Impaired vascular responsiveness to nitric oxide in renal transplant recipients

Cardiovascular disease is now the leading cause of death in renal transplant recipients. However, the mechanisms are poorly understood. The vascular endothelium plays an important role in preventing the development of hypertension and atherosclerosis, one mechanism being the production and release of nitric oxide (NO). NO has several antiatherogenic roles which include vasodilatation and inhibition of platelet aggregation, vascular smooth muscle cell proliferation, and leukocyte adhesion. Impaired endothelial production of NO may play a role in the development of atherosclerosis and has previously been demonstrated in patients with diabetes mellitus1 and hypercholesterolemia.2 It is likely that endothelial dysfunction is also present in renal transplant recipients but this has not previously been demonstrated. The aim of this present study was to examine endothelial function and vascular responsiveness to NO in patients with stable allograft function using the in vivo technique of forearm strain-gauge plethysmography

Missing Data Correction in Still Images Using Multi-Resolution Analysis

This paper proposes an improvement to the texture generation – based image in-painting algorithm, using multi-resolution analysis. Instead of optimizing the size of the neighborhood window of the synthesized pixel and the size of the test image, the approach described in this paper applies the same (minimal) window and test image size to different sub-bands of the discrete wavelet transformed (DWT) image. This way the execution complexity is kept lowest possible, while still obtaining the same visual quality as by applying the optimal parameters in the spatial domain