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The commercial quality of Japanese Angelica radices — Angelica acutiloba Kitagawa (Yamato-toki) and A. acutiloba Kitagawa var. sugiyama Hikino (Hokkai-toki) — used in Kampo traditional herbal medicines, was studied by use of omics technologies. Complementary and alternative medical providers have observed in their clinical experience that differences in radix commercial quality reflect the differences in pharmacological responses; however, there has been little scientific examination of this phenomenon. The approach of omics, including metabolomics, transcriptomics, genomics, and informatics revealed a distinction between the radix-quality grades based on their metabolites, gene expression in human subjects, and plant genome sequences. Systems biology, constructing a network of omics data used to analyze this complex system, is expected to be a powerful tool for enhancing the study of radix quality and furthering a comprehensive understanding of all medicinal plants.

Considering the popularity of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) in allergic patients, physicians involved in allergic patients' care need to be aware of CAM. To assess self-reported knowledge, attitude and approach to CAM of physicians who deal with allergic patients, a total of 500 structured questionnaires were distributed to physicians who participated in "Turkish National Society of Allergy and Clinical Immunology Congress-2009". For the questionnaires handed out, 242 (48.4%) physicians (median age 36.0 years, range 25–64 years) responded; 22.4% were fellows in training and 48.5% were residents. The main specialties were pediatrics (49.3%), and pulmonology (36.8%); half were either specialists or training in allergy and one-quarter (25.6%) referred patients to CAM. Asthma (42.1%) and chronic urticaria (28.9%) were the most common CAM referral diseases. Referred therapies were herbal (10.3%) and diet-based medicine (7.4%). The differences between physicians in terms of age, gender, experience in medicine, and specialty/allergy subspecialty were not statistically significant (p = 0.01). Affiliation to a university hospital was significantly associated with no CAM referral vs. affiliation in a state/private hospital or private practice. Academic degree and reported level of knowledge negatively/positively affected attitudes toward CAM, respectively. More than half of the respondents (68.8%) reported lack of or insufficient information about CAM, while 58.7% of physicians desired CAM education. This first report on physicians involved in allergic patients' care shows that they are reluctant to refer for CAM therapies. A minority believes that they have enough knowledge, and most are interested in continuing medical education on CAM. Considering physicians' interest and tendency to communicate significantly with their patients about CAM when they feel that they have sufficient knowledge and popularity of CAM among patients, training possibilities should be created to improve physicians' education in this field.

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is an important component of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). The fast economic growth of mainland China in the past two decades has promoted the use of TCM beyond Chinese-speaking countries. Chinese researchers have published more TCM research studies in CAM-related professional journals, including the American Journal of Chinese Medicine (AJCM), the highest impact journal in Chinese medicine. The consistent increase of the impact factor of the AJCM suggests a growth in TCM popularity. This study analyzed articles published in the AJCM between 2004 and 2011. Our data show that while enthusiasm towards cardiovascular, nervous system and inflammation related research remained high, more herbal investigations and cancer studies were published. Furthermore, a reduction in TCM formulation studies was replaced by increasing botanical single constituent research. Examples of frequently cited studies, including those before 2004, are presented. These data are not only important to the scientific community for recognition of trends in TCM research, but also for providing information to TCM researchers who are targeting potentially highly cited studies.

The objective of this review was to summarize and critically evaluate the clinical evidence of the effect of qigong exercise on immunity and its efficacy in the prevention or treatment of infectious diseases. Thirteen databases were searched from their respective inceptions through January 2011, and all controlled clinical trials of qigong exercise on immunity and infections were included. Quality and validity of the included studies were evaluated using standard scales. Seven studies including two randomized controlled trials (RCTs), two controlled clinical trials (CCTs) and three retrospective observational studies (ROSs) met the inclusion criteria. One study focused on functional measures of immunity (antigen-induced immunity) and six studies on enumerative parameters of immunity. No study on clinical symptoms relevant to infectious diseases could be identified. Overall, the included studies suggested favorable effects of qigong exercise on immunity, but the quality of research for most of the studies examined in this review was poor. Further rigorously designed studies are required, which should adhere to accepted standards of methodology for clinical trials.

Most network processors perform some kind of classification on the received packet stream, according to criteria set by the implemented networking application. Packet indexing is an integral part of the packet classification process. Indexing is considered as one of the most processor intensive part of network processing and is often supported by special hardware units. High performance Network processors usually rely upon Content Addressable Memories (CAMs) for the indexing of millions of packets per second into discrete "flow Identifiers" in ATM and IP networks. Most often, the indexing process examines packet data (tags) of significant size, necessitating the use of large CAM devices. This paper proposes an alternative method for searching lengthy tags, using RAM as storage medium instead of the expensive and complex CAMs. The technique applies the open-addressing hashing methodology to provide high speed lookups, close to CAM's performance. Our approach handles efficiently the limitations imposed by the hashing algorithms by appropriately selecting system parameters and resolving hashing collisions. The advantages of the proposed method are evaluated in detail.

The Arctangent function is used in several signal processing applications and it is widely needed for hardware implementations. However, it often constitutes the performance bottleneck because of its inaccuracy and/or its poor performances. We present a generic VLSI design to respond to some applications' need of fast Arctangent functions handling high precision data. The method presented here contrasts with the usual Look Up table based solutions which allow the output customization but limit the precision of the corresponding tangent input. Detailed logical design and FPGA implementation results are provided to show our solution as the best candidate to comply with fast execution as well as high precision for both input and output data.

Quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) has come out as one of the potential computational structures for the emerging nanocomputing systems. It has a large capacity in the development of circuits with high space density and dissipation of low heat and allows faster computers to develop with lower power consumption. The QCA is a new appliance to realize nanolevel digital devices and study and analyze their various parameters. It is also a potential technology for low force and high-density memory plans. Large memory designs in QCA show unique features because of their architectural structure. In QCA-based architectures, memory must be maintained in motion, i.e., the memory state has to be continuously moved through a set of QCA cells. These architectures have different features, such as the number of bits stored in a loop, access type (serial or parallel) and cell arrangement for the memory bank. However, the decisive features of the QCA memory cell design are the number of cells, to put off the use of energy. Although the review and study of the QCA-based memories are very important, there is no complete and systematic literature review about the systematical analyses of the state of the mechanisms in this field. Therefore, there are five main types to provide systematic reviews about the QCA-based memories; including read only memory (ROM), register, flip-flop, content addressable memory (CAM) and random access memory (RAM). Also, it has provided the advantages and disadvantages of the reviewed mechanisms and their important challenges so that some interesting lines for any coming research are provided.

The article is on a survey of knowledge, attitudes and the usage of complementary and alternative medicine in Singapore. It explains the methods, the results and the conclusion of the experiment.

The procedure involved in evolving a compound that was utilized for producing prosthetic foot with mechanical characteristics and a sensible price is presented. Compound’s characteristics such as Charpy impact strength and tensile were investigated using mechanical tests. During this procedure 10% linear low density polyethylene (LLDPE) was added to 90% high-density polyethylene (HDPE). This reduced the energy impact as well as ultimate yield stress whilst elongated at break from 27% in comparison to those of pure HDPE. Prostheses properties were further studied in comparison to human foot. The analytical part indicates the static analysis outcomes by experimental as well as finite element methods (ANSYS Workbench 14). Thus, the foot was formed, and dorsiflexion was measured. Overall, the nonarticulated (HDPE and LLDPE) foot was compared to SACH foot by cost and weight. It was found that the nonarticulated foot’s weight was lighter by 2% and its cost was lower than SACH foot by approximately 60%. The nonarticulated foot has great properties, for instance a life of foot cycles (9^∘ and 2,193,228) as well as good dorsiflexion in comparison to SACH foot with 6.4$\circ$ and 896,213 life of foot cycles.

Background and Aim: Before being applied on the clinical settings, the establishment of ovarian tissue cryopreservation and transplantation process should be optimum. The vascularization after transplant is depended on the ovarian tissue size, which influence the follicular recruitment. It may then affect the post-transplantation survival.

Methods: On chorionic-allantoic membrane (CAM) of 8-days-old, fertilized eggs, goat ovarian tissue samples (Capra hircus) were split into pre- and post-transplantation groups. Each group was subsequently divided into 2.5×2.5×1, 5×5×1, and 10×10×1 mm size. Vascularization density and vascularization surface area was analysed and correlated with PTEN protein expressions.

Results: Pre- and post-transplantation samples were taken from a total of 36 strips of ovarian tissue. The vascularization density was found to be the highest in the 2.5×2.5×1 mm transplantation samples compared to the pre-transplantation samples (9.54±3.2; 15.46±1.85; P<0,05). Meanwhile the vascularization surface area was also significantly higher after transplantation regardless the size of ovarian tissue (P<0,05). Interestingly, the vascularization surface area was observed to be significantly higher in the cortex area adhered to CAM compared to more distant than the CAM. To magnify the vascularization results, in the 2.5×2.5×1 mm transplantation sample, it was shown that the higher PTEN expression after transplantation. Concurrently in the 10×10×1 mm transplantation, PTEN protein expressions were significantly lower in primordial follicles after transplantation (P<0.05). These results were also mutual for total number of primordial follicles in 2.5×2.5×1 mm, which were higher after transplantation (mean rank 11.92±2.56) compared to the other size groups (10.88±1.48; 9.72±6.36).

Conclusions: The most vascularized ovarian tissue samples were found to be 2.5×2.5×1 mm in size and it was found to express more PTEN in the primordial follicles. As a result, compared to the other sample sizes, it also showed the least post-transplantation decline in the number of primordial follicles, indicating less follicular burn-out than the group with larger tissue surface area.

In vivo animal models are currently the gold standard for testing the capacity of stem/progenitor cells, smart biomaterials and novel growth factors for successful tissue engineering. In vitro models ultimately fail to provide the appropriate physiologically relevant microenvironment and hence animal models are an essential pre-requisite in the translation of any new therapy to the clinic. The aim of this chapter is to consider the available animal models commonly in use for tissue engineering, with a particular focus upon bone and cartilage research. Factors driving the choice of a given animal model are reviewed, according to the requirements of experimental design, hypothesis and the specific parameters to be tested. A number of animal models, together with their respective advantages and limitations are described, ranging from relatively simple experimental designs such as the subcutaneous implant and muscle pouch models, through to the diffusion chamber model and chorioallantoic membrane assay, to the more complex in vivo bioreactors and (arguably the most clinically relevant) bone and cartilage defect models. The need to consider the ethical issues of using animal models and the principles of reduction, replacement and refinement are emphasised in selecting the final experimental model of choice.

Government regulation and registration of health practitioners aims to ensure a minimal level of education and training, appropriate standards of professional behaviour and effective and efficient complaint-handling mechanisms. Although medical practitioners, pharmacists, nurses and some other categories of health practitioners are registered by government, most have received little or no training in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Some doctors who practise “integrative medicine” are an exception. CAM practitioners such as naturopaths, herbalists and homeopaths have not yet achieved national registration, in part because of division in their ranks, but also because of their extremely varied training.

Unlike conventional medicines, the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration does not evaluate complementary medicines for efficacy. They do ensure that AUST L-labelled products contain “relatively safe” ingredients and are manufactured according to Good Manufacturing Practice. However, claims made for complementary medicines are often far in advance of the scientific evidence available, whereas information about possible adverse effects, including interaction with conventional medicines, is often lacking. A similar situation exists for diagnostic and therapeutic devices used by CAM practitioners. The majority are regarded as “low risk” by the regulator and are not assessed to see if they work. A complaint system exists, but it is underresourced, overloaded and lacks effective sanctions. As a consequence, numerous claims that have been proven to breach the Therapeutic Goods Advertising Code continue to be made about CAM medicines and devices. The government has acknowledged these problems and several working groups are currently discussing possible regulatory reform. Meanwhile, caveat emptor applies (let the buyer beware).

Currently more than half of all Australians use one or more complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) items year by year. At the same time, sales of CAM materials exceed the cost of conventional medicines. So well established is CAM culture, that it is time medical and surgical professionals took more notice of its extensive role in medical care. At this time there is strong interest in having all conventional medical activity evidence-based. Although CAM has been the subject of many randomised controlled trials, and some have been accepted into integrated practice, most lack the rigour in their development to render them acceptable in day-to-day practice. It is suggested that, in spite of these observations, the continued pressure arising from increasing usage of CAM therapies, together with patients' expectations, should be given greater consideration in integration with conventional medicine, while ensuring maintenance of standards. This will not be an easy task. As CAM usage may result in deleterious outcomes, it is imperative that its use is elicited when taking a patient's history. The consultation should be conducted in an atmosphere of mutual respect and understanding, to discourage the patient from withholding information. When possible, clinicians should be apprised of CAM agents that have adverse interactions with standard treatments and of CAM agents that may be dangerous. As CAM is now clearly established in the public domain, it would seem that appropriate steps should be taken to educate clinicians in CAM, by introducing changes to undergraduate curricula. Such a move may lead to better understanding at medical and community level.

Now growing at a rate of over 5% per annum, the $3 billion ‘alternative health therapies’ business is now positioned in the top ten growth industries in Australia. With poor regulation of both therapeutic goods and the unregistered therapists who promote them, cancer patients may well be putting their health at risk when they place their faith in many so-called ‘natural’ or ‘traditional’ treatments. With a focus on what complementary therapists refer to as ‘energy medicine’ and ‘nutritional medicine’, this chapter explores the risks and benefits of some of the more popular alternative health-care choices. While investigating their histories, it outlines what influences cancer patients to try these unproven therapies, and the conflict and contrast in information relating to the claims made for them and the conclusions of evidence-based research. Although there are a number of complementary therapies that are of benefit to some patients, both during and after their cancer treatments, ‘natural’ does not always equal ‘safe’, may be expensive and may even compromise their health. More patients now want a greater say in their choices of treatment, and selecting complementary therapies that may help is another of the many challenges faced in trying to make informed choices, as we navigate along our individual roads on our journeys to recovery.

Machining complex freeform surfaces more efficient and more flexible has been a challenging task. The equivalent normal curvature milling model is a new milling method proposed in this paper based on 5-axis CNC bed-type horizontal milling machine. At the same time, a specialized whirlwind milling tool is also introduced. The tool path planning of this new milling method emphasizes the alignment of milling tool orientation so as to approach to the surface being machined in the form of equivalent normal curvature envelopment. So this new method will minimize the difference of normal principal curvatures between the surface being machined and the symmetric rotational surface of the milling tool and improve the metal removal rate (MMR). The new whirlwind-milling tool with circular standard-sized cutters is easy to enhance the cutting finish and productivity. The cutter path description and machine-tool coordinate transformation are analyzed, and some examples about this new equivalent normal curvature milling method are discussed.

Manufacturing systems have become more and more sophisticated due to global competition. Hence, manufacturers have to satisfy conflicting demands for more product diversification, better product quality, improved productivity, and decreased cost. This trend in manufacturing systems and global competition have forced companies to adopt new sophisticated technologies by incorporating computer-based systems into their manufacturing systems. Evidence of this trend can be seen from the extent to which Computer-Aided Design (CAD), Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM), Computer-Integrated Manufacturing (CIM), Material Requirement Planning (MRP), Numerically Controlled (NC) Machines, Group Technology (GT), and Computer-Aided Process Planning (CAPP) are being used in industry. These computer techniques represent some of the developed systems that are used in today's world-class manufacturing systems. Therefore, the computer has been recognized by manufacturing firms as an important competitive weapon and a mean of survival. Current interest in manufacturing systems focuses heavily on integrating isolated computer-based systems into a unified system that handles and transforms information among these systems to facilitate a smooth production environment. A recent trend in integrating manufacturing system into a unified system is Computer-Aided Process Planning (CAPP). CAPP system bridges the gap between CAD system and CAM system. Therefore, CAPP system is a critical element in total system integration of automated design and manufacturing environment. This paper provides an overview of CAPP system and its approaches. Also, it presents the techniques that are used to integrate CAPP systems with other computer-based systems. Finally, some of the well-known CAPP systems will be discussed.

The critical exponents of the bond percolation model are calculated in the D(= 2,3,…)-dimensional simple cubic lattice on the basis of Suzuki's coherent anomaly method (CAM) by making use of a series of the pair, the square-cactus and the square approximations of the cluster variation method (CVM) in the s-state Potts model. These simple approximations give reasonable values of critical exponents α, β, γ and ν in comparison with ones estimated by other methods. It is also shown that the results of the pair and the square-cactus approximations can be derived as exact results of the bond percolation model on the Bethe and the square-cactus lattice, respectively, in the presence of ghost field without recourse to the s→1 limit of the s-state Potts model.

Angiogenesis is a natural process of new vessel formation from existing ones. The formation of blood vessels in tumors is an interactive process between tumor, endothelial and stromal cells in order to create a network for oxygen and nutrients supply. The chicken embryo chorioallantoic membrane (CAM) model is widely used as an in vivo model to study the vascular effects of angiogenesis modulating agents. The aim of this paper, is to break the blood vessel for quantification.

About 5000 years, the major traditional medicines were created: Chinese medicine, Ayurveda and Unani, in China, India and the Arab region, respectively.

In order to realize the medical dreams of personalized and preventive medicine, and also to solve problems such as economical and social educational matters, modern Western medicine is integrated with traditional medicine (TM) and complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) — collectively termed as integrative medicine. In this chapter, the key elements such as TM, CAM and their models and problems will be discussed.