Kinetic models of metabolism require detailed knowledge of kinetic parameters. However, due to measurement errors or lack of data this knowledge is often uncertain. The model of glycolysis in the parasitic protozoan Trypanosoma brucei is a particularly well analysed example of a quantitative metabolic model, but so far it has ...

At a time when anthropogenic activities are increasingly disturbing the overall ecological integrity of freshwater ecosystems, monitoring of biological communities is central to assessing the health and function of streams. This study aimed to use a large nation-wide database to develop a multimetric index (the Korean Benthic macroinvertebrate Index of ...

Medical data sensors on patients in hospitals produce an increasingly large volume of increasingly diverse real-time data. Because scheduling the transmission of this data through wireless hospital networks becomes a crucial problem, we propose a Reinforcement Learning-based queue management and scheduling scheme. In this scheme, we use a game-theoretical approach ...

Commensal leucothoid amphipods have been collected from the branchial chambers of their ascidian hosts throughout the Ryukyu Archipelago, Japan. Seven new species are described in two genera with valuable location data and host records. An identification key to ascidian-dwelling Leucothoidae of the Ryukyu Archipelago is provided.

Most of the parasites of the phylum Apicomplexa contain a relict prokaryotic-derived plastid called the apicoplast. This organelle is important not only for the survival of the parasite, but its unique properties make it an ideal drug target. The majority of apicoplast-associated proteins are nuclear encoded and targeted post-translationally to ...

The relationship between species richness and the prevalence of vector-borne disease has been widely studied with a range of outcomes. Increasing the number of host species for a pathogen may decrease infection prevalence (dilution effect), increase it (amplification), or have no effect. We derive a general model, and a specific ...

A local modal estimation procedure is proposed for the regression function in a non-parametric regression model. A distinguishing characteristic of the proposed procedure is that it introduces an additional tuning parameter that is automatically selected using the observed data in order to achieve both robustness and efficiency of the resulting ...

A substantial part of all traffic accidents involving passenger cars are rear-end collisions and most of them occur at low speed. Auto Brake is a feature that has been launched in several passenger car models during the last few years. City Safety is a technology designed to help the driver ...

In this paper, a laboratory goniometer system for performing multi-angular measurements under controlled illumination conditions is described. A commercially available robotic arm enables the acquisition of a large number of measurements over the full hemisphere within a short time span making it much faster than other goniometers. In addition, the ...

Malaria elimination requires a variety of approaches individually optimized for different transmission settings. A recent field study in an area of low seasonal transmission in South West Cambodia demonstrated dramatic reductions in malaria parasite prevalence following both mass drug administration (MDA) and high treatment coverage of symptomatic patients with artemisinin-piperaquine ...

An open-access program for generating three-item statement (3TS) matrices from data such as molecular sequences does not currently exist. The recently developed LisBeth package allows for representation of hypotheses of homology among taxa or areas directly as rooted trees or as hierarchies; however, LisBeth is not a standard matrix-based platform. ...

A key ingredient to modern data analysis is probability density estimation. However, it is well known that the curse of dimensionality prevents a proper estimation of densities in high dimensions. The problem is typically circumvented by using a fixed set of assumptions about the data, e.g., by assuming partial independence ...

Performance degradation assessment based on condition monitoring plays an important role in ensuring reliable operation of equipment, reducing production downtime and saving maintenance costs, yet performance degradation has strong fuzziness, and the dynamic information is random and fuzzy, making it a challenge how to assess the fuzzy bearing performance degradation. ...

We state vertebral body (VB) segmentation in MRI as a distribution-matching problem, and propose a convex-relaxation solution which is amenable to parallel computations. The proposed algorithm does not require a complex learning from a large manually-built training set, as is the case of the existing methods. From a very simple ...

Notwithstanding the significant efforts to develop estimators of long-range correlations (LRC) and to compare their performance, no clear consensus exists on what is the best method and under which conditions. In addition, synthetic tests suggest that the performance of LRC estimators varies when using different generators of LRC time series. ...

Expansion and intensification of human land use represents the major cause of habitat fragmentation. Such fragmentation can have dramatic consequences on species richness and trophic interactions within food webs. Although the associated ecological consequences have been studied by several authors, the evolutionary effects on interacting species have received little research ...

BACKGROUND: The activPAL has been identified as an accurate and reliable measure of sedentary behaviour. However, only limited information is available on the accuracy of the activPAL activity count function as a measure of physical activity, while no unit calibration of the activPAL has been completed to date. This study ...

[This corrects the article on p. e41962 in vol. 7.].

[This corrects the article on p. e33927 in vol. 7.].

A new filter named the maximum likelihood-based iterated divided difference filter (MLIDDF) is developed to improve the low state estimation accuracy of nonlinear state estimation due to large initial estimation errors and nonlinearity of measurement equations. The MLIDDF algorithm is derivative-free and implemented only by calculating the functional evaluations. The ...

When quantifying the total volume, number, length, or surface of morphological features in complex structures such as the brain, it is neither desirable nor feasible to make absolute determinations of these parameters. It would take a lifetime to count all of the neurons or measure the total length of dendrites ...

Estimating crop yield using remote sensing techniques has proven to be successful. However, sugarcane possesses unique characteristics; such as, a multi-year cropping cycle and plant height-limiting for midseason fertilizer application timing. Our study objective was to determine if sugarcane yield potential could be estimated using an in-season estimation of normalized ...

Postures have long been used and proved useful to describe animals' behaviours and emotional states, but remains difficult to assess objectively in field conditions. A recent study performed on horses using geometric morphometrics revealed important postural differences between 2 horse populations differing in management conditions (leisure horses living in social ...

Jiang et al. (Research Article, 11 October 2011, DOI: 10.1126/scisignal.2002152) used a combined experimental and computational modeling approach to study the dynamic response behavior of covalent modification cycles in the presence of downstream targets ("loads"). Despite remarkable agreement between experiments and model predictions, there exists an apparent discrepancy in their ...

Understanding the relationship between Plasmodium falciparum malaria transmission and health outcomes requires accurate estimates of exposure to infectious mosquitoes. However, measures of exposure such as mosquito density and entomological inoculation rate (EIR) are generally aggregated over large areas and time periods, biasing the outcome-exposure relationship. There are few studies examining ...

Genome sequencing of many eukaryotic pathogens and the volume of data available on public resources have created a clear requirement for a consistent vocabulary to describe the range of developmental forms of parasites. Consistent labeling of experimental data and external data, in databases and the literature, is essential for integration, ...

Recent increases in funding for malaria control have led to the reduction in transmission in many malaria endemic countries, prompting the national control programmes of 36 malaria endemic countries to set elimination targets. Accounting for human population movement (HPM) in planning for control, elimination and post-elimination surveillance is important, as ...

Although smartphone applications represent the most typical data consumer tool from the citizen perspective in environmental applications, they can also be used for in-situ data collection and production in varied scenarios, such as geological sciences and biodiversity. The use of standard protocols, such as SWE, to exchange information between smartphones ...

This study developed a smartphone application that provides wireless communication, NRTIP client, and RTK processing features, and which can simplify the Network RTK-GPS system while reducing the required cost. A determination method for an error model in Network RTK measurements was proposed, considering both random and autocorrelation errors, to accurately ...

Plasmodium vivax imposes substantial morbidity and mortality burdens in endemic zones. Detailed understanding of the contemporary spatial distribution of this parasite is needed to combat it. We used model based geostatistics (MBG) techniques to generate a contemporary map of risk of Plasmodium vivax malaria in Indonesia in 2010. Plasmodium vivax ...

Abstract The attributable fraction of a disease due to an exposure is the fraction of disease cases in a population that can be attributed to that exposure. We consider the attributable fraction for a semi-continuous exposure, that is an exposure for which a clump of people have zero exposure and ...

Patient-specific cardiac modelling can help in understanding pathophysiology and predict therapy planning. However it requires to personalize the model geometry, kinematics, electrophysiology and mechanics. Calibration aims at providing global values (space invariant) of parameters before performing the personalization stage which involves solving an inverse problem to find regional values. We ...

Identifying functional networks from resting-state functional MRI is a challenging task, especially for multiple subjects. Most current studies estimate the networks in a sequential approach, i.e., they identify each individual subject's network independently to other subjects, and then estimate the group network from the subjects networks. This one-way flow of ...

Agent-based modeling of Plasmodium falciparum infection offers an attractive alternative to the conventional Ross-Macdonald methodology, as it allows simulation of heterogeneous communities subjected to realistic transmission (inoculation patterns). We developed a new, agent based model that accounts for the essential in-host processes: parasite replication and its regulation by innate and ...

We consider the problem of estimating the correlation in bivariate normal data when the means and variances are assumed known, with emphasis on the small sample case. We consider eight different estimators, several of them considered here for the first time in the literature. In a simulation study, we found ...

Response surface methodology was employed to optimize the degradation conditions of AFB(1) by Rhodococcus erythropolis in liquid culture. The most important factors that influence the degradation, as identified by a two-level Plackett-Burman design with six variables, were temperature, pH, liquid volume, inoculum size, agitation speed and incubation time. Central composite ...

Introduction. The cervical sagittal translation mobility is related to neck pain. A practical method for measuring the specific cervical mobility is needed. The aim was to describe a simple method for measuring the cervical sagittal translation mobility and to evaluate its reliability in a clinical setting. Method. The head protraction ...

Estimates of volume can be useful in comparative and experimental studies of tissues and organs. In this article, a simple procedure for making unbiased estimates of total volume using Cavalieri's principle is described. This is followed by a description of how point probes can be used to make unbiased estimates ...

In Uganda, Rhodesian sleeping sickness, caused by Trypanosoma brucei rhodesiense, and animal trypanosomiasis caused by T. vivax and T. congolense, are being controlled by treating cattle with trypanocides and/or insecticides. We used a mathematical model to identify treatment coverages required to break transmission when host populations consisted of various proportions ...

Recent work has demonstrated that enzymatic degradation of collagen fibers exhibits strain-dependent kinetics. Conceptualizing how the strain dependence affects remodeling of collagenous tissues is vital to our understanding of collagen management in native and bioengineered tissues. As a first step towards this goal, the current study puts forward a multiscale ...

Biology, biomedicine and healthcare have become data-driven enterprises, where scientists and clinicians need to generate, access, validate, interpret and integrate different kinds of experimental and patient-related data. Thus, recording and reporting of data in a systematic and unambiguous fashion is crucial to allow aggregation and re-use of data. This paper ...

Conditional pairwise estimates parameters in Rasch models separate inference on item parameters from inference on person parameters. Pairwise item parameter estimates are consistent when sample size approaches infinity, but adds an extra random error to estimation compared to conditional maximum likelihood estimates. Pairwise estimates of person parameters are easily calculated, ...

Fiducial-based registration is often utilized in image guided surgery because of its simplicity and speed. The assessment of target registration error when using this technique, however, is difficult. Although the distribution of the target registration error can be estimated given the fiducial configuration and an estimation of the fiducial localization ...

Data analysis is used to test the hypothesis that "hitting is contagious". A statistical model is described to study the effect of a hot hitter upon his teammates' batting during a consecutive game hitting streak. Box score data for entire seasons comprising [Formula: see text] streaks of length [Formula: see ...

In this paper we propose a new family of cumulative indexes for measuring scientific performance which can be applied to many metrics, including h index and its variants (here we apply it to the h index, h(2) index and Google Scholar's i10 index). These indexes follow the general principle of ...

Objective: Biodiversity studies in search of endoparasitic acephaline gregarines of earthworms revealed a new species under the genus Rhynchocystis Hesse, 1909. Methods: The species has been obtained from the seminal vesicles of the earthworm, Metaphire peguana. The parasite was identified using standard methodology. Results: Gamonts are solitary, elongated with a ...

Although many consensus clustering methods have been successfully used for combining multiple classifiers in many areas such as machine learning, applied statistics, pattern recognition and bioinformatics, few consensus clustering methods have been applied for combining multiple clusterings of chemical structures. It is known that any individual clustering method will ...

Environmental conditions, including anthropogenic disturbance, can significantly alter host and parasite communities. Yet, our current knowledge is based mainly on endoparasites, while ectoparasites remain little studied. We studied the indirect effects of anthropogenic disturbance (human population density) and climate (temperature, precipitation and elevation) on abundance of highly host-specific bat flies ...

We present a two-stage method for effective and efficient detection of one or multiple anatomical landmarks in an arbitrary 3D volume. The first stage of nearest neighbor matching is to roughly estimate the landmark locations. It searches out of 100,000 volumes for the closest to an input volume and then ...

Background. In many studies with longitudinal data, time-dependent covariates can only be measured intermittently (not at all observation times), and this presents difficulties for standard statistical analyses. This situation is common in medical studies, and methods that deal with this challenge would be useful. Methods. In this study, we performed ...