Decreasing vascular access flow (Qa) is an important predictor of future access thrombosis and malfunction for hemodialysis (HD) patients. Among all of the methods for determining Qa, the variable pump flow (VPF) Doppler method measures Qa according to the change in Doppler signal between the arterial and the venous needles under different pump flow. After this technique was combined with spect...

For most computed tomography (CT) simulators, radiation therapists must remove the flat couch top to perform daily CT quality assurance (QA), and then use separate tools to perform localization-laser QA. This process wastes time and effort and creates the opportunity for accidents to occur. In this study, we tested a simple yet comprehensive daily QA program and phantom that we designed for CT ...

This paper is the first analysis of caching architectures for Question Answering (QA). We introduce the novel concept of multi-layer collaborative caches, where: (a) each resource intensive QA component is allocated a distinct segment of the cache, and (b) the overall cache is transparently spread across all nodes of the distributed system. We empirically analyze the proposed architecture using...

This paper describes a question answering system and its various models handling the definition, factoid and list questions defined in the TREC12 Main task. Specially, we model the factoid QA task as QA entities or Events. Each QA event comprises of elements describing different facets of the event like time, location, object, action etc. By analyzing the external knowledge to discover the QA e...

The major histocompatibility complex class Ib protein, Qa-1(b), serves as a ligand for murine CD94/NKG2A natural killer (NK) cell inhibitory receptors. The Qa-1(b) peptide-binding site is predominantly occupied by a single nonameric peptide, Qa-1 determinant modifier (Qdm), derived from the leader sequence of H-2D and L molecules. Five anchor residues were identified in this study by measuring ...

AIM To evaluate HBV quasispecies (QA) complexity in the preCore/Core regions in relation to HBeAg status, and explore QA changes under natural evolution and nucleoside analogue (NUC) treatment. METHODS Ultra-deep pyrosequencing of HBV preCore/Core regions in 30 sequential samples (baseline [diagnosis], treatment-free, and treatment-nonresponse) from 10 retrospectively selected patients groupe...

Qa-1b binds a peptide (AMAPRTLLL), referred to as Qdm (for Qa-1 determinant modifier), derived from the signal sequence of murine class Ia molecules. This peptide binds with high affinity and accounts for almost all of the peptides associated with this molecule. Human histocompatibility leukocyte antigen (HLA)-E, a homologue of Qa-1b, binds similar peptides derived from human class Ia molecules...

This paper describes the TALP-QA system in the context of the CLEF 2005 Spanish Monolingual Question Answering (QA) evaluation task. TALP-QA is a multilingual open-domain QA system that processes both factoid (normal and temporally restricted) and definition questions. The approach to factoid questions is based on in-depth NLP tools and resources to create semantic information representation. A...

To assess the neurotoxic properties of the glutamate agonist quisqualic acid (QA) in immature brain, we injected this compound (100 nmol QA/1 microliter) directly into the striatum of 7-day-old rats. QA produced neuronal necrosis and glial infiltration in 14 pups and reduced the size of the striatum and hippocampus on the side of injection. Intracerebral injection of QA provides a new method fo...

Question Answering (QA) is an emerging important field in Information Retrieval. In a QA system the archive of previous questions asked from the system makes a collection full of useful factual nuggets. This paper makes an initial attempt to investigate the reuse of facts contained in the archive of previous questions to help and gain performance in answering future related factoid questions. I...