BACKGROUND & AIMS Some patients with diarrhea-predominant irritable bowel syndrome (IBS-D) may have undiagnosed celiac sprue (CS). Because the symptoms of CS respond to a gluten-free diet, testing for CS in IBS may prevent years of morbidity and attendant expense. We sought to determine whether this might be a cost-effective diagnostic strategy in IBS-D. METHODS We used decision analysis to c...

GOALS AND BACKGROUND Relatives of patients with celiac disease have an increased lifetime risk of developing celiac disease. Repeat screening of relatives would improve diagnosis rates, but at significant cost. Genetic testing before screening would potentially reduce costs by eliminating HLA-DQ2 and DQ8 negative patients who are at extremely low risk for developing celiac disease. STUDY A de...

Quality of any software system mainly depends on how much time testing take place, what kind of testing methodologies are used, the complexity of software and the amount of efforts put by software developers subject to the cost and time constraint. More time developers spend on testing more errors can be removed leading to better reliable software. On the contrary, if testing time is too short,...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate DNA testing for detecting hereditary haemochromatosis (HHC) in subgroups of patients suspected of having the disorder and in family members of those diagnosed with HHC. DATA SOURCES Major electronic databases, searched from inception to April 2007. REVIEW METHODS A systematic review was undertaken using a priori methods and a de novo model developed to assess costs and...

Introduction to ITAM program and ATTACC module The Department of Defense is responsible for the management of over 25 million acres of land, making it the 5 largest federal land management agency (Mendoza, et al, 2002). The Army's Integrated Training Area Management (ITAM) Program is responsible for the management of training lands and a formal strategy for the sustained use of the Army's train...

Testing takes a considerable amount of the time and resources that are spent on producing software. Testing accounts for approximately 50% of the cost of the development of a software system. Therefore, techniques to reduce the cost of testing would be useful. This paper presents an automatic test-data generation technique that uses a genetic algorithm (GA). This technique applies the concepts ...

The necessity of air-conditioning causes the enormous energy use of underground train stations. Exergy and thermoeconomic analysis is applied to the annual operation of the air-conditioning system of a large underground train station in Taiwan. The current installation and the monitored data are taken to be the base case, which is then compared to three different optimized designs. The total re...

Studies have shown that random testing can be an effective testing strategy. One of tbe goals of testing is to estimate the reliability of tbe program from tbe test outcomes. In tbis paper we extend tbe Tbayer-Lipow-Nelson reliability model to account for tbe cost of errors. Also we compare random with partition testing by looking at upper confidence bounds for the cost weighted performance of ...

In vitro testing: In vitro testing was performed using DIMSCAN, a semiautomatic fluorescencebased digital image microscopy system that quantifies viable (using fluorescein diacetate [FDA]) cell numbers in tissue culture multiwell plates [1]. Cells were incubated in the presence of drug for 96 hours. Mean fluorescence values were determined for each concentration tested and then normalized to th...

‎Let $G$ be a graph without an isolated vertex‎, ‎the normalized Laplacian matrix $tilde{mathcal{L}}(G)$‎ ‎is defined as $tilde{mathcal{L}}(G)=mathcal{D}^{-frac{1}{2}}mathcal{L}(G)mathcal{D}^{-frac{1}{2}}$‎, where ‎$mathcal{D}$ ‎is a‎ diagonal matrix whose entries are degree of ‎vertices ‎‎of ‎$‎G‎$‎‎. ‎The eigenvalues of‎ $tilde{mathcal{L}}(G)$ are ‎called as ‎the ‎normalized Laplacian eigenva...