Based on experiences with international standardization of analytical methods for milk products are described the problems and solutions of collaboratively developing and testing reference and other standard methods for trace analysis of milk products. Contaminations from laboratory equipment, chemicals and air must be eliminated and interferences corrected. Precautions traditionally applied bu...

In fuzzy clustering, the fuzzy c-means (FCM) algorithm is the most commonly used clustering method. However, the FCM algorithm is usually affected by initializations. Incorporating FCM into switching regressions, called the fuzzy c-regressions (FCR), has also the same drawback as FCM, where bad initializations may cause difficulties in obtaining appropriate clustering and regression results. In...

Thirty-eight lactating dairy cows including 6 ruminally cannulated cows were used in a feeding study to assess effects of feed sources that differed in dietary nonfiber carbohydrate (NFC) composition and ruminal degradability of dietary protein (RDP) on production, ruminal, and plasma measures. The design was a partially balanced, incomplete Latin square with three 21-d periods and a 3 x 2 fact...

OBJECTIVE The objective of the study was to determine the effects of increasing levels of metabolizable protein (MP) on lactation performance and nitrogen (N) efficiencies in lactating dairy cows. METHODS Nine multiparous cows in mid lactation [113±25 days in milk] received three treatments in a 3×3 Latin square design with a period length of 21 days. The treatments were three diets, designed...

In medical applications it is very important for a physician to be informed of patient situation as soon as possible especially in emergency circumstances. Therefore all efficient agents in patient health must be fast even medical algorithms such as clustering ones. Among clustering methods Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) clustering has been frequently used for segmentation of medical images. In this paper...

Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCM) are a proper knowledge-based tool for modeling and simulation. They are denoted as directed weighted graphs with feedback allowing causal reasoning. According to the transformation function used for updating the activation value of concepts, FCM can be grouped in two large clusters: discrete and continuous. It is notable that FCM having discrete outputs never exhibit ...

BACKGROUND Unexplained fatigue is often left untreated or treated with antidepressants. This randomized, placebo-controlled, single-blinded study evaluated the efficacy and tolerability of single-dose intravenous ferric carboxymaltose (FCM) in iron-deficient, premenopausal women with symptomatic, unexplained fatigue. METHODS Fatigued women (Piper Fatigue Scale [PFS] score ≥5) with iron defici...

The objective of this experiment was to compare metabolic and milk production parameters in dairy cows supplemented and nonsupplemented with rumen-protected choline (RPC) during the transition period. Twenty-three nonlactating, multiparous, pregnant Holstein cows were ranked by BW and BCS 21 d before expected date of calving and immediately were assigned to receive (n = 12) or not receive (cont...

Standard FCM algorithm takes the pixel gray-scale information into account only, while ignoring the spatial location of pixels, so the standard FCM algorithm is sensitive to noise. This paper present a pavement image segmentation algorithm based on FCM algorithm using neighborhood information. The presented algorithm introduces neighborhood information into membership function to improve the st...