Respiration and the muscle pump play major roles in increasing venous return. However, the relative contribution of each of these factors remains unclear. The present study investigates the quantitative effects of interaction between respiration and the muscle pump on femoral venous blood flow (FVBF) during a single voluntary knee extension-flexion (KEF) using duplex-Doppler ultrasound. During various respiration modes, which consisted of arrested respiration, normal respiration and deep respiration (inspiration or expiration), eight subjects performed a supine one-legged voluntary KEF. FVBF was measured during respiration only (Protocol A) and during KEF synchronized with respiration (Protocol B). The difference between FVBF values obtained in Protocol B and Protocol A was defined as DeltaFVBF. When KEF was synchronized with normal or deep respiration, FVBF with inspiration was significantly lower than that with expiration. However, DeltaFVBF was significantly higher with inspiration than with expiration during deep respiration but was not significant during normal respiration. Furthermore, DeltaFVBF was significantly higher at both normal and deep respiration than at arrested respiration. The effects upon the venous return during KEF differed between inspiration and expiration. The present findings indicate that during a single supine KEF, respiration might promote venous return to a range of 1.5- to 2.3-fold DeltaFVBF during arrested respiration.

How do you place the three electrodes to create waveforms for leads I, II, III, aVR, aVL, aVF, and V1‐V6?

The effect of trawling on seabed fauna in the Northern Prawn Fishery experimental region of Australia is investigated through distributional changes in individual weights for each species. A stochastic growth model is employed to overcome a limited number of effective observations. One statistical challenge is to deal with non-identically distributed observations as only total weights and numbers of individuals caught for each species are observed. A modified Cramér-von Mises statistic is introduced and the p -values are evaluated by random number generation. As a result, the gamma distribution, the equilibrium distribution of the stochastic growth model fits well to 57 out of 80 cases before trawling. We conclude that most of the species are unaffected by trawling but several other species are shifted towards lighter weights. The unevenness of the effect over regions suggests that other environmental effects and ecological factors are involved.

No abstract

In this paper, asymptotic distribution of Cramér-von Mises goodness-of-fit test statistic is investigated when contamination exists. We first derive the asymptotic distribution of the Cramér-von Mises statistic when the observations are contaminated with noise as a mixture. The result is extended to the case where the parameters are estimated by the minimum distance estimator, which minimizes the Cramér-von Mises statistic. In both cases the asymptotic distribution of the Cramér-von Mises statistic is given by that of the weighted infinite sum of non-central χ 2 1 variables and the effect of contamination appears only in the non-centrality of the variables. We also demonstrate the robustness of the goodnessof-fit test by Monte Carlo simulations when the parameters are estimated by the minimum distance estimator and the maximum likelihood estimator. Numerical experiments indicate that the use of the minimum distance estimator makes the test insensitive to contamination whereas the power is retained almost the same as that of the maximum likelihood estimator.