Objective: To outline the major methodological issues appropriate to the use of the population impact number (PIN) and the disease impact number (DIN) in health policy decision making. Design: Review of literature and calculation of PIN and DIN statistics in different settings. Setting: Previously proposed extensions to the number needed to treat (NNT): the DIN and the PIN, which give a populat...

We analyze possible future trends in dissolved inorganic nitrogen (DIN) export by world rivers and associated emissions of nitrous oxide (N2O). Our scenarios either assume that current trends continue or that nitrogen (N) inputs to aquatic systems are reduced as a result of changes in agriculture practices and fuel combustion technologies. The results indicate that moderate changes in the human...

We investigated the properties of an artificial chimeric peptide that contains an Arg-Gly-Asp (RGD)tripeptide, the versatile cell recognition signal of extracellular matrix protein components, coupled to a carboxyl-terminal fragment of the highly specific a-thrombin hibitor, hirudin (residues 53-64): WG-SANGDFEEIPEEYL (RGD-hir~din'~-'~). Hir ~ d i n ~ ~ ' ~ and RGD-hir~din'~-'~ inhibited th...

BACKGROUND Sponges have long been known to be ecologically important members of the benthic fauna on coral reefs. Recently, it has been shown that sponges are also important contributors to the nitrogen biogeochemistry of coral reefs. The studies that have been done show that most sponges are net sources of dissolved inorganic nitrogen (DIN; NH4 (+) and NO3 (-)) and that nitrification, mediated...

Availability and leaching of dissolved inorganic N (DIN = NH4 + NO3) in soil were measured in a periodically flooded forest of the Central Amazon floodplain (v rzea) during one terrestrial phase. Special emphasis was on the effects of a legume and a nonlegume tree species. NH4-N accounted for more than 85% of DIN even at the end of the terrestrial phase although it decreased throughout the expe...

In region-based image segmentation, two models dominate the field: the Mumford-Shah functional and statistical approaches based on Bayesian inference. Whereas the latter allow for numerous ways to describe the statistics of intensities in regions, the first includes spatially smooth approximations. In this paper, we show that the piecewise smooth Mumford-Shah functional is a first order approxi...