conclusions considering iran’s economic condition during the last five years, the catastrophic health expenditure headcount ratio was more than 2% in iran. materials and methods this descriptive study on iranian rural and urban households was conducted from april to june 2015. the sample sizes were 19437 rural and 18888 urban households that iranian statistical centre (isc) selected them throug...

A new video coding paradigm, distributed video coding, has been the focus of many recent studies. In this paper we present a simple video coding framework, based on the principles of distributed coding, that can be applied to any video coding standards with minor modifications. The framework allows spatial scalability of the non-reference frames, and does not need any feedback channel between t...

BACKGROUND At the end of the eleven-year conflict in Sierra Leone, a wide range of policies were implemented to address both demand- and supply-side constraints within the healthcare system, which had collapsed during the conflict. This study examines the extent to which households' exposure to financial risks associated with seeking healthcare evolved in post-conflict Sierra Leone. METHOD Th...

An interactive Question Answering (QA) system frequently encounters non-sentential (incomplete) questions. These non-sentential questions may not make sense to the system when a user asks them without the context of conversation. The system thus needs to take into account the conversation context to process the incomplete question. In this work, we present a recurrent neural network (RNN) based...

An encoder-decoder architecture with recurrent neural networks in both the encoder and decoder is a standard approach to the question-answering problem (finding answers to a given question in a piece of text). The Dynamic Coattention[1] encoder is a highly effective encoder for the problem; we evaluated the effectiveness of different decoder when paired with the Dynamic Coattention encoder. We ...

BACKGROUND Much of research on household catastrophic medical expenses in China has focused on less developed areas and little is known about this problem in more developed areas. This study aimed to analyse the incidence and determinants of catastrophic medical expenses in eastern China. METHODS Data were obtained from a health care utilization and expense survey of 11,577 households conduct...

A common method for stopping error propagation in encoded video is to transmit intracoded blocks whenever errors occur, but this results in significantly increased bitrate. Error propagation can also be stopped by synchronizing the state of the encoder to that of the decoder. For example, one may emulate and repeat the entire decoding – including the channel errors – inside the encoder. This ap...

In this work we present an implementation of a fully functional IEEE 802.11p transmitter in software-defined radio. We describe the rapid-prototyping methodology that was used to implement the frame-encoder within the open-source GNU Software Radio (GNURadio) platform [1]. The encoder generates OFDM frames in digital complex base-band representation and uses the USRP2 [2] as digital-to-analog f...

Preparing for catastrophic events, both human-made and natural, is in the national interest and has become a priority since catastrophic events in Oklahoma City, Washington, DC, and New York City. Dentists are a large source of non-physician health manpower that could contribute to the public welfare during catastrophic events that require additional public health human resources. Dentists, by ...