RATIONALE AND OBJECTIVES In medical imaging, physicians often estimate a parameter of interest (eg, cardiac ejection fraction) for a patient to assist in establishing a diagnosis. Many different estimation methods may exist, but rarely can one be considered a gold standard. Therefore, evaluation and comparison of different estimation methods are difficult. The purpose of this study was to exami...

The thermal confinement time of a magnetized fusion plasma is essentially determined by turbulent heat conduction across the equilibrium magnetic field. To achieve the study of turbulent thermal diffusivities, Vlasov gyrokinetic description of the magnetically confined plasmas is now commonly adopted, and offers the advantage over fluid models (MHD, gyrofluid) to take into account nonlinear res...

An overview is presented on statistical techniques for the analytic evaluation of integrals for non-resonant, non-resonant depleted, non-resonant cut-off, non-resonant sccreened, and resonant thermonuclear reaction rates. The techniques are based on statistical distribution theory and the theory of Meijer’s G-function and Fox’s H-function. The implementation of Meijer’s G-function in Mathematic...

In this report, we focus on robust image retrieval. We rst describe why robustness is of importance in this kind of search. Then we propose a very general architecture based on three steps. As an assumption, we assume that any image of the database is characterized by a set of features (each feature resulting in a statistical distribution of a particular measure over the image). The rst step of...

Finite mixture models are helpful for uncovering heterogeneity due to hidden structure. Quantitative genetics issues of continuous characters having a finite mixture of Gaussian components as statistical distribution are explored in this article. The partition of variance in a mixture, the covariance between relatives under the supposition of an additive genetic model, and the offspring-parent ...

In this chapter, the authors present the result of a study carried out to develop a pre-assessment model that can be used to carry out a preliminary study on the availability of wind energy resources of a site. 21 years’ (1987 – 2007) monthly average wind speeds for 18 locations in Nigeria were used to create the simple constitutive model. The locations span across the six geopolitical zones of...

Since dispersal research has mainly focused on the evolutionary dynamics of dispersal rates, it remains unclear what shape evolutionarily stable dispersal kernels have. Yet, detailed knowledge about dispersal kernels, quantifying the statistical distribution of dispersal distances, is of pivotal importance for understanding biogeographic diversity, predicting species invasions, and explaining r...

Understanding toxic effects on biological populations across generations is crucial for determining the long-term consequences of chemical pollution in aquatic environments. As a consequence, there is considerable demand for suitable statistical methods to analyze complex multigeneration experimental data. We demonstrate the application of a Bayesian mixture model (with random-effects) to asses...

The problem of estimating a Markov transition matrix to statistically describe the dynamics underlying an observed process is frequently found in the physical and economical sciences. However, little attention has been paid to the fact that such an estimation is associated with statistical uncertainty, which depends on the number of observed transitions between metastable states. In turn, this ...

Coal-mine owners are required to measure miner exposures to respirable dust so that compliance with Federal health regulations can be monitored. This study analyzes the problem of possible underreporting of dust exposures. Using two statistical approaches, data for three mining occupations in 54 large underground coal mines during 1976-1978 are examined for evidence of underreporting. First, re...