AIMS Acute coronary artery occlusion (ACO) occurs in ∼30% of patients with non-ST-segment elevation-acute coronary syndrome (NSTE-ACS). We investigated the ability of a regional non-invasive myocardial work index (MWI) to identify ACO. METHODS AND RESULTS Segmental strain analysis was performed before coronary angiography in 126 patients with NSTE-ACS. Left ventricular (LV) pressure was estim...

The analog circuit design is a hard complex and time consuming task. Recently, Ant Colony Optimization algorithm (ACO) has emerged as a powerful and useful method for optimal design of analog circuits, based on the finding of the good compromise between the most important performances or merits figure of a given circuit. As a drawback it needs longer time execution when compared for instance to...

This paper investigates the capabilities of the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) meta-heuristic for solving the maximum clique problem, the goal of which is to find a largest set of pairwise adjacent vertices in a graph. We propose and compare two different instantiations of a generic ACO algorithm for this problem. Basically, the generic ACO algorithm successively generates maximal cliques throug...

The accountable care organization (ACO) model of health care delivery is rapidly being implemented under government and private-sector initiatives. The model requires that each ACO have a defined patient population for which the ACO will be held accountable for both total cost of care and quality performance. However, there is no empirical evidence about the best way to define how patients are ...

We study the class of polynomial threshold functions using harmonic analysis and apply the results to derive lower bounds related to ACo functions. A Boolean function is polynomial threshold if it can be represented as a sign function of a sparse polynomial (one that consists of a polynomial number of terms). Our main result is that the class of polynomial threshold functions can be characteriz...

BACKGROUND The Accountable Care Organization (ACO) is one of the new models of health care delivery in the U.S. To date, little is known about the characteristics of health care organizations that have joined ACOs. We report on the findings of a survey of primary care clinics, the objective of which was to investigate the opinions of clinic management about participation in ACOs, and the charac...

In this article, we study the relationship between the two techniques known as ant colony optimization (ACO) and stochastic gradient descent. More precisely, we show that some empirical ACO algorithms approximate stochastic gradient descent in the space of pheromones, and we propose an implementation of stochastic gradient descent that belongs to the family of ACO algorithms. We then use this i...

The crowding population based ant colony optimization algorithm (CP-ACO) uses a different pheromone update in comparison to other ACO algorithms. In this paper, crowding population based ant colony optimization algorithm is proposed to solve service restoration problem. The most notable achievement featured in this paper is run time reduction of algorithm to solve the service restoration task. ...

In this article we study the feasibility of the Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO) algorithm for finding optimal Kanban allocations in Kanban systems represented by Stochastic Petri Net (SPN) models. Like other optimisation algorithms inspired by nature, such as Simulated Annealing/Genetic Algorithms, the ACO algorithm contains a large number of adjustable parameters. Thus we study the influence of ...