introduction: this study was designed to evaluate the prevalence of referred pain with pulpal source in the head, face and neck region among patients referred to dental school of shahid beheshti university mc, tehran, iran in 2004. materials and methods: in this cross-sectional study, 100 patients (55 males and 45 females) referred to oral medicine department of shahid beheshti dental school ev...

We analyse the convergence to stationarity of a simple non-reversible Markov chain that serves as a model for several non-reversible Markov chain sampling methods that are used in practice. Our theoretical and numerical results show that non-reversibility can indeed lead to improvements over the diiusive behavior of simple Markov chain sampling schemes. The analysis uses both probabilistic tech...

Bayesian inference often requires the calculation of posterior distributions. Unfortunately, only in special cases (e. g., conjugate priors) it is possible to compute analytically the posterior. Typical approximations to this computation are Laplace approximations and sampling. In sampling-based approaches the integral is approximated numerically. Markov chain Monte Carlo methods (MCMC) can be ...

BACKGROUND Efforts have focused on developing innovative recruitment strategies to engage the most marginalized of populations in public health research. Respondent-driven sampling (RDS) has been found to be an effective sampling strategy for hard-to-reach, hidden populations. Though studies have documented RDS peer referral as challenging, literature contextualizing these challenges is scant a...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Referral systems are relatively easy in terms of design, but implementing them is extremely difficult. Considering the three levels of primary healthcare, access of people to specialized services through a referral system is possible. With regard to the importance of a referral system in a family physician program, this study was performed to assess the function of the ...

We develop an optimization model based on Markovian approach to determine the optimum value of thresholds in a proposed acceptance sampling design. Consider an acceptance sampling plan where items are inspected and when the number of conforming items between successive defective items falls below a lower control threshold value, then the batch is rejected, and if it falls above a control thresh...

determination of pre-hospital delay time of patients with acute myocardial infarction and seeking ways of speeding up the time for reperfusion is an important factor to lower mortality in these patients. this is a cross-sectional study to determine pre-hospital delay time, its components, and related causes and conditions, obtained in 375 patients with prolonged chest pain referred to four hosp...

Seismic reservoir characterization aims to transform obtained seismic signatures into reservoir properties such as lithofacies and pore fluids. We propose a Markov chain Monte Carlo (McMC) workflow consistent with geology, well‐logs, seismic data and rock‐physics information. The workflow uses a multiple‐point geostatistical method for generating realizations from the prior distribution...

OBJECTIVE Retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) is emerging as a significant avoidable cause of childhood blindness in developing countries. This study was conducted to assess the referral system for ROP in the leading health care centers involved in the provision of services to newborns in Karachi, and to assess the awareness of this condition among health care workers in these centers. METHODS A...

Chain records is a new type of multidimensional record. We discuss how often the chain records occur when the background sampling is from the unit cube with uniform distribution (or, more generally, from an arbitrary continuous product distribution in d dimensions). Extensions are given for sampling from more general spaces with a self-similarity property.