BACKGROUND Lack of adherence to international normalised ratio (INR) monitoring in rheumatic heart disease (RHD) patients is a contributor to cardio-embolic complications. This population-based observational study investigated whether the distance between home and an INR clinic affects the maintenance of therapeutic INR in RHD patients on warfarin. METHODS Residential addresses, INR clinics, ...

After the quasi-extinction of much of the European vertebrate megafauna during the last few centuries, many reintroduction projects seek to restore decimated populations. However, the future of numerous species depends on the management scenarios of metapopulations where the flow of individuals can be critical to ensure their viability. This is the case of the bearded vulture Gypaetus barbatus,...

INTRODUCTION Access to radiation therapy (RT) underlies optimal care for prostate and breast cancer patients. This study investigates the impact of opening a new RT clinic on distance and road travel time to RT, and overall utilisation for prostate and breast cancer patients over a 3-year period in North Queensland (NQ), Australia. METHODS The study used retrospective audit of two radiotherap...

To solve many-objective routing problems, this paper generalizes the Multi-Objective Ant Colony System (MOACS) algorithm, a well-known Multi-Objective Ant Colony Optimization (MOACO) metaheuristic proposed in 2003. This Generalized MOACS algorithm is used to solve a Split-Delivery/Mixed-Fleet Vehicle Routing Problem (SD/MFVRP) under different constraints, resulting from the mathematical modelli...

We propose a robust approach to the problem of ego-motion estimation using a mobile stereo platform. Stereo is computed for every frame obtaining 3D points of the environment. In addition optical flow establishes correspondences between points in successive frames. A smoothness motion constraint is applied in order to detect flow vectors which are inconsistent with the current ego-motion. The o...

The magnitude of personal travel in the industrialised society has increased tremendously. In Sweden, the average travelled distance per person is currently around 40 km per day (see Figure 10.1). Travelling distances are related to speed. Studies show that the time spent on travel tends to be relatively constant at around one hour a day on average. The historical development of new transport t...

These notes are based on scribe notes by Marios Papaefthymiou and Mike Kluger-man. 1 Euclidean TSP Consider the travelling salesman problem in the plane. Given n points in the plane, we would like to nd a tour that visits all of them and that minimizes the distance travelled, where the distance between two points is given by the Euclidean distance. This problem will be denoted by ETSP (Euclidea...

The impact of the Mongol invasions of the Middle East has been the subject of extensive research, especially in the last few decades. Scholars have evaluated the damage and the benefits brought by the Mongols to the Islamic world in different fields such as the military, religion, politics, economy and culture. Despite this, in the case of Anatolia, the Mongol period is still under-studied when...