BACKGROUND AND AIM OF THE STUDY An integrated macro/micro approach was used to evaluate flow within the pivots of the Medtronic ADVANTAGE bileaflet heart valve. Results were compared with those obtained with the St. Jude Medical bileaflet heart valve. METHODS The integrated macro/micro approach consists of both a macroscopic hydrodynamic performance assessment and a three-part microscopic flo...

Chinese and Spanish are the most spoken languages in the world. However, there is not much research done in machine translation for this language pair. We experiment with the parallel Chinese-Spanish corpus (United Nations) to explore alternatives of SMT strategies which consist on using a pivot language. Particularly, two well-known alternatives are shown for pivoting: the cascade system and t...

Recent research on multilingual statistical machine translation focuses on the usage of pivot languages in order to overcome resource limitations for certain language pairs. Due to the richness of available language resources, English is in general the pivot language of choice. In this paper, we investigate the appropriateness of Asian languages as pivot languages. Experimental results using st...

Many fast similarity search techniques relies on the use of pivots (specially selected points in the data set). Using these points, specific structures (indexes) are built speeding up the search when queering. Usually, pivot selection techniques are incremental, being the first one randomly chosen. This article explores several techniques to choose the first pivot in a tree-based fast similarit...

Precision agriculture (PA) refers to a series of practices and tools necessary to correctly evaluate farming needs and a high density of soil sensors is an essential part of this effort. However, the accuracy and effectiveness of PA solutions are highly dependent on accurate and timely analysis of the soil conditions. Traditional soil measurements techniques, however, do not provide real-time d...

Knee arthroplasties are designed to accommodate flexion, axial rotation and anteroposterior (AP) translation. Axial rotation during extension varies, with some rotating platform devices allowing unrestricted rotation while some conforming fixed-bearing designs almost none. The purpose of this study was to examine in vivo kinematics of a fixed-bearing medial rotation-type arthroplasty (MRK) duri...

The new sort developed by Sundararajan and Chakarborty (2007), a modification of Quick sort that removes the interchanges, considers the first element of the array as pivot element. In this paper the pivot element taken is a randomly selected element of the array. The effect of binomial parameters are examined on the average sorting complexity using Principal Component Analysis approach. An att...