UNLABELLED Attenuation, photon scatter, and distance-dependent collimator-detector response are major degrading factors in myocardial SPECT images. The current study investigated whether compensation for these factors improves perfusion defect detectability, and compared the results for human observers with a previous study using a mathematical observer. METHODS Four methods were investigated...

Two dimensional mesh motion compensation produces blocking free prediction in contrast to block matching motion compensation by generating a smooth full motion field from the set of node motion vectors. This is clearly not appropriate across moving object boundaries where motion discontinuities exist. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing an adaptive interpolation scheme for patch...

John W. Ruser is Chief, Compensation Research and Program Development Group, Office of Compensation and Working Conditions, Bureau of Labor Statistics. E-mail: [email protected] The Employment Cost Index (ECI) is a quarterly measure of the change in the price of labor, defined as compensation per employee hour worked. Closely watched by many economists, the ECI is an indicator of cost pressures w...

Infrared Focal Plane Arrays (FPAs) are used in a wide variety of military and industrial applications which require the collection of low noise, high resolution images. In many of these applications, the dominant noise results from array response nonuniformities. For low noise applications (e.g., detection of low contrast, unresolved targets), correction for the nonuniform array response is cri...

We examined the relationships among CEO perceived charisma, CEO compensation packages, and firm performance in a sample of Fortune 500 companies over a 10-year period. CEO charisma ratings obtained from company CFOs and VPs for HRM were directly related to total CEO pay but not to any firm performance measures. CEO perceived charisma also was related to shareholder value, under highly uncertain...

Policy debates over medical malpractice in the United States involve a complex amalgam of legal doctrine, public demands to address the problem of medical errors, and the interests of various stakeholder groups. Most parties can agree, however, that the current system for compensating medical injury performs poorly. It falls short of achieving its two main goals: compensation and deterrence. Th...

In this paper, we investigate the degradation of speaker identification performance due to speech coding algorithms used in digital telephone networks, cellular telephony, and voice over IP. By analyzing the difference between front-end feature vectors derived from coded and uncoded speech in terms of spectral distortion, we are able to quantify this coding degradation. This leads to two novel ...