IRRA (IR-Ra) group participated in the 2012 Web track, with a system implementing a non-parametric term weighting method based on measuring the divergence from independence (DFI). This is the third year of participation for IRRA group, following the participations in TREC 2009 and 2010 Web tracks. In this year, the aim is to evaluate a new DFI-based term weighting model developed on the basis o...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate whether increasing antioxidant intake in men with high levels of DNA damage or lipid peroxidation improves gestational results in couples with history of recurrent embryo loss. DESIGN Descriptive study (case series). SETTING Early recurrent embryo loss program at the University of Antioquia, Medellín, Colombia. PATIENT(S) Seventeen men whose spouses had a history of ...

BACKGROUND Airway management is a key component of prehospital care for seriously ill and injured patients. Although endotracheal intubation has been a commonly performed prehospital procedure for nearly three decades, the safety and efficacy profile of prehospital intubation has been challenged in the last decade. Reported intubation success rates vary widely, and established benchmarks are la...

BACKGROUND The purpose of this study was to evaluate the prognostic significance of the molecular detection of cytokeratin 19 (CK-19) mRNA-positive cells in the peripheral blood of women with operable breast cancer after the completion of adjuvant chemotherapy. PATIENTS AND METHODS Blood from 161 patients with stage I and II breast cancer, obtained after the completion of adjuvant chemotherap...

Twenty-four 35-day-old lambs were distributed to a completely randomized design with 3 treatments to study the effects of number of feeding buckets per pen on performance, haematology and behaviour indicators. Treatments consisted of 8 (T1), 4 (T2) or 2 (T3) feeding buckets/pen (8 lambs/pen). During the experiment, concentrate was fed at 08:30 in individual feeders. Daily dry matter intake (DMI...

Two data sets were developed to evaluate and refine feed energy predictions with the beef National Research Council (NRC, 1996) model level 1. The first data set included pen means of group-fed cattle from 31 growing trials (201 observations) and 17 finishing trials (154 observations) representing over 7,700 animals fed outside in dirt lots. The second data set consisted of 15 studies with indi...

BACKGROUND Artificial insemination is not as widely used in horses as in other domestic species, such as dairy cattle and pigs, partly because of the wide variation in sperm quality between stallion ejaculates and partly due to decreased fertility following the use of cooled transported spermatozoa. Furthermore, predictive tests for sperm fertilising ability are lacking. The objective of the pr...

Introduction: Blood vessels can be non-invasively visualized from a digital fundus image (DFI). Several studies have shown an association between cardiovascular risk and vascular features obtained DFI. Recent advances in computer vision segmentation enable automatising DFI blood vessel segmentation. There is need for resource that automatically compute vasculature biomarkers (VBM) these segment...

For further gravitational wave (GW) detections, it is significant to invent a technique reduce all kinds of mirror displacement noise dominant at low frequencies for ground-based detectors. The neutron displacement-noise-free interferometer (DFI) one the tools lower frequencies. In this paper, we describe simplified configuration DFI in terms incidence direction. new configuration, neutrons ent...

introduction: the amount of expression of bax and bcl-2 genes in infertile men’s sperm as well as its association with sperm parameters and dna fragmentation index is an issue which has not been studied yet. in this research, it is assumed that up-regulation of bax and downregulation of bcl-2 are directly associated with sperm dna fragmentation. methods: after obtaining semen samples from the p...