OBJECTIVE The purpose of this research was to detect cervical ripening with a new quantitative ultrasound technique. METHODS Cervices of 13 nonpregnant and 65 timed pregnant (days 15, 17, 19, 20, and 21 of pregnancy) Sprague Dawley rats were scanned ex vivo with a 70-MHz ultrasound transducer. Ultrasound scatterer property estimates (scatterer diameter [SD], acoustic concentration [AC], and s...

Some anecdotal evidence demonstrates success of the extreme programming practice in a portion of the software industry. It has also been argued that pair programming, as a part of the extreme programming process, yields higher quality software products in less time. On the other hand, these principles are sometimes questioned with respect to resource allocation and management issues. Although p...

Object-oriented programming is about the creation of reusable classes that are to be extended to capture the specific requirements of the application at hand. However, instead of extending the methods of these classes, programmers often introduce subclasses in which they replace methods with new implementations that are completely detached from the superclass; that is, the subclass method does ...

High resolution peripheral quantitative quantitative computed tomography (HR-pQCT) permits in-vivo assessement of trabecular microstructure at an isotropic voxel size of 82μm. The new imaging modality has potential in the differentiation of certain forms of osteoporosis based on the associated microstructural patterns. In this paper we propose an approach that assesses bone microarchitecture ba...

Mobile robotic mapping is now considered to be a sufficiently mature field with demonstrated successes in various domains. While there has been much progress made in the development of computationally efficient and consistent mapping schemes, it is still murky at best on how these maps can be evaluated. We are motivated by the absence of an accepted standard for quantitatively measuring the per...

This article discusses the use of quantitative risk assessment (QRA) in decision making regarding the safety of complex technological systems. The insights gained by QRA are compared with those from traditional safety methods and it is argued that the two approaches complement each other. It is argued that peer review is an essential part of the QRA process. The importance of risk-informed rath...

Myocardial perfusion MRI is acquired with a T1-weighted dynamic MRI sequence. Fully quantitative analysis of myocardial perfusion MRI allows the absolute quantification of myocardial blood flow (MBF) through the use of complex mathematical modeling. There are essentially two main methods for quantification of absolute MBF: the linear time-invariant model and the compartment model. Maximized con...

To determine the value of simple spirometric measurements in the diagnostic assessment of breathless patients, doctors requesting such tests were asked to predict the likely ventilatory abnormality, expressing these pretest predictions as probabilities. Comparison of these pretest predictions with the test results allowed an analysis of the doctors' ability to identify lung function abnormaliti...

Current initiatives to reduce the high prevalence of nutritional iron deficiency have highlighted the need for reliable epidemiologic methods to assess iron status. The present report describes a method for estimating body iron based on the ratio of the serum transferrin receptor to serum ferritin. Analysis showed a single normal distribution of body iron stores in US men aged 20 to 65 years (m...

This study was conducted to examine the impact of formative and summative assessment in the professional development of Iranian EFL Instructors at universities. Moreover, an attempt was made to figure out whether the formative assessment is more effective than the summative assessment. Since the present work is qualitative/quantitative research in nature, it was conducted within the ethnography...