Among the recent data mining techniques available, the boosting approach has attracted a great deal of attention because of its effective learning algorithm and strong boundaries in terms of its generalization performance. However, the boosting approach has yet to be used in regression problems within the construction domain, including cost estimations, but has been actively utilized in other d...

BACKGROUND The aim of this study is to assess patients' driving ability when wearing surgical shoes following right-sided first metatarsal osteotomy. METHODS From August 2013 to August 2015, 42 consecutive patients (mean age 54.5 years) with right-sided hallux valgus deformity underwent first metatarsal osteotomy. Patients were tested for brake response time (BRT) 1 day preoperatively (contro...

PURPOSE We focused the attention on radiation therapy practices about the gynecological malignancies in Piedmont, Liguria, and Valle d'Aosta to know the current treatment practice and to improve the quality of care. MATERIAL AND METHODS We proposed a cognitive survey to evaluate the standard practice patterns for gynecological cancer management, adopted from 2012 to 2014 by radiotherapy (RT) ...

PURPOSE To evaluate the treatment outcomes with high-dose-rate (HDR) interstitial brachytherapy (HDR-BRT) in head and neck cancers (HNC). MATERIAL AND METHODS Fifty-eight patients with HNC as per American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) TNM staging criteria were analyzed retrospectively between 2008 and 2015. Forty-two patients received external beam radiotherapy (EBRT) with HDR-BRT and 16 p...

Aerobic exercise training combined with resistance training (RT) might prevent the deterioration of vascular function. However, how aerobic exercise performed before or after a bout of RT affects vascular function is unknown. The present study investigates the effect of aerobic exercise before and after RT on vascular function. Thirty-three young, healthy subjects were randomly assigned to grou...

Diversity-generating retroelements (DGRs) are molecular evolution machines that facilitate microbial adaptation to environmental changes. Hypervariation occurs via a mutagenic retrotransposition process from a template repeat (TR) to a variable repeat (VR) that results in adenine-to-random nucleotide conversions. Here we show that reverse transcription of the Bordetella phage DGR is primed by a...

The MPEG bit-rate transcoder with motion compensation, MC-BRT, that exactly derives from a simplified synchronized decoder/encoder cascade, is considered. Such a transcoder is cost effective but lacks features such as spatial and temporal filtering. These features are known to improve the encoder performance at low bit-rates. Such features would be highly desirable in the MC-BRT since most appl...