET Registry is a prospective, single-arm study with independent medical event monitoring and core-lab adjudication. Patients with de novo intracranial aneurysms were embolized with either TARGET-360 degrees or helical coils in 12 US centers. The primary outcome was aneurysm packing density (PD), which was assessed immediately post-procedure. The secondary outcomes were immediate and long-term aneurysm occlusion rate using the Raymond Scale, and independent functional outcome using the modified Rankin Scale (mRS). A secondary analysis investigated the influence of the use of 100% 360-complex coils on clinical and angiographic outcomes. Results: 148 patients with 157 aneurysms met the inclusion and exclusion criteria. 58 (39.2%) patients with ruptured and 90 (61.8%) with unruptured aneurysms were treated using TARGET 360 degrees , helical Coils, or both. Median age was 58.3 (IQR 48.1-67.4), 73% female, and 71.6% were Caucasian. Median follow-up time was 5.9 (IQR 4.0-6.9) months. The majority were treated with TARGET 360-coils (63.7%), followed by mixed and helical coils only. Peri-procedural morbidity and mortality was seen in 2.7% of patients. A good outcome at discharge (mRS 0-2) was seen in 89.9% of the full cohort, and in 84.5 and 93.3% in the ruptured and unruptured patients, respectively. The median packing density was 28.8% (IQR 20.3-41.1). Long-term complete and near complete occlusion rate was seen in 90.4% of aneurysms and complete obliteration was seen in 66.2% of the aneurysms. No significant difference in clinical and angiographic outcomes were noted between the pure 360-complex coiling vs. mixed 360-complex/Helical coiling strategies. In a multivariate analysis, predictors for long-term aneurysm occlusion were aneurysm location, immediate occlusion grade, and aneurysm size. The long-term independent functional outcome was achieved in 128/135 (94.8%) patients and all-cause mortality was seen in 3/148 (2%) patients. Conclusion: In the multicenter TARGET Registry, two-thirds of aneurysms achieved long-term complete occlusion and 91.0% achieved complete or near complete occlusion with excellent independent functional outcome. Clinical Trial Registration: www.ClinicalTrials.gov, identifier: NCT01748903

Amplification of Fluctuations in Unstable Systems with Disorder

We study the early-stage kinetics of thermodynamically unstable systems with quenched disorder. We show analytically that the growth of initial fluctuations is amplified by the presence of disorder. This is confirmed by numerical simulations of morphological phase separation (MPS) in thin liquid films and spinodal decomposition (SD) in binary mixtures. We also discuss the experimental implications of our results.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figure

Development of a Sustained Transdermal Delivery System of Amiloride for Management of Resistant Hypertension

Resistant hypertension is a condition in which blood pressure remains above the ideal value (120/80mmHg), despite concurrent use of three antihypertensive agents of different classes taken at maximally tolerated doses. Amiloride, a potassium-sparing diuretic agent, when added to the treatment regimen of these drugs has been found suitable for the management of resistant hypertension, especially in diabetic patients and those resistant to a similar diuretic, spironolactone. Currently, it is available as an oral tablet, administered once daily. The oral bioavailability of amiloride is 50%, which gets reduced to 30% when administered with food. In addition, gastrointestinal side effects are also reported. Patient’s adherence to the multi-drug treatment regimen has been found to be low in patients with resistant hypertension and hence, administering amiloride in the oral forms may not solve the problem, in spite of its proven pharmacological efficacy in such situations. Thus, considering the low oral bioavailability, associated side-effects, and prospects of better patient compliance with a skin patch of amiloride, our long term goal is to design a long-acting skin patch for transdermal delivery of amiloride in patients with resistant hypertension. The current study aims to investigate the passive transdermal delivery of amiloride and evaluate the effects of chemical and physical enhancement techniques on its permeation through dermatomed porcine ear skin. High performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) method for amiloride was developed. Absence of skin interference in the assay was confirmed using blank skin extract. Solubility of amiloride was screened in different solvents, some of which included propylene glycol, phosphate buffer saline, oleic acid in propylene glycol, etc. In vitro permeation of amiloride across intact and microneedle-treated (500 µm long stainless needles applied for 2 min) porcine ear skin was evaluated using Franz Diffusion cells over 30 h. The optimized reverse-phase HPLC method involved isocratic elution on Kinetex® 5 µm, 100 Ao, 250 X 4.6 mm C18 column using 100% mobile phase (0.2 M phosphate buffer, pH 4.5) at a flow rate of 0.8 mL/min, column temperature of 40°C, and UV detection at 360 nm. Drug retention time was found to be around 4 min. Amiloride was found to be most soluble in propylene glycol (57.18 ± 2.41 mg/mL) with least solubility in phosphate buffer saline (0.311 ± 0.004 mg/mL). Microneedles were found to significantly enhance the permeation flux of amiloride by 16 folds as compared to the control intact skin (

Effect of Chemical enhancers on Transdermal Delivery of Amiloride for Management of Resistant Hypertension

Resistant hypertension is a condition in which blood pressure remains above the ideal value (120/80 mmHg), despite concurrent use of three antihypertensive agents of different classes taken at maximally tolerated doses. Amiloride has been clinically proven to manage resistant hypertension in patients with multiple treatment regimens including a diuretic. Currently, it is available as an oral tablet, which is administered once daily with an oral bioavailability of 50%, which gets reduced to 30% when administered with food. In addition, gastrointestinal side effects are also reported. Patient adherence to the multi-drug treatment regimen has been found to be low in patients with resistant hypertension and hence, administering amiloride in oral forms may not solve the problem, despite its proven pharmacological efficacy in such situations. Thus, considering the low oral bioavailability, associated side effects, and prospects of better patient compliance, our study aims to investigate the passive transdermal delivery of amiloride and evaluate the effects of chemical enhancement techniques on its permeation through dermatomed porcine ear skin into the dermis layer. Our long-term goal is to design a long-acting skin patch for transdermal delivery of amiloride for the management of resistant hypertension. Our hypothesis suggests the use of chemical enhancers will significantly enhance drug permeation across the skin. Chemical enhancers explored included oleic acid, oleyl alcohol, vitamin E TPGS, N-methyl-2-pyrrolidone (NMP), and a combination of oleic acid and oleyl alcohol. Drugs in propylene glycol served as the control. In vitro, permeation studies of the amiloride drug solution in different chemical enhancers were conducted across dermatomed porcine ear skin using Franz Diffusion Cells to determine 168-hour drug permeation profiles. Oleyl alcohol (761.86 ±74.97 µg/cm2) and oleic acid (691.90 ±78. 59 µg/cm2) significantly enhanced the permeation flux over 7 days as compared to the control in propylene glycol (193.42 ±38.02 µg/cm2) (p0.05). Our research findings have indicated a marked improvement in amiloride permeation through porcine skin using oleic acid and oleyl alcohol, providing valuable evidence to support our hypothesis. The encouraging results of this preliminary investigation provide evidence for the use of oleic acid and oleyl alcohol as chemical enhancers in transdermal preparations of amiloride to be used for the treatment regimen of resistant hypertension

The systematic study of the influence of neutron excess on the fusion cross sections using different proximity-type potentials

Using different types of proximity potentials, we have examined the trend of variations of barrier characteristics (barrier height and its position) as well as fusion cross sections for 50 isotopic systems including various collisions of C, O, Mg, Si, S, Ca, Ar, Ti and Ni nuclei with $1\leq N/Z < 1.6$ condition for compound systems. The results of our studies reveal that the relationships between increase of barrier positions and decrease of barrier heights are both linear with increase of $N/Z$ ratio. Moreover, fusion cross sections also enhance linearly with increase of this ratio.Comment: 28 pages, 7 figures, 5 Table

Environment Induced Entanglement in Markovian Dissipative Dynamics

We show that two, non interacting 2-level systems, immersed in a common bath, can become mutually entangled when evolving according to a Markovian, completely positive reduced dynamics.Comment: 4 pages, LaTex, no figures, added reference

Local Strategy Improvement for Parity Game Solving

The problem of solving a parity game is at the core of many problems in model checking, satisfiability checking and program synthesis. Some of the best algorithms for solving parity game are strategy improvement algorithms. These are global in nature since they require the entire parity game to be present at the beginning. This is a distinct disadvantage because in many applications one only needs to know which winning region a particular node belongs to, and a witnessing winning strategy may cover only a fractional part of the entire game graph. We present a local strategy improvement algorithm which explores the game graph on-the-fly whilst performing the improvement steps. We also compare it empirically with existing global strategy improvement algorithms and the currently only other local algorithm for solving parity games. It turns out that local strategy improvement can outperform these others by several orders of magnitude

Adsorption Isotherms of Carbon Dioxide at 273°K on Adsorbent Carbons & Evaluation of Microporosity using Dubinin Equation

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