STUDY DESIGN Measurement and normalization of disc geometry parameters for several animal models used in disc research. OBJECTIVES To compare normalized values of disc geometry to the human disc geometry to aid in the selection and interpretation of animal model studies. SUMMARY OF BACKGROUND DATA Animal models are widely used to study intervertebral disc degeneration and to evaluate disc t...

Exercise presents a considerable stress to the pulmonary system and ventilation-perfusion (Va/Q) heterogeneity increases with exercise, affecting the efficiency of gas exchange. In particular, prolonged heavy exercise and maximal exercise are known to increase Va/Q heterogeneity and these changes persist into recovery. We hypothesized that the spatial heterogeneity of pulmonary perfusion would ...

An areal rainfall estimator based on differential propagation phase is proposed and evaluated using the Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre (BMRC) CPOL radar and a dense gauge network located near Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia. Twelve storm events during the summer rainy season (December 1998–March 1999) are analyzed and radar–gauge comparisons are evaluated in terms of normalized err...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study is to evaluate the airway dynamics of the upper airway as depicted on cine MRI in children with tracheotomy tubes during two states of airflow through the upper airway. MATERIALS AND METHODS Sagittal fast gradient echo cine MR images of the supra-glottic airway were obtained with a 1.5T MRI scanner on seven children with tracheotomy tubes. Two sets of image...

OBJECTIVE The present study aimed to assess the effects of exercise with dietary restriction on cardiac autonomic activity, arterial stiffness, and cardiovascular biomarkers in obese individuals. METHODS Seventeen obese adults completed an 8-week exercise and dietary program. Anthropometry, body composition, and multiple biochemical markers were measured. We used carotid-femoral pulse wave ve...

Feature Filtering is an approach that is widely used for dimensionality reduction in text categorization. In this approach feature scoring methods are used to evaluate features leading to selection. Thresholding is then applied to select the highest scoring features either locally or globally. In this paper, we investigate several local and global feature selection methods. The usage of Standar...

We investigate the local times of a continuous-time Markov chain on an arbitrary discrete state space. For fixed finite range of the Markov chain, we derive an explicit formula for the joint density of all local times on the range, at any fixed time. We use standard tools from the theory of stochastic processes and finite-dimensional complex calculus. We apply this formula in the following dire...

We establish strong large deviation results for an arbitrary sequence of random variables under some assumptions on the normalized cumulant generating function. In other words, we give asymptotic expansions for the tail probabilities of the same kind as those obtained by Bahadur and Rao (Ann. Math. Stat. 31:1015–1027, 1960) for the sample mean. We consider both the case where the random variabl...