In a 1966 American Naturalist article, G. C. Williams initiated the study of reproductive effort (RE) with the prediction that longer-lived organisms ought to expend less in reproduction per unit of time. We can multiply RE, often measured in fractions of adult body mass committed to reproduction per unit time, by the average adult life span to get lifetime reproductive effort (LRE). Williams's...

Recently, modified REACH-B (mREACH-B) risk prediction model for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) development was proposed. We validated the accuracy of the mREACH-B model and compared its accuracy with those of other prediction models. Between 2006 and 2012, 1,241 patients with chronic hepatitis B (CHB) were recruited. All patients underwent transient elastography at enrollment. The median age of...

BACKGROUND Linear regression of efficiency or LRE introduced a new paradigm for conducting absolute quantification, which does not require standard curves, can generate absolute accuracies of +/-25% and has single molecule sensitivity. Derived from adapting the classic Boltzmann sigmoidal function to PCR, target quantity is calculated directly from the fluorescence readings within the central r...

BACKGROUND Pretest probability (PTP) assessment plays a central role in diagnosis. This report compares a novel attribute-matching method to generate a PTP for acute coronary syndrome (ACS). We compare the new method with a validated logistic regression equation (LRE). METHODS Eight clinical variables (attributes) were chosen by classification and regression tree analysis of a prospectively c...

This paper describes Brno University of Technology (BUT) system for 2007 NIST Language recognition (LRE) evaluation. The system is a fusion of 4 acoustic and 9 phonotactic subsystems. We have investigated several new topics such as discriminatively trained language models in phonotactic systems, and eigen-channel adaptation in model and feature domain in acoustic systems. We also point out the ...

Spoken Language Recognition (SLR) technology has remarkably improved in the last years, partly thanks to NIST Language Recognition Evaluations (LRE), which have become standard benchmarks for testing new approaches. NIST evaluations focus on narrow-band conversational telephone speech and deal with some specific target languages. Recent efforts to expand the scope of SLR technology assessment i...

The performance of a PPRLM language recognition system depends on the quality and the consistency of phone decoders. To improve the performance of the decoders, this paper investigates the use of context-dependent instead of contextindependent phone models, and the use of CMLLR for model adaptation. This paper also discusses several improvements to the LIMSI 2007 NIST LRE system, including the ...

Relational classifiers use relations between objects to predict the class values. In some cases the relations are explicitly given. In other cases the dataset contains implicit relations, e.g. the relation is hidden inside of noisy attribute values. To apply relational classifiers for this task, the relations have to be extracted. Manually extracting relations by a domain expert is an expensive...

Motor axons preferentially reinnervate original synaptic sites on denervated muscle fibers. We have shown that components of synaptic basal lamina direct this selectivity, and we identified a protein, s-laminin, that is concentrated in synaptic basal lamina. Here, we report that a recombinant s-laminin fragment inhibits neurite outgrowth promoted by laminin. A tripeptide sequence in this fragme...