In medical research data are often collected serially on subjects. The statistical analysis of such data is often inadequate in two ways: it may fail to settle clinically relevant questions and it may be statistically invalid. A commonly used method which compares groups at a series of time points, possibly with t tests, is flawed on both counts. There may, however, be a remedy, which takes the...

There is an increasing interest in extracting spatial information from acoustic sound fields, for instance for databased rendering of virtual scenes. Analyzing an acoustic sound field with respect to suitable spatial components, e.g., plane waves, can be performed by evaluating signals captured by a number of spatially distinct microphones, i.e., microphone arrays. Typically, the signal acquisi...

Spreading of aqueous surfactant solution droplets over hydrophobic substrates proceeds in one slow stage at concentration of surfactants below some critical value and in two stages if the surfactant concentration is above the critical value: the fast and relatively short first stage is followed by a slower second stage. It is shown that the kinetics of a slow spreading at concentrations below t...

INTRODUCTION Nursing documentation is one of the main parts of clinical documentation. Poor knowledge of nurses in documentation methods could bring about problems for patients and nurses. It is very important to promote nurses' knowledge and skills in this regard through effective teaching methods. The aim of this study was to use Team-Based Learning (TBL) to teach nursing documentation for nu...

A two-stage method for the computational prediction of the structure of protein-ligand complexes is proposed. Given an experimentally determined structure of the protein, in the first stage a large number of plausible ligand conformations is generated using the fast docking algorithm FlexX. In the second stage these conformations are minimized and reranked using a method based on a classical fo...

Liver segmentation is an important prerequisite for planning of surgical interventions like liver tumor resections. In this paper we propose a method for automated liver segmentation from images that is invariant in provisions of size, shape and intensity values. The system consists of three stages. In the first stage of the computerized system, Preprocessing of an image is done to reduce the n...

BACKGROUND In this paper a novel method for prostate segmentation in transrectal ultrasound images is presented. METHODS A segmentation procedure consisting of four main stages is proposed. In the first stage, a locally adaptive contrast enhancement method is used to generate a well-contrasted image. In the second stage, this enhanced image is thresholded to extract an area containing the pro...

A surprising increase in seismicity started in and around Monticello Reservoir, South Carolina in December 1996, and by the end of 1999, over 700 earthquakes with 0.4 ML 2.5 had been located. This seismicity occurred in a new hypocentral region and filled the gaps in earlier seismicity at depths shallower than 2 km. The seismicity occurred in four episodes each with at least one earthquake of m...

A strain of the virus of poliomyelitis has been described which has passed through several stages of virulence as tested upon monkeys. The first stage consisted of the adaptation of the original human virus to the monkey. In this process high virulence was readily achieved. The adapted, virulent strain of virus was passed regularly through monkeys and maintained its activity for about 3 years, ...

In this issue, Robert Hayes has written provocatively about the implications of the digital economy for Operations Management (OM). Here I examine and illustrate a simple four-stage framework for thinking about these implications: advances in digital technology (stage 1) lead to business developments (stage 2), which impact the views of OM-relevant thought leaders (stage 3), which influence the...