Congenital vertebral malformations (CVM) pose a significant health problem because they can be associated with spinal deformities, such as congenital scoliosis and kyphosis, in addition to various syndromes and other congenital malformations. Additional information remains to be learned regarding the natural history of congenital scoliosis and related health problems. Although significant progr...

OBJECTIVES This study sought to determine the size of the genetic effect (heritability) in families identified by a hypoplastic left heart syndrome (HLHS) proband. BACKGROUND Hypoplastic left heart syndrome is a severe form of cardiovascular malformation (CVM), and it remains a leading cause of infant mortality and childhood morbidity. Familial clustering of HLHS and bicuspid aortic valve (BA...

Higher-precision inferences about impending software failures can be achieved when the same software reliability model that fits failure data from the test interval also fits data from the field interval. If the test and field environments differ significantly in terms of how the software is used, then a single model for the pooled data may not be adequate. In this article we formulate the hypo...

The cluster variation method (CVM) is a hierarchy of approximate variational techniques for discrete (Ising–like) models in equilibrium statistical mechanics, improving on the mean–field approximation and the Bethe–Peierls approximation, which can be regarded as the lowest level of the CVM. In recent years it has been applied both in statistical physics and to inference and optimization problem...

1 The recently proposed rough margin based support vector machine (RMSVM) could tackle the overfitting problem due to outliers effectively with the help of rough margins. However, the standard solvers for them are time consuming and not feasible for large datasets. On the other hand, the core vector machine (CVM) is an optimization technique based on the minimum enclosing ball that can scale up...

Recently, the core vector machine (CVM) has shown significant speedups on classification and regression problems with massive data sets. Its performance is also almost as accurate as other state-ofthe-art SVM implementations. By incorporating the orthogonality constraints to diversify the CVM ensembles, this turns out to speed up the maximum margin discriminant analysis (MMDA) algorithm. Extens...

Human cervicovaginal mucus (CVM) is a viscoelastic gel containing a complex mixture of mucins, shed epithelial cells, microbes and macromolecules, such as antibodies, that together serve as the first line of defense against invading pathogens. Here, to investigate the affinity between IgG and different mucus constituents, we used Fluorescence Recovery After Photobleaching (FRAP) to measure the ...

Congenital cardiovascular malformation (CVM) exhibits familial predisposition, but most of the specific genetic factors involved are unknown. Postulating that rare variants in genes in critical cardiac developmental pathways predispose to CVM, we systematically surveyed three genes of the bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) signaling pathway for novel variants. Exonic, splice site, and untranslate...

Among the various hereditary diseases that have been widely studied in dairy cattle, bovine leukocyte adhesion deficiency (BLAD), deficiency of uridine-5-monophosphate synthase (DUMPS), and complex vertebral malformation (CVM) are noteworthy because of their high impact on overall herd productivity as a consequence of increased calf mortality. The aim of this study was to verify the frequency o...

The J(1)-J(2) Ising model in the square lattice in the presence of an external field is studied by two approaches: the cluster variation method (CVM) and Monte Carlo simulations. The use of the CVM in the square approximation leads to the presence of a new equilibrium phase, not previously reported for this model: an Ising-nematic phase, which shows orientational order but not positional order,...