Background The noninvasive assessment of liver fibrosis in chronic hepatitis C patients is very important as it dictates the disease prognosis and the indication for therapy, narrowing down the use of the liver biopsy. Standardized scores (FibroTest, FibroMax) and imaging techniques (FibroScan) have been validated in this respect. As for the noninvasive prediction of the sustained viral respons...

Biotic indexes are one of several types of measures that are routinely used in biological monitoring in temperate streams and offer interesting possibilities to assess the environmental quality of rivers in the neotropics. Macroinvertebrate communities of seven southeastern Nicaraguan streams were monitored and seven ecological indexes were applied. The results suggest that information from the...

We constructed, stored on disk and reused suux trees and suux binary search trees for C. elegans chromosomes, and measured their performance using orthogonal persistence for Java (PJama). We compare our implementation with the performance of a transient 1 suux tree, and discuss the suitability of such indexes in pursuing our long-term goal of indexing large genomes. We identify the potential fo...

Current models suggest that human form and motion information are initially processed through separate pathways, then integrated in action perception. Testing such a sequential model requires techniques with high temporal resolution. Prior work demonstrated sensitivity of a posterior temporal event-related potential (ERP) effect - the N2 - to biological motion, but did not test whether the N2 i...

PURPOSE This study examined whether any of a series of segmental and whole-word measures of articulatory competence captured more of the variance in impressionistic ratings of severity of involvement in speech delay. It also examined whether knowing the age of the child affected severity ratings. METHOD Ten very experienced speech-language pathologists rated severity of involvement from conve...

Tourism has become a very important and dynamic sector both in the world economy and particular in the developing countries. Its growth affects not only the activities directly linked to tourism but also other sectors. Tourism is already an important sector in some developing countries and will become so for others. Developing countries have been fast growing in tourism industry terms in the wo...

A comparative study was performed on the initial and final bacillary indexes of 213 multibacillary leprosy patients who received 12 doses (Group 1: 128 patients) or 24 doses (Group 2: 85 patients) of multidrug therapy (MDT/WHO) to measure the effectiveness of the two regimens. All patients were evaluated at treatment baseline, 12 months, and 24 months. The reduction in bacillary levels and mean...

In order to evaluate the graduates attending second-round examination objectively, this study established graduate second-round examination evaluate system based on Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method. Evaluation indexes in the system included knowledge structure, scientific research ability and comprehensive quality of graduates attending second-round exa...

This paper demonstrates the advantage of combining a ranked output from a fulltext index and another from an index generated using generic summary texts. Our main ndings are as follows: (1) The combination of a fulltext-based run and a summary-based run can signi cantly outperform either alone, especially when the fulltext evidence is emphasized. (2) The primary role of the summary index in the...