The culture of Mycobacterium tuberculosis using parallel inoculation of a solid culture medium and a liquid broth provides the gold standard for the diagnosis of tuberculosis. Here, we evaluated a chlorhexidine decontamination-MOD9 solid medium protocol versus the standard NALC-NaOH-Bactec 960 MGIT protocol for the diagnosis of pulmonary tuberculosis by culture. Three-hundred clinical specimens...

In this study I investigated the hypothesis that alterations in macroalgal cover significantly influenced the growth rates of coral colonies on the fringing reefs of Discovery Bay, Jamaica. For colonies of Montastrea annularis, Porites astreoides, and Sidastrea siderea, radial growth rates were significantly (p<0.02) higher at Dairy Bull (where Diadema antillarum had removed macroalgal cover) t...

In this paper, we consider series-parallel and parallel-series systems with independent subsystems consisting of dependent homogeneous components whose joint lifetimes are modeled by an Archimedean copula. Then, by considering two such systems with different numbers of components within each subsystem, we establish hazard rate and reversed hazard rate orderings between the two system lifetimes,...

This research has been conducted to establish a wheel-point device and evaluate its efficiency (precision, accuracy and time) with respect to the estimation of canopy percent in a pilot Artemisia stand in Khabr region of Baft, Kerman province, Iran in 2015. Several transects with different lengths (30, 60, 90, 120, 150 and 180 m) were established using the randomized sampling block with 5 repli...

The majority of the catchment (area 0.95 km2) is corered by a thin deposit of blanket peat. Peats, over 5 m deep in places, occur in small valley depressions. Two transects across the depressions were selected for a radiocarbon and palaeoecological study into peatland initiation and development (Jones, 1987). As in the Loch Dungeon study, analysis of pollen from peat profiles enables a picture ...

The paper presents an automatic method for liver vasculature segmentation in volumetric images obtained during Computed Tomography (CT) patient examination. The method, apart from the CT image, also requires an additional image containing binary liver mask. A modified multiscale vesselness filter (VF) performs vasculature detection. VF response is used to determine the starting voxels for the s...

Marine bird at-sea distributions are surveyed using two standardized population surveying techniques: line transects and strip transects (Buckland et al. 1993). Line transects use the perpendicular distances to individual sightings to model a detection function, which quantifies the probability of observing an object given its distance from the trackline. This approach allows for speciesspecifi...

This study describes a step-by-step process used to design an effective benthic video survey component of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands long-term monitoring program. Documenting abundance of major benthic groups at relatively large spatial scales, at the appropriate localities, can empower monitoring programs with the capacity to detect changes over time and assess whether ma...