Ultrasound is the recommended staging modality for papillary thyroid cancer. Surgeons proficient in US assessment of the neck and experienced in the management of papillary thyroid cancer (PTC) appear uniquely qualified to assess the lateral cervical lymph nodes for metastatic disease. Of 310 patients treated for PTC between 2000 and 2008, 109 underwent surgeon-performed ultrasound (SUS) of the...

This article reviews the strides and challenges of the Brazilian Unified National Health System (SUS), based on an assessment of the results achieved and the constraints for effective consolidation of it objectives. The article focuses on three issues: the process of implementing the SUS, highlighting the institutional and political constraints, some of which as effects of previous policies; st...

We build culture-specific dialogue policies of virtual humans for negotiation and in particular for argumentation and persuasion. In order to do that we use a corpus of non-culture specific dialogues and we build simulated users (SUs), i.e. models that simulate the behavior of real users. Then using these SUs and Reinforcement Learning (RL) we learn negotiation dialogue policies. Furthermore, w...

To enable mobile stations (MSs) of secondary users (SUs) in cognitive radio (CR) networks sharing a common channel with MSs of primary users (PUs) is an important but challenging issue. In this paper, a cooperative spatial multiplexing (CSM) scheme is proposed, where base station (BS) in CR network has K antennas and each SU or PU has one antenna only, and BS supports PUs and SUs by K spatial c...

We propose a distributed spectrum access algorithm for cognitive radio relay networks with multiple primary users (PU) and multiple secondary users (SU) utilizing multiple antennas at their transmitter. The overlay model is considered, where the PUs allow spectrum access opportunities for the SUs, in exchange for the SUs cooperatively relaying the PUs’ data in exchange for both spectrum access ...

The pygmy hog, Sus salvanius, the smallest and rarest extant suid was first described as the only member of the genus Porcula. It is currently regarded as member of the genus Sus and a sister taxon of the domestic pig/Eurasian wild boar (Sus scrofa). Phylogenetic analyses of 2316 bp from three mtDNA loci (control-region, cytochrome b, 16S) by Bayesian inference and statistical testing of altern...

Oneof themost efficientmethods to reduce the dropping andblockingprobabilities of the secondary users (SUs) in cognitive radio networks is channel sub-banding strategy. This means that when all the channels are occupied by the primary and secondary users, then the SUs’ channels can be divided into two sub-bands, and two SUs can use a subband, simultaneously. In this paper, we propose an opportu...