Different spatial interpolation techniques have been applied to construct objective bioclimatic maps of La Palma, Canary Islands. Interpolation of climatic data on this topographically complex island with strong elevation and climatic gradients represents a challenge. Furthermore, meteorological stations are not evenly distributed over the island, with few stations at high ...

The bacterium Flavobacterium psychrophilum is a serious problem for salmonid farming worldwide. This study investigates by multilocus sequence typing (MLST) the population structure of this pathogen in Japan where it is also a major concern for ayu, a popular game fish related to salmoniforms. A total of 34 isolates collected ...

Image segmentation has become a vital and often rate-limiting step in modern radiotherapy treatment planning. In recent years, the pace and scope of algorithm development, and even introduction into the clinic, have far exceeded evaluative studies. In this work we build upon our previous evaluation of a registration driven segmentation ...

The hippocampus has been known to be an important structure as a biomarker for Alzheimer's disease (AD) and other neurological and psychiatric diseases. However, it requires accurate, robust and reproducible delineation of hippocampal structures. In this study, an automated hippocampal segmentation method based on a graph-cuts algorithm combined with atlas-based ...

PURPOSE: Many patients who sustain an acute lateral ankle sprain develop chronic ankle instability (CAI). Altered ankle kinematics have been reported to play a role in the underlying mechanisms of CAI. In previous studies, however, the foot was modeled as one rigid segment, ignoring the complexity of the ankle and ...

Purpose: To improve the accuracy and the robustness of the segmentation in living donor liver transplantation (LDLT) surgery planning system, the authors present a new segmentation framework that addresses challenges induced by the complex shape variations of patients' livers with cancer. It is designed to achieve the accurate and robust ...

This study sought to differentiate the species of skates encountered in Gulf St Vincent (GSV), South Australia using normalized elliptical Fourier analysis of body shape. Significant intraspecific variation was observed among whole body shapes. This was overcome by limiting subsequent analyses to the anterior snout region, where significant differences in ...

The recent proliferation of Networked Music Performances has led to the investigation of low-latency, low-bitrate musical encoding schemes, including audio codecs and control protocols that specifically address the requirements of live musical interactions across the Internet. This work presents an alternative perspective inspired by the "synthesis by analysis" approach, tightly ...

A road traffic noise model was developed to approximate the ambient noise levels present within a 200 km(2) urban center. Road corridors that included highways, city streets, and country side-roads with varying traffic volumes were modeled to evaluate the existing ambient conditions within the project area. To calculate noise levels, ...

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study is to provide an improved method for the automatic classification of the Cyclic Alternating Pattern (CAP) sleep by applying a segmentation technique to the computation of descriptors from the EEG. METHODS: A dataset of 16 polysomnographic recordings from healthy subjects was employed, and the ...

For the past 35 years, the Cambrian fossil Pikaia gracilens was widely interpreted as a typical basal chordate based on short descriptions by Conway Morris. Recently, Conway Morris and Caron (CMC) (2012, Biol Rev 87:480-512) described Pikaia extensively, as a basis for new ideas about deuterostome evolution. This new Pikaia ...

Validation is required to ensure automated segmentation algorithms are suitable for radiotherapy target definition. In the absence of true segmentation, algorithmic segmentation is validated against expert outlining of the region of interest. Multiple experts are used to overcome inter-expert variability. Several approaches have been studied in the literature, but the ...

To assess the correlation between four visual morphological types based on body colour and shape (fario trout, FT; shiny fario, SFT; presmolt trout, PST; typical smolt ST) of juvenile brown trout Salmo trutta during downstream spring migration and the biological form at the adult stage (river or sea), mark-recapture experiments ...

Successful practices that help leverage revenue cycle data and analytics include: Starting the collections process early, Segmenting accounts, Holding agencies accountable for their performance, Using trend data to identify staff training needs.

The purpose of this study was to compare estimates of gastrocnemius muscle length (GML) obtained using a segmented versus straight-line model in children. Kinematic data were acquired on eleven typically developing children as they walked under the following conditions: normal gait, crouch gait, equinus gait, and crouch with equinus gait. ...

Expectancies regarding the effects of various psychoactive substances are important predictors of the initiation and maintenance of substance use. Although measures of outcome expectancies exist for several addictive substances, there is currently no measure to assess smokeless tobacco (ST) expectancies in an adult population. This article presents 2 studies leading ...

Segments of identity by descent (IBD) detected from high-density genetic data are useful for many applications, including long-range phase determination, phasing family data, imputation, IBD mapping and heritability analysis in founder populations. We present Refined IBD, a new method for IBD segment detection. Refined IBD achieves both computational efficiency and ...

Background Current inertial motion capture systems are rarely used in biomedical applications. The attachment and connection of the sensors with cables is often a complex and time consuming task. Moreover, it is prone to errors, because each sensor has to be attached to a predefined body segment. By using wireless ...

BACKGROUND: /st>In open TCI and anaesthesia display systems, the choice of pharmacokinetic (PK) parameter sets of opioids is clinically relevant. Accuracy and bias of the PK models may be affected by administration mode and the co-administered hypnotic drug. We retrospectively evaluated the performance of eight PK parameter sets for alfentanil ...

Uncovering the genetic and developmental changes that generate morphological diversity is one of the longstanding challenges in biology. The developmental process generating the spine, one of the defining features of vertebrates, constitutes one of these core questions. The vertebral column is patterned in early development through the formation of segments, ...

One of the critical requirements for high-speed videoendoscopy (HSV) to become a clinically useful tool is to pair it with a technique, which provides a quick overview of the vast amount of HSV data and rapidly identifies the best video segments for subjective and objective analyses. This article proposes intensity-based ...

We present a novel patch-based probabilistic graphical model for semi-supervised video segmentation. At the heart of our model is a temporal tree structure which links patches in adjacent frames through the video sequence. This permits exact inference of pixel labels without resorting to traditional short time-window based video processing or ...

 A generic descriptive analysis using 11 judges provided 16 sensory attributes that described the aroma, flavor, and texture characteristics of 7 nectarine and peach cultivars selected for their predominant sensory attributes. Simultaneously, the "in-store" acceptability of these cultivars was evaluated by 120 consumers from northern California. The relationships among instrumental ...

Sit-to-stand (STS) is a functional dynamic task, requiring movement of the lumbar spine, however, little is known about whether regional differences or between-gender differences exist during this task. The aim of this study was to confirm whether kinematic differences existed within regions of the lumbar spine during STS and also to determine ...

Radiation therapy is used to treat cancer patients around the world. High quality treatment plans maximally radiate the targets while minimally radiating healthy organs at risk. In order to judge plan quality and safety, segmentations of the targets and organs at risk are created, and the amount of radiation that ...

Valid and reliable low-back load assessment tools that can be used in field situations are needed for epidemiologic studies and for ergonomic practice. The aim of this study was to assess the inter-rater reliability of a low-back load video-analysis method in a field setting. Five raters analyzed 50 work site ...

Researchers working with rodent models of neurological disease often require an accurate map of the anatomical organization of the white matter of the rodent brain. With the increasing popularity of small animal MRI techniques, including diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), there is considerable interest in rapid segmentation methods of neurological structures ...

Although there are numerous examples of individual species moving up in elevation and poleward in latitude in response to 20th century climate change, how communities have responded is less well understood and requires fully accounting for changes in species-specific detectability over time, which has been neglected in past studies. We ...

OBJECTIVE: /st>The aim of this study was to develop and test a measurement instrument for spread of quality improvement in healthcare. The instrument distinguishes: (i) spread of work practices and their results and (ii) spread practices and effectiveness. Relations between spread and sustainability of changed work practices were also explored ...

To compare the accuracy of linear and angular measurements between cephalometric and anatomic landmarks on surface models derived from 3D cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) with two different segmentation protocols was the aim of this study. CBCT scans were made of cadaver heads and 3D surface models were created of ...

A novel tracking algorithm is proposed for targets with drastically changing geometric appearances over time. To track such objects, we develop a local patch-based appearance model and provide an efficient online updating scheme that adaptively changes the topology between patches. In the online update process, the robustness of each patch ...

Despite the multi-linked architecture of the cervical spine, all previous studies that have made estimations of mechanical properties of the neck have considered the head-neck segment as a rigid link, with a fixed center of rotation at C7. The aim of this study was to consider the head-neck segment as ...

The most common approach to study the influence of certain road features on accidents has been the consideration of uniform road segments characterized by a unique feature. However, when an accident is related to the road infrastructure, its cause is usually not a single characteristic but rather a complex combination ...

We developed a fast method to construct local sub-databases from the NCBI-nr database for the quick similarity search and annotation of huge metagenomic datasets based on BLAST-MEGAN approach. A three-step sub-database annotation pipeline (SAP) was further proposed to conduct the annotation in a much more time-efficient way which required far ...

In an era when global biodiversity is increasingly impacted by rapidly changing climate, efforts to conserve global biodiversity may be compromised if we do not consider the uneven distribution of climate-induced threats. Here, via a novel application of an aggregate Regional Climate Change Index (RCCI) that combines changes in mean ...

In step-and-shoot IMRT plans, aperture-based optimization (or one-step optimization) has been considered as a means of improving monitor unit (MU) efficiency compared to fluence-based optimization (or two-step optimization). However, the extent of improvement on MU efficiency varies, depending on the implementation and design of one-step optimization. In this paper, we ...

A novel framework to efficiently deal with three-dimensional (3-D) segmentation of challenging inhomogeneous data in real-time has been recently introduced by the authors. However, the existing framework still relied on manual initialization, which prevented taking full advantage of the computational speed of the method. In the present article, an automatic ...

SNP arrays output two signals that reflect the total genomic copy number (LRR) and the allelic ratio (BAF), which in combination allow the characterisation of allele-specific copy numbers (ASCNs). While methods based on hidden Markov models (HMMs) have been extended from array comparative genomic hybridisation (aCGH) to jointly handle the ...

We propose a fast, noniterative method to segment an in-line hologram of a volumetric sample into in-line subholograms according to its constituent objects. In contrast to the phase retrieval or twin image elimination algorithms, we do not aim or require to reconstruct the complex wave field of all the objects, ...

Molecular phenotyping technologies (e.g., transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics) offer the possibility to simultaneously obtain multivariate time series (MTS) data from different levels of information processing and metabolic conversions in biological systems. As a result, MTS data capture the dynamics of biochemical processes and components whose couplings may involve different scales ...

Regular landscape patterning arises from spatially-dependent feedbacks, and can undergo catastrophic loss in response to changing landscape drivers. The central Everglades (Florida, USA) historically exhibited regular, linear, flow-parallel orientation of high-elevation sawgrass ridges and low-elevation sloughs that has degraded due to hydrologic modification. In this study, we use a meta-ecosystem ...

This paper introduces a novel partition-based regression approach that incorporates topological information. Partition-based regression typically introduce a quality-of-fit-driven decomposition of the domain. The emphasis in this work is on a topologically meaningful segmentation. Thus, the proposed regression approach is based on a segmentation induced by a discrete approximation of the ...

Among all abnormal growths inside the skull, the percentage of tumors in sellar region is approximately 10-15%, and the pituitary adenoma is the most common sellar lesion. A time-consuming process that can be shortened by using adequate algorithms is the manual segmentation of pituitary adenomas. In this contribution, two methods ...

To compensate for bias field inhomogeneity and reduce noise, we incorporate domain-based knowledge and spatial information into a brain segmentation algorithm by proposing a new multi-layer Hidden Markov model. Brain tissues include Gray Matter (GM), White Matter (WM), and Cerebrospinal Fluid (CSF). A typical slice of a brain image either ...

Acanthobdellidans are unique in their organisation and phylogenetic relationships due to having transitional characters that combine features of oligochaetous and achaetous annelids. Alongside the relatively well-studied Acanthobdella peledina Grube, 1851, there is another member of the group, Paracanthobdella livanowi (Epshtein, 1966), with five rows of chaetae and an anterior sucker. ...

The Gray-Code Kernels (GCK) family which has Walsh Hadamard Transform (WHT) on sliding windows as a member is a family of kernels that can perform image analysis efficiently using a fast algorithm such as the GCK algorithm. The GCK has been successfully used for pattern matching. In this paper, we ...

OBJECTIVE: /st>To develop and test a handover performance tool (HPT) able to help clinicians to systematically assess the quality and safety of shift handovers. DESIGN: /st>The study used a mixed methods approach. In the development phase of the tool, a review of the literature and a Delphi process were conducted ...

The fixation index F(ST) and the coefficient of gene differentiation G(ST) are analyzed for the finite island model under short time spans, ignoring mutations. Dividing the reproduction cycle into the three steps-gamete formation, fertilization, and migration-we develop a new approach for computing quasi equilibrium formulas for F(ST) (and G(ST)). Our ...

In this paper, a new segmentation framework with prior knowledge is proposed and applied to the left ventricles in cardiac Cine MRI sequences. We introduce a new formulation of the random walks method, coined as guided random walks, in which prior knowledge is integrated seamlessly. In comparison with existing approaches ...

Rapid evolution has rarely been assessed in biological control systems despite the similarity with biological invasions, which are widely used as model systems. We assessed post-introduction climatic adaptation in a population of Longitarsus jacobaeae, a biological control agent of Jacobaea vulgaris, which originated from a low-elevation site in Italy and ...