PURPOSE Time spent in "sports/outdoor activity" has shown a negative association with incident myopia during childhood. We investigated the association of incident myopia with time spent outdoors and physical activity separately. METHODS Participants in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) were assessed by noncycloplegic autorefraction at ages 7, 10, 11, 12, and 15 yea...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the accuracy of noncycloplegic refraction compared with cycloplegic refraction in diagnosing refractive error in primary school children in southern Thailand. MATERIAL AND METHOD This is a cross-sectional study. One hundred twenty children aged from 6-13 years who had visual acuity of 20/40 or worse in at least one eye were included. All the children underwent autorefrac...

A large variety of supervised or unsupervised learning algorithms is based on a metric or similarity measure of the patterns in input space. Often, the standard euclidean metric is not sufficient and much more efficient and powerful approximators can be constructed based on more complex similarity calculations such as kernels or learning metrics. This procedure is benefitial for data in euclide...

The Morphon, a non-rigid registration method is presented and applied to a number of registration applications. The algorithm takes a protoype image (or volume) and morphs it into a target image using an iterative, multi-resolution technique. The deformation process is done in three steps: displacement estimation, deformation field accumulation and deformation. The framework could be described ...

We describe a method allowing users to walk through 3D scenes using Macromedia Flash player. The method is optimised for low data transfer rates and low demands on the displaying device, which makes it suited especially for mobile devices. The walkthroughs are partially pre-computed on a server and partially calculated directly on the PDA. Non-photorealistic rendering is used for more eye-pleas...

We describe a method for proving non-termination of term rewriting systems that do not admit looping reductions. As certificates of non-termination, we employ regular (tree) automata. 1998 ACM Subject Classification D.1.1, D.3.1, F.4.1, F.4.2, I.1.1, I.1.3

A 78-year-old woman with burn-induced cervico-mento-sternal scar contracture was scheduled for laparoscopic cholecystectomy. During inhalational induction of sevoflurane, her airway patency deteriorated. The right lateral position and assist ventilation using a breathing bag dramatically improved her airway patency.

Autotrophic nitrogen removal through sequential partial nitritation and anammox reactions can be achieved in biofilm reactors by controlling the oxygen concentration in the bulk liquid in such a way that nitrite oxidizers are outcompeted by anammox bacteria. In the case of granular sludge reactors, the granule size may influence the optimal range of oxygen concentration, as has been confirmed i...

The need to reduce energy input and enhance energy recovery from wastewater is driving renewed interest in high-rate activated sludge treatment (i.e. short hydraulic and solids retention times (HRT and SRT, respectively)). This process generates short SRT activated sludge stream, which should be highly degradable. However, the evaluation of anaerobic digestion of short SRT sludge has been limit...

It is quite well known that the diffusers are required for efficient conversion of the dynamic head generated by the impeller in a centrifugal fan. Hence the flow into the diffuser passage plays a crucial role in determining the efficiency of conversion. The flow in the region bounded by the impeller exit and the diffuser entry i.e. the radial clearance space is generally considered to be highl...