Modern cardiovascular science has produced a revolutionary new idea: the heart acts not merely as a pump, but as a "gland", that is as a regulator of circulatory homeostasis and salt-water balance. This book combines the classical heamodynamic view with the new neuro-hormonal paradigm, in all its potential clinical implications. The...
Childhood brain tumors are a diverse group of diseases characterized by the abnormal growth of tissue contained within the skull. Other than leukemia and lymphoma, brain tumors are the most common type of neoplasms that occur in children. The leading cause of death from childhood neoplasms among persons up to 19 years is brain tumors. As...
Forty years ago, the age-old battle against infectious diseases as a major threat to human health was believed close to being won. However, by the late twentieth century, the increase of emerging and reemerging infectious diseases was evident in both low and high income countries. About 30 new infectious diseases have been identified in the...
The genesis of this book arose from our educational consultations with many physiotherapy
and occupational therapy colleagues around the world. In the course of presenting
workshops that were primarily focused on problem-based learning (PBL), it
became very clear to us that educators in the rehabilitation sciences were very...
This is an excellent introduction for graduate students and nonspecialists to the field of mathematical and computational neurosciences. The book approaches the subject via pulsed-coupled neural networks, which have at their core the lighthouse and integrate-and-fire models. These allow for highly flexible modeling of realistic synaptic...
Neuroblastoma is a medical enigma. As a childhood neoplasm arising from neural crest cells, it is characterized by diverse clinical behaviors ranging from spontaneous remission to rapid tumor progression and death. Although clinical outcome can be predicted to a large extent by the stage of disease and the age at diagnosis, an in-depth...
Traditionally, the interplay between cancer cells and host immunity has been studied systemically. Recent studies, however, indicate that the tumor microenvironment is unique in providing both supportive and inhibitory factors that determine the fate of the tumor and its host. This volume compiles reviews on innate and adaptive immune...
Blood loss in spine surgery is a significant and very common problem connected with all kinds of surgical procedures. An international faculty of authors provide a comprehensive survey on the research and evidence about blood sparing in spine surgery. This publication fills a gap in the spinal literature and provides invaluable data for all...
This second edition includes two new chapters: one on domination in graphs and the other on the spectral properties of graphs, the latter including a discussion on graph energy. The chapter on graph colorings has been enlarged, covering additional topics such as homomorphisms and colorings and the uniqueness of the...
This book represents the most up-to-date description of the state of the art in laser and light source technology. After an initial chapter describing the latest understanding of laser physics and safety, subsequent chapters take up the laser treatment, respectively, of vascular lesions, pigmented lesions and tattoos, unwanted hair, ablative...
Although the utility of human antibodies as medical therapeutics for cancer and immune diseases has been well-established, it is only beginning to be realized for the treatment of viral infectious diseases. Polyclonal immunoglobulins have long been used for some viral diseases, but they have limited potency and disease scope. Only a single...
In the second half of the 20th century innate immune responses of cellular or humoral
type were treated like stepchildren by many immunologists: that is, somewhat
neglected. This disregard turned into an exciting research field over the past several
years and led to the identification of receptor families involved in the recognition...
