Electronic portal imaging device (EPID) plays an important role in radiation therapy portal imaging, geometric and dosimetric verification. Consistent image quality and stable radiation response is necessary for proper utilization that requires routine quality assurance (QA). A commercial 'EPID QC' phantom weighing 3.8 kg with a dimension of 25 × 25 × 4.8 cm³ is used for EPID QA. This device ha...

This paper presents a question answering (QA) system called Tikka. Tikka’s approach to QA relies heavily on the semantic annotation of text documents and on the usage of answer extraction patterns. In this way, Tikka applies to QA pattern-based techniques traditionally used in named entity recognition and information extraction. In the experiments presented in this paper, Tikka’s performance is...

The MHC class Ib molecule Qa-1 is the primary ligand for mouse CD94/NKG2A inhibitory receptors expressed on NK cells, in addition to presenting Ags to a subpopulation of T cells. CD94/NKG2A receptors specifically recognize Qa-1 bound to the MHC class Ia leader sequence-derived peptide Qdm. Qdm is the dominant peptide loaded onto Qa-1 under physiological conditions and this peptide has an optima...

The information retrieval (IR) community has investigated many different techniques to retrieve passages from large collections of documents for question answering (QA). In this paper, we specifically examine and quantitatively compare the impact of passage retrieval for QA using sliding windows and disjoint windows. We consider two different data sets, the TREC 2002–2003 QA data set, and 93 wh...

Previous works on evaluating the performance of Question Answering (QA) systems are focused on the evaluation of the precision. In this paper, we developed a mathematic procedure in order to explore new evaluation measures in QA systems considering the answer time. Also, we carried out an exercise for the evaluation of QA systems within a time constraint in the CLEF-2006 campaign, using the pro...

OBJECTIVES To investigate the impact of vascular access flow (Qa) on vascular and all-cause mortality in chronic haemodialysis (HD) patients. DESIGN Observational cohort study. SETTING Single centre. PARTICIPANTS Adult chronic HD patients at the HD unit of Shin Kong Wu Ho-Su Memorial Hospital between 1 January 2003 and 31 December 2003 were recruited. Patients were excluded if they had ar...

Decreasing vascular access flow (Qa) is an important predictor of future access thrombosis and malfunction for hemodialysis (HD) patients. Among all of the methods for determining Qa, the variable pump flow (VPF) Doppler method measures Qa according to the change in Doppler signal between the arterial and the venous needles under different pump flow. After this technique was combined with spect...

For most computed tomography (CT) simulators, radiation therapists must remove the flat couch top to perform daily CT quality assurance (QA), and then use separate tools to perform localization-laser QA. This process wastes time and effort and creates the opportunity for accidents to occur. In this study, we tested a simple yet comprehensive daily QA program and phantom that we designed for CT ...

This paper is the first analysis of caching architectures for Question Answering (QA). We introduce the novel concept of multi-layer collaborative caches, where: (a) each resource intensive QA component is allocated a distinct segment of the cache, and (b) the overall cache is transparently spread across all nodes of the distributed system. We empirically analyze the proposed architecture using...