Introduction: Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is one of the most serious and most frequent eye diseases in the world and the most common cause of blindness in adults between 20 and 60 years of age. Following 15 years of diabetes, about 2% of the diabetic patients are blind and 10% suffer from vision impairment due to DR complications. This paper addresses the automatic detection of microaneurysms (MA...

Development of antibiotic resistance in Intensive Care Units (ICUs) is a worldwide problem. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of an antibiotic stewardship program (ASP) by carbapenems restriction on gram-negative antimicrobial resistance in ICU. The study was designed in a 21 bedded general ICU of a teaching hospital with two wings (one and two) in Tehran, Iran. Carbapenem pr...

Development of antibiotic resistance in Intensive Care Units (ICUs) is a worldwide problem. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of an antibiotic stewardship program (ASP) by carbapenems restriction on gram-negative antimicrobial resistance in ICU. The study was designed in a 21 bedded general ICU of a teaching hospital with two wings (one and two) in Tehran, Iran. Carbapenem pr...

This paper presents a new construction simulation approach using CellDEVS techniques, which allows considering site spatial constraints and the sensitivity analysis of different site layout patterns. The proposed approach includes three phases: pre-processing to configure the simulation, main-processing where the simulation is executed, and post-processing, which incorporates animation and sens...

In the estimation of causal effects with observational data, applied analysts often use the differences-in-differences (DID) method. The method is widely used since the needed before and after comparison of a treated and control group is a common situation in the social sciences. Researchers use this method since it protects against a specific form of unobserved confounding. Here, we develop a ...

To make sense of our ever-changing world, our brains search out patterns. This drive can be so strong that the brain imposes patterns when there are none. The opposite can also occur: The brain can overlook patterns because they do not conform to expectations. In this study, we examined this neural sensitivity to patterns within the auditory brainstem, an evolutionarily ancient part of the brai...

To localize sounds in space, humans heavily depend on minute interaural time differences (ITDs) generated by path-length differences to the two ears. Physiological studies of ITD sensitivity have mostly used deterministic, periodic sounds, in which either the waveform fine structure or a sinusoidal envelope is delayed interaurally. For natural broadband stimuli, however, auditory frequency sele...

OBJECTIVES To identify yeastisolates in vaginal specimens to species level and determine their antifungal susceptibility patterns. DESIGN Cross-sectional laboratory-based study. SETTING The Aga Khan University Hospital (AKUH), Nairobi. SUBJECTS Yeast isolates from high vaginal swabs presented to the laboratory for culture and sensitivity were identified to species level using the API Cand...

Implementing realistic activity patterns for a population is crucial for modeling, for example, disease spread, supply and demand, and disaster response. Using the dynamic activity simulation engine, DASim, we generate schedules for a population that capture regular (e.g., working, eating, and sleeping) and irregular activities (e.g., shopping or going to the doctor). We use the sample entropy ...