The next generation of QbD based pharmaceutical products will be manufactured through continuous processing. This will allow the integration of online/inline monitoring tools, coupled with an efficient advanced model-based feedback control systems, to achieve precise control of process variables so that the predefined product quality can be achieved consistently. The ...

In this article, an application of cognitive work analysis (CWA), using the strategies analysis diagram (SAD) method, to model performance variability in road transport, is presented. Specifically, the method was used to describe performance variability across four road user groups (drivers, cyclists, motorcyclists and pedestrians) when turning right at an ...

Abstract Autonomous learning implemented purely by means of a synthetic chemical system has not been previously realized. Learning promotes reusability and minimizes the system design to simple input-output specification. In this article we introduce a chemical perceptron, the first full-featured implementation of a perceptron in an artificial (simulated) chemistry. A ...

BACKGROUND: Synchronisation/coupling between respiratory patterns and musical structure. METHODS: Healthy professional musicians and members of the audience were studied during a performance of W.A. Mozart's Piano Concerto KV 449. Electrocardiogram (ECG)/Heart Rate Variability (HRV) data recording (Schiller: Medilog(R)AR12, ECG-channels: 3, sampling rate: 4096 Hz, 16 Bit) was carried out and ...

Vegetation forms a main component of the terrestrial biosphere and plays a crucial role in land-cover and climate related studies. Activity of vegetation systems is commonly quantified using remotely sensed vegetation indices. Extensive reports on temporal trends over the past decades in time series of such indices can be found ...

Heart rate variability (HRV) analysis is increasingly used in anaesthesia and intensive care monitoring of spontaneous breathing and mechanical ventilated patients. In the frequency domain, different estimation methods of the power spectral density (PSD) of RR-intervals lead to different results. Therefore, we investigated the PSD estimates of fast Fourier transform ...

Quantifying the energy requirements of animals in nature is critical for understanding physiological, behavioural, and ecosystem ecology; however, for difficult-to-study species such as large sharks, prey intake rates are largely unknown. Here, we use metabolic rates derived from swimming speed estimates to suggest that feeding requirements of the world's largest ...

A teaching tool that facilitates student understanding of a three-dimensional (3D) integration of dermatomes with peripheral cutaneous nerve field distributions is described. This model is inspired by the confusion in novice learners between dermatome maps and nerve field distribution maps. This confusion leads to the misconception that these two distribution ...

Identifying local adaptation is crucial in conservation biology to define ecotypes and establish management guidelines. Local adaptation is often inferred from the detection of loci showing a high differentiation between populations, the so-called FST outliers. Methods of detection of loci under selection are reputed to be robust in most spatial ...

Gait variability may have greater utility than spatio-temporal parameters and can, be an indication for risk of falling in people with Parkinson's disease (PD). Current methods rely on prolonged data collection in order to obtain large datasets which may be demanding to obtain. We set out to explore a phase ...

Fractional differintegration is used as a new tool to characterize heart rate variability time series. This paper proposes and focuses in two indexes (ac and fnQ) derived from the fractional differintegration operator. Both indexes are applied to fractional Gaussian noise (fGn) and actual RR time series in order to test ...

BACKGROUND: For the representation of RNA interference (RNAi) dynamics,several mathematical models based on systems ofordinary differential equations (ODEs) have been proposed.These models consist of equations foreach molecule that are involved in RNAi phenomena.Therefore, many real-value parameters must beoptimized to identify the models.They also have many `hidden variables',which cannot be observed ...

This article aims to document the use of multisensory stimulation environments and its related perceptions, concerning ludic content, play and the computer-mediated ludic activity, from the perspective of professionals organizing and delivering therapeutic activities in these spaces with children with developmental disabilities, in Portugal. Face-to-face open interviews with 12 professionals ...

Spatial navigation calls upon mnemonic capabilities (e.g. remembering the location of a rewarding site) as well as adaptive motor control (e.g. fine tuning of the trajectory according to the ongoing sensory context). To study this complex process by means of behavioral measurements it is necessary to quantify a large set ...

Triplet-based Spike Timing Dependent Plasticity (TSTDP) is a powerful synaptic plasticity rule that acts beyond conventional pair-based STDP (PSTDP). Here, the TSTDP is capable of reproducing the outcomes from a variety of biological experiments, while the PSTDP rule fails to reproduce them. Additionally, it has been shown that the behaviour ...

In this paper we present a new method for inferring handedness from lithic evidence. The study was conducted by means of an experimental programme in stone-knapping, after which the resulting lithic products (tools) were analysed. These lithic tools were produced by 15 inexpert knappers (8 right-handed and 7 left-handed), because ...

OBJECTIVE: Natural language processing (NLP) tasks are commonly decomposed into subtasks, chained together to form processing pipelines. The residual error produced in these subtasks propagates, adversely affecting the end objectives. Limited availability of annotated clinical data remains a barrier to reaching state-of-the-art operating characteristics using statistically based NLP tools in ...

Predator-prey dynamics is most simply and commonly described by Lotka-Volterra-type ordinary differential equations (ODEs) for continuous population density variables in the limit of large population sizes. One popular extension of these ODEs is the so-called Rosenzweig-MacArthur model in which various interaction rates between the populations have a nonlinear dependence on ...

BACKGROUND: Estimating harm rates for specific patient populations and detecting significant changes in them over time are essential if patient safety in general practice is to be improved. Clinical record review (CRR) is arguably the most suitable method for these purposes, but the optimal values and combinations of its parameters ...

Selenium (Se) contamination in environmental systems has become a major issue in many regions world-wide during the previous decades, with both elevated and deficient Se concentrations in groundwater, surface water, soils and associated cultivated crops reported. To provide a tool that can assess baseline conditions and explore remediation strategies, this ...

Researchers are increasingly using data envelopment analysis (DEA) to examine the efficiency of environmental policies and resource allocations. An assumption of the basic DEA model is that decisionmakers operate within homogeneous environments. But, this assumption is not valid when environmental performance is influenced by variables beyond managerial control. Understanding the ...

PURPOSE: This study investigates changes in the quality of life (QoL) of Gaza Palestinians before and after the Israeli winter 2008-2009 war using the World Health Organization's WHOQOL-Bref; the extent to which this instrument adequately measures changing situations; and its responsiveness to locally developed human insecurity and distress measures appropriate ...

Qualitative content analysis and thematic analysis are two commonly used approaches in data analysis of nursing research, but boundaries between the two have not been clearly specified. In other words, they are being used interchangeably and it seems difficult for the researcher to choose between them. In this respect, this ...

The aim of the present study was to investigate whether time-dependent biases of oculomotor selection as typically observed during visual search are better accounted for by an absolute-processing-speed account (J. P. de Vries, I. T. C. Hooge, M. A. Wiering, & F. A. J. Verstraten, 2011, How longer saccade latencies ...

Spectral optimization algorithm (SOA) is a well-accepted scheme for the retrieval of water constituents from the measurement of ocean color radiometry. It defines an error function between the input and output remote sensing reflectance spectrum, with the latter modeled with a few variables that represent the optically active properties, while ...

The practice of engineering biology now depends on the ad hoc reuse of genetic elements whose precise activities vary across changing contexts. Methods are lacking for researchers to affordably coordinate the quantification and analysis of part performance across varied environments, as needed to identify, evaluate and improve problematic part types. ...

Life cycle assessment (LCA) has shown that first generation biofuels provide a little to no benefit for greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions compared to petroleum fuels, particularly when indirect effects are considered. Second generation fuels are intended to achieve greater GHG reductions and avoid other sustainability issues. LCAs of second generation ...

This review focuses on the impacts of climate change on population dynamics. I introduce the MUP (Measuring, Understanding and Predicting) approach, which provides a general framework where an enhanced understanding of climate-population processes, along with improved long-term data, are merged into coherent projections of future population responses to climate change. ...

BACKGROUND: Mosquito feeding behaviour plays a major role in determining malaria transmission intensity and the impact of specific prevention measures. Human Landing Catch (HLC) is currently the only method that can directly and consistently measure the biting rates of anthropophagic mosquitoes, both indoors and outdoors. However, this method exposes the ...

Since video quality fluctuation degrades the visual perception significantly in multimedia communication systems, it is important to maintain a consistent objective quality over the entire video sequence. We propose a rate control algorithm to keep the consistent objective quality in HEVC which is an upcoming standard video codec. In the ...

Most models of nucleotide or amino-acid substitution used in phylogenetic studies assume that the evolutionary process has been homogeneous across lineages and that composition of nucleotides or amino acids has remained the same throughout the tree. These over-simplified assumptions are refuted by the observation that compositional variability characterizes extant biological ...

Coral reefs distant from human population were sampled in the Red Sea and one-third showed degradation by predator outbreaks (crown-of-thorns-starfish = COTS observed in all regions in all years) or bleaching (1998, 2010). Models were built to assess future trajectories. They assumed variable coral types (slow/fast growing), disturbance frequencies (5,10,20 ...

OBJECTIVE: The male refractory period (MRP) continues to be a topic of discussion and debate within the field of sexual medicine. To date explanations rely on central descending (efferent) influences involving specific neurotransmitter systems. Herein we explore the issue of the male refractory period, identifying problems with current explanations, specifying ...

The pattern recognition based myoelectric control scheme is in the process of being implemented in clinical settings, but it has been mainly tested on sequential and steady state data. This paper investigates the ability of pattern recognition to resolve movements that are simultaneous and dynamically changing; and compares the use ...

Purpose: To compare the effects of constant and variable intensity cycling on gross efficiency (GE) and to compare estimates of energy expenditure (EE) made using indirect calorimetry with estimates derived from commercially available power meters. Methods: 9 National Team female road cyclists completed a gross efficiency test (GEtest = 4min ...

This study develops a measure of the efficiency of visiting nurse (VN) agencies in Japan, examining the issues related to the measurement of efficiency, and identifying the characteristics that influence efficiency. We have employed a data envelopment analysis to measure the efficiency of 108 VN agencies, using the numbers of ...

A cationic dye, Rhodamine B (RhB), could be efficiently discolored by heterogeneous Fenton-like reaction catalyzed by natural schorl. In this work, with the main goal of the optimization for RhB discoloration, central composite design under the response surface methodology (RSM) was employed for the experiment design and process optimization. The ...

PURPOSE: Contraction frequencies are an important parameter for the analysis of bowel motility in MRI. The contraction curve can be rather noisy and the frequency-evaluation might be difficult. The aim was to evaluate manual calculations of small bowel contraction frequency in comparison with automatic calculations using two mathematically established methods. ...

BACKGROUND: There is interest in using residential dust to estimate human exposure to environmental contaminants. OBJECTIVES: We characterize the sources of variability for polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in residential dust and provide guidance for investigators who plan to use residential dust to assess exposure to PAHs. METHODS: We collected repeat ...

BACKGROUND: Culture-independent phylogenetic analysis of 16S ribosomal RNA (rRNA) gene sequences has emerged as an incisive method of profiling bacteria present in a specimen. Currently, multiple techniques are available to enumerate the abundance of bacterial taxa in specimens, including the Sanger sequencing, the 'next generation' pyrosequencing, microarrays, quantitative PCR, and ...

Accurate modelling of long-term changes in plant stomatal functioning is vital to global climate change studies because changes in evapotranspiration influence temperature via physiological forcing of the climate. Various stomatal models are included in land surface schemes, but their robustness over longer timescales is difficult to validate. We compare the ...

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are short non-coding RNAs that are involved in the regulation of cellular processes and have been shown to be differentially expressed in neoplasia and other disease states. This renders miRNAs promising diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers in tissues and body fluids, especially in blood. However, numerous variables can influence ...

Quantitative colocalization studies suffer from the lack of unified approach to interpret obtained results. We developed a tool to characterize the results of colocalization experiments in a way so that they are understandable and comparable both qualitatively and quantitatively. Employing a fuzzy system model and computer simulation, we produced a ...

OBJECTIVE: The P300 speller is a system designed to restore communication to patients with advanced neuromuscular disorders. This study was designed to explore the potential improvement from using electrocorticography (ECoG) compared to the more traditional usage of electroencephalography (EEG). METHODS: We tested the P300 speller on two epilepsy patients with ...

Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) is often categorized as a tool for experimental psychologists. However, it also continues to be a popular statistical procedure used by organizational scientists. Unfortunately, when the dependent variables (DV) are correlated with one another, interpreting the significant omnibus test in MANOVA becomes difficult. The present ...

There is conflicting evidence as to whether skilled performance is associated with lower or higher movement variability. The effect of skill level and task difficulty on movement variability during gymnastics swinging was investigated. Four male gymnasts ranging in skill from university standard through to international medallist performed 10 consecutive regular ...

Low-density quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR) arrays are often used to profile expression patterns of microRNAs in various biological milieus. To achieve accurate analysis of expression of miRNAs, non-biological sources of variation in data should be removed through precise normalization of data. We have systematically compared the performance of 19 normalization ...

Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) provides quantitative parametric maps sensitive to tissue microarchitecture (e.g., fractional anisotropy, FA). These maps are estimated through computational processes and subject to random distortions including variance and bias. Traditional statistical procedures commonly used for study planning (including power analyses and p-value/alpha-rate thresholds) specifically model variability, but ...

The symmetric-range accuracy of a sampler is defined as the fractional range, symmetric about the true concentration, that includes a specified proportion of sampler measurements. In this article, we give an explicit expression for assuming that the sampler measurements follow a one-way random model so as to capture different components ...

Autonomous global models based on radial basis functions were obtained from data measured from patients under noninvasive mechanical ventilation. Some of these models, which are discussed in the paper, turn out to have chaotic or quasi-periodic solutions, thus providing a first piece of evidence that the underlying dynamics of the ...