XML has emerged as a popular formatting and exchanging language for nearly all kinds of data, including scientific data. Efficient query processing in XML databases is of great importance for numerous applications. Trees or twigs are the core structural elements in XML data and queries. Recently, a holistic computing approach has been proposed for extended XML twig patterns, i.e., B-Twigs (Bool...

Preeclampsia is a pregnancy-related disease afflicting 3-7% of pregnancies worldwide and leads to maternal and infant morbidity and mortality. The disease is of placental origin and is commonly described as a disease of two stages. A variety of preeclampsia animal models have been proposed, but all of them have limitations in fully recapitulating the human disease. Based on the research questio...

We investigate the use of a constructive solid geometry (CSG) representation of polygons in testing if points fall within them; this representation consists of a tree whose nodes are either Boolean operators or edges. By preprocessing the polygons, we seek (1) to construct a space-conserving data structure that supports point-in-polygon tests, (2) to prune as many edges as possible while mainta...

In recent years, the Open Street Map (OSM) project collected a large repository of spatial network data containing a rich variety of information about traffic lights, road types, points of interest etc.. Formally, this network can be described as a multi-attribute graph, i.e. a graph considering multiple attributes when describing the traversal of an edge. In this demo, we present our framework...

This paper considers a ray-casting point-in polyhedron test. Although it is conceptually the simple extension of a well-known point-in-polygon ray-casting algorithm, various practical problems appear in 3D, especially, when the boundary of a geometric object is represented as a triangulated surface. When a larger number of points have to be tested regarding their positions on the considered geo...

BACKGROUND The purpose of this study was to assess the effect of a vanishing twin on the risk of being small-for-gestational age (SGA) in in vitro fertilization (IVF) singletons. METHODS The study included 642 survivors of a vanished co-twin, 5237 primary singletons and 3678 primary twins. The survivor cohort was subdivided according to gestational age at the time of vanishing to give groups ...

Current understanding of the complex process of wound repair is based on decades of study. Integral to this understanding has been the use of in vitro and in vivo models to uncover the key molecular players. Now that major wound processes are more fully understood, therapeutic strategies can be developed to manipulate wound repair. Particularly important areas for future research include develo...

Functional data that are not perfectly aligned in the sense of not showing peaks and valleys at the precise same locations possess phase variation. This is commonly addressed by preprocessing the data via a warping procedure. As opposed to treating phase variation as a nuisance effect, it is advantageous to recognize it as a possible important source of information for clustering. It is illustr...

Two methods for colorimetric characterization of color scanner are proposed based on the measures of perceptual color difference error. The first method is used to minimize the total color differences between the actual and predicted color samples. The second one, which is a generalization of the existing cubic-root preprocessing technique, derives the mapping between the p’th root of scanner r...