BACKGROUND Childhood obesity is at record high levels in the US and disproportionately affects Latino children; however, studies examining Latino preschool children's obesity-related risk factors are sparse. This study determined correlates of Latino preschoolers' (ages 3-5 years) adiposity to inform future obesity interventions and policies. METHODS Latino preschoolers (n = 96) from 4 Head S...

BACKGROUND Assessing neighborhood vitality is important to understanding how to improve quality of life and health outcomes. The ecocity model recognizes that cities are part of natural systems and favors walkable neighborhoods. This article introduces ecocity mapping, an innovative planning method, to the public health literature on community engagement by describing a pilot project with a new...

the purpose of this project was to conduct a thorough evaluation of mental health services delivery system as an important part of helath services delivery system. as an important part of health services delivery system. for this purpose, 266 health workers (behavarses) and health houses, 91 gps and rural health centers, 923 persons who refered to private and other psychiatric centers, and 737 ...

We have developed an algorithm (STVQ) for the optimization of neighborhood preserving maps by applying deterministic anneal-ing to an energy function for topographic vector quantization. The com-binatorial optimization problem is solved by introducing temperature dependent fuzzy assignments of data points to cluster centers and applying an EM-type algorithm at each temperature while annealing. ...

This paper presents a variational level set approach to joint segmentation and bias correction of images with intensity inhomogeneity. Our method is based on an observation that intensities in a relatively small local region are separable, despite of the inseparability of the intensities in the whole image caused by the intensity inhomogeneity. We first define a weighted K-means clustering obje...

Chamfer distances are discrete distances based on the propagation of local distances, or weights defined in a mask. The medial axis, i.e. the centers of the maximal disks (disks which are not contained in any other disk), is a powerful tool for shape representation and analysis. The extraction of maximal disks is performed in the general case with comparison tests involving look-up tables repre...

In many high-risk populations, access to tuberculosis (TB) diagnosis and treatment is limited and pockets of high prevalence persist. We estimated the cost-effectiveness of an extensive active case finding program in areas of Cambodia where TB notifications and household poverty rates are highest and access to care is restricted. Thirty operational health districts with high TB incidence and ho...

Although K-Means clustering has been widely studied due to its simplicity, these methods still have the following fatal drawbacks. Firstly, they need initialize cluster centers, which causes unstable performance. Secondly, poor performance on non-Gaussian datasets. Inspired by affinity matrix, we propose a novel multi-view based adjacency matrix. It maps matrix distance according principle that...

neighborhoods within the hierarchy of urban structure are one of the smallest socio-physical building blocks of cities. traditional neighborhoods of iranian historic cities benefited from strong social relations which were flourished over the years and were manifested in the neighborhoods centers. in the modern era, the new master plans and the complementary local plans have disintegrated these...

this paper identifies effective criteria in locating urban parks land use in district 9 of mashhad. this recognition is in three scale of neighborhood, local and regional with emphasis on the principles of minimum distance.finally, surveying the potential of district 9 to build these kind of parks is the main purpose. therefore, by using document anf field research method ,first we survey the l...