BACKGROUND Kulldorff's spatial scan statistic has been one of the most widely used statistical methods for automatic detection of clusters in spatial data. One limitation of this method lies in the fact that it has to rely on scan windows with predefined shapes in the search process, and therefore it cannot detect cluster with arbitrary shapes. We employ a new neighbor-expanding approach and in...

anzali wetland is one of the most important aquatic ecosystems of iran located in south of the caspian sea. this wetland is a habitat for valuable fishes and aquatic animals which have an important role in life cycle of this ecosystem. agroup of the pollutants entering these wetlands is the persistent organic pollutants. this pollutants has a wide range of ingredients in the environment and are...

been rising, it represents only 20% of method use among 15–44-year-old women.7 In addition, the widespread availability of modern, efficient contraceptives—sterilization, the pill, IUD, implant and injectable—contributes to low rates of condom use. However, while these methods are more effective than barrier methods at preventing pregnancy, do not reduce sensitivity or pleasure during intercour...

Purpose: Commonly used diffusion weighted (DW) imaging such as DW spin echo (SE) type echo planar imaging (DW-SE-EPI) is known to be a snapshot-like acquisition and to have a relatively high signal-to-noise ratio. Spiral MRI sequence (SPIRAL) has characteristics similar to these of EPI, but it has rarely been used for diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI). In vivo DW-SPIRAL of the rat brain has almo...

This paper addresses DW design problems, with the goal of improving the DW logical design process. Some of the existing work in transformation oriented methodologies for DW design construct the DW starting from an EntityRelationship model of the source database, and arrive to a conceptual or highlevel-logical dimensional model of the DW. We propose a mechanism for obtaining the DW logical schem...