Most countries have acceded to at least one global or regional covenant or treaty confirming the right to health. After years of international discussions on human rights, many governments are now moving towards practical implementation of their commitments. A practical example may be of help to those governments who aim to translate their international treaty obligations into practice. WHO's E...

Since idiopathic chronic eosinophilic pneumonia (ICEP) and asthma are frequently associated, their possible reciprocal influence on clinical presentation and evolution were investigated. The clinical and follow-up features of 53 cases of ICEP, of which 41 (77%) had asthma, were reviewed retrospectively. Asthma preceded the diagnosis of ICEP in 26 patients, was contemporaneous in eight patients,...

Extraction of primitives, such as lines, edges and curves, is often a key step in an image analysis procedure. The most popular technique for curve detection is based on the Hough transform. The original formulation of the Hough transform is inherently discrete. It is therefore difficult to assess which properties are inherent to the transform-based technique and which are due to its discrete n...

Organic Computing (OC) is an upcoming research area with strong relationships to the ideas and concepts of agent-based systems. Therefore, in this paper we will have a closer look at agent systems, organic computing systems (as well as autonomic computing systems) and state commonalities and examine divergences between them. We then propose a common view on these technologies and show how they ...