Bücher veröffentlicht von Springer US

Recent Developments in Graves' Ophthalmopathy offers an overview of the pathogenesis, assessment and management of patients with thyroid-associated eye disease. Each chapter is written by an expert and truly represents the current state of the art on the particular topic. This book can therefore almost be considered a textbook on this enigmatic disorder. Recent Developments in Graves' Ophthalmopathy is designed for all those interested in this disease, including basic scientists, clinical endocrinologists, ophthalmologists, radiotherapists, and orbital surgeons. The book gives a comprehensive overview of all aspects of Graves' ophthalmopathy. Subjects covered include the pathology of Graves' eye disease and the controversial views on its autoimmune pathogenesis; assessment of the eye changes using reliable measurements; medical management of Graves' eye disease with an overview of the many treatment options available to the clinician, including orbital radiotherapy and other immunosuppressive treatments; management of the thyroid disease; and finally, the techniques for performing various surgical procedures, which are explained and illustrated.

By the time a man gets well into his seventies, his continued existence is a mere miracle. -Robert Louis Stevenson It hardly seems possible that a second edition is needed after the first has been in print for only three years. However, when I reflect on what has happened in geriatric cardiology during that short period, it becomes obvious why. First, cardiologists all over the globe have begun to realize that geriatric cardiology has evolved into a science and a clinical discipline of its own. Although some of us may consider such subspecialization unfortunate, it has become clear that a variety of cardiac disorders present with different symptoms and signs, require a different diagnostic and therapeutic approach, and have a different prognostic outlook in the elderly when compared to middle-aged patients. Since the aging segment of the population has increased dramatically over the past few decades, and continues to do so, specific age-related disorders are more frequently encountered by the practicing physician, be it by the general practitioner, by the internist, or by a cardiologist. Cardiovascular Disease in the Elderly provides an up-to-date guide to help the physician deal with these problems, leading the way in what turns out to be an increasingly complex area. Second, I have been heartened by the warm reception of the first edition and by the excellent reviews that it got in the most prestigious medical journals.

The molecular basis for atrial fibrillation continues to be largely unknown, and therapy remains unchanged, aimed at controlling the heart rate and preventing systemic emboli with anticoagulation. Familial atrial fibrillation is more common than previously suspected. While atrial fibrillation is commonly associated with acquired heart disease, a significant proportion of individuals have early onset without other forms of heart disease, referred to as "e;lone"e; atrial fibrillators. It is also well recognized that atrial fibrillation occurs on a reversible or functional basis, without associated structural heart disease, such as with hyperthyroidism or of atrial fibrillation following surgery. It remains to be determined what percentage in these individuals is familial or due to a genetic predisposition. Mapping the locus for familial atrial fibrillation is the first step towards the identification of the gene. Isolation of the gene and subsequent identification of the responsible molecular genetic defect should provide a point of entry into the mechanism responsible for the familial form and the common acquired forms of the disease and eventually provide more effective therapy. We know that the ionic currents responsible for the action potential of the atrium is due to multiple channel proteins as is electrical conduction throughout the atria. Analogous to the ongoing genetic studies in patients with familial long QT syndrome, it is highly likely that defects in each of these channel proteins will be manifested in familial atrial fibrillation.

Currently, individuals interested in seeking an in-depth discussion of transplantation immunology must seek individual articles published in several journals, or extrapolate information from various non-transplant immunology textbooks. The purpose of this text is to provide the reader with a single source of information for the basic science of immunobiology of organ transplantation. It is unique that it focuses on immunobiology from the basic research side, with an emphasis on the cellular and molecular levels. The readers will be physicians, scientists, and graduate students interested and engaged in the study of immunology as it relates to allo- and xenotransplantation. This book is designed to be the reference standard for the immunobiology of transplantation.

The globalisation of markets and the expansion of product responsibility into the entire product life cycle lead to an increasing competitive situation for nationally and internationally operating companies. Therefore, to win this competition the use of the most effective and efficient resources regarding the whole product life cycle is necessary. Since these resources are globally distributed the different tasks both within a phase of product life cycle and those spread over different phases are distributed as well. The global interference of these tasks requires a close multilateral co-operation of the companies concerned. Current information- and communication technologies and modern management concepts offer high potentials to meet these requirements. The international seminar of CIRP on Life Cycle Engineering titled "e;Life Cycle Networks"e; was a forum for the presentation and discussion of current research work and recent advancements on these strategic issues for current and future engineering. Complex requirements and innovative solutions to support and realise Life Cycle Networks has been revealed and summerised. The employment of information technology to support both specific phases of product life cycle and holistic approaches will be the main focus. This volume contains the papers presented at the seminar which provide opportunities to identify the state-of-the-art and address future needs. The parts in this volume correspond to the sessions of the seminar and are presented under the following headings: Life Cycle Management; Life Cycle Design; Design for Environment; Design for Recycling; Life Cycle Assessment; Disassembly; IT-Networks.

Asymptotic Combinatorial Coding Theory is devoted to the investigation of the combinatorial properties of transmission systems using discrete signals. The book presents results of interest to specialists in combinatorics seeking to apply combinatorial methods to problems of combinatorial coding theory. Asymptotic Combinatorial Coding Theory serves as an excellent reference for resarchers in discrete mathematics, combinatorics, and combinatorial coding theory, and may be used as a text for advanced courses on the subject.

Multimedia Information Retrieval: Content-Based Information Retrieval from Large Text and Audio Databases addresses the future need for sophisticated search techniques that will be required to find relevant information in large digital data repositories, such as digital libraries and other multimedia databases. Because of the dramatically increasing amount of multimedia data available, there is a growing need for new search techniques that provide not only fewer bits, but also the most relevant bits, to those searching for multimedia digital data. This book serves to bridge the gap between classic ranking of text documents and modern information retrieval where composite multimedia documents are searched for relevant information. Multimedia Information Retrieval: Content-Based Information Retrieval from Large Text and Audio Databases begins to pave the way for speech retrieval; only recently has the search for information in speech recordings become feasible. This book provides the necessary introduction to speech recognition while discussing probabilistic retrieval and text retrieval, key topics in classic information retrieval. The book then discusses speech retrieval, which is even more challenging than retrieving text documents because word boundaries are difficult to detect, and recognition errors affect the retrieval effectiveness. This book also addresses the problem of integrating information retrieval and database functions, since there is an increasing need for retrieving information from frequently changing data collections which are organized and managed by a database system. Multimedia Information Retrieval: Content-Based Information Retrieval from Large Text and Audio Databases serves as an excellent reference source and may be used as a text for advanced courses on the topic.

The subject of this book is Command Control Communication and Information 3 (C I) which is the management infrastructure for any large or complex dynamic resource systems. Here command means the determination of what to do, and control means the ongoing managementofthe execution ofa command. 3 Decision making is the essence of C I which is accomplished through a phased implementation of a set of facilities, communications, personnel, equipment and procedures for monitoring, forecasting, planning, directing, allocating resources, and generating options to achieve specific and general objectives. 3 The C I system that is in question here is for a strategic military command including its subordinate commands. Although the design methodology that will be expounded in the book is for a military system, it can, to a large extent, apply also to tactical military as well as to civilian management information systems (MIS). 3 A C I system is a decision making network that reflects a hierarchical organization 3 of C I nodes. Each node is responsible for the management of some portion ofthe available resources, where the higher level nodes are responsible for a 3 correspondingly greater portion of the resources. Within a C I system both command and control decision making occur at every level of the hierarchy. Command decisions at one level determine how to satisfy the management decisions at a higher level.

Compiler technology is fundamental to computer science since it provides the means to implement many other tools. It is interesting that, in fact, many tools have a compiler framework - they accept input in a particular format, perform some processing and present output in another format. Such tools support the abstraction process and are crucial to productive systems development. The focus of Compiler Technology: Tools, Translators and Language Implementation is to enable quick development of analysis tools. Both lexical scanner and parser generator tools are provided as supplements to this book, since a hands-on approach to experimentation with a toy implementation aids in understanding abstract topics such as parse-trees and parse conflicts. Furthermore, it is through hands-on exercises that one discovers the particular intricacies of language implementation. Compiler Technology: Tools, Translators and Language Implementation is suitable as a textbook for an undergraduate or graduate level course on compiler technology, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners interested in compilers and language implementation.

Since the first edition of this book was published in 1987, there have been several important changes in the state of numerical field computation, as discussed in the Introduction. These changes have motivated the publication of this second edition. As with the first edition, the objective of this second edition is to give the newcomer to field computation the information needed to perform practical field computations. Again, clarity of presentation is given greater emphasis than a high degree of sophistication or the state of the art. And again, the basic concepts of field computation are presented as well as the commonly used algorithms. Several persons have provided much valuable information for this second edition. I wish to thank Professor Giorgio Molinari of the University of Genoa, Italy for advice regarding adaptive mesh generation; Dr. C. R. E. Emson of Vector Fields, Ltd., England and Dr. John Brauer of McNeal-Schwendler Corp. for their advice on transient eddy current computation; and Dr. Zoltan Cendes of Ansoft Corp. for information about their adaptive mesh generator. Again, I would like to acknowledge the support for this second edition by my wife, Candace. Again, I could not have written this book without her support.

In order to compete in the current commercial environment companies must produce greater product variety, at lower cost, all within a reduced product life cycle. To achieve this, a concurrent engineering philosophy is often adopted. In many cases the main realization of this is Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DFM/A). There is a need for in-depth study of the architectures for DFM/A systems in order that the latest software and knowledge-based techniques may be used to deliver the DFM/A systems of tomorrow. This architecture must be based upon complete understanding of the issues involved in integrating the design and manufacturing domains. This book provides a comprehensive view of the capabilities of advanced DFM/A systems based on a common architecture.

Multi-Threaded Object-Oriented MPI-Based Message Passing Interface: The ARCH Library presents ARCH, a library built as an extension to MPI. ARCH relies on a small set of programming abstractions that allow the writing of well-structured multi-threaded parallel codes according to the object-oriented programming style. ARCH has been written with C++. The book describes the built-in classes, and illustrates their use through several template application cases in several fields of interest: Distributed Algorithms (global completion detection, distributed process serialization), Parallel Combinatorial Optimization (A* procedure), Parallel Image-Processing (segmentation by region growing). It shows how new application-level distributed data types - such as a distributed tree and a distributed graph - can be derived from the built-in classes. A feature of interest to readers is that both the library and the application codes used for illustration purposes are available via the Internet. The material can be downloaded for installation and personal parallel code development on the reader's computer system. ARCH can be run on Unix/Linux as well as Windows NT-based platforms. Current installations include the IBM-SP2, the CRAY-T3E, the Intel Paragon, PC-networks under Linux or Windows NT. Multi-Threaded Object-Oriented MPI-Based Message Passing Interface: The ARCH Library is aimed at scientists who need to implement parallel/distributed algorithms requiring complicated local and/or distributed control structures. It can also benefit parallel/distributed program developers who wish to write codes in the object-oriented style. The author has been using ARCH for several years as a medium to teach parallel and network programming. Teachers can employ the library for the same purpose while students can use it for training. Although ARCH has been used so far in an academic environment, it will be an effective tool for professionals as well. Multi-Threaded Object-Oriented MPI-Based Message Passing Interface: The ARCH Library is suitable as a secondary text for a graduate level course on Data Communications and Networks, Programming Languages, Algorithms and Computational Theory and Distributed Computing and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.