BACKGROUND Extracapsular spread (ECS) in cervical lymph node metastases from head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) is regarded as an adverse prognostic factor and is often used to select patients who may benefit from adjuvant therapy. The prognostic value of ECS was evaluated for patients with oropharyngeal SCC (OPC; with known p16/human papillomavirus [HPV] status) and for patients with ...

This paper studies the existence of eecient (small size) ampliiers for proving explicit inaproximability results for bounded degree and bounded occurrence combinatorial optimization problems, and gives an explicit construction for such ampliiers. We use this construction to improve the currently best known approximation lower bounds for bounded occurrence instances of linear equations mod 2, an...

The role of alkaloids in cigarette smoke was investigated in the cumulus expansion of oocyte-cumulus complexes (OCC) isolated from large antral porcine follicles. Suppression of the cumulus expansion stimulated by FSH was observed in the presence of different concentration of cadmium, anabasine and nicotine but not its metabolite cotinine. There were comparable inhibitory effects of cadmium and...

We introduce the SCP the sorted common prefix, and study some of its properties. Based on the internal representations used by a class of new compression schemes, we show how the SCP table can be constructed using an ( ) max κ Σ + u O number of comparisons on average, and ( ) Σ u O worst case, where u is the size of the sequence, Σ is the number of symbols, and max κ is the maximum SCP value. W...

Development and usage of Case Based Reasoning (CBR) driven medical diagnostic system requires a large volume of clinical cases that depict the problem-solving methodology of medical experts. Successful usage of CBR based systems in healthcare is constrained by the need for a continuous supply of current and correct clinical cases (in an electronic medium) from medical experts. To address this c...

An extension of the one-cycle control (OCC) method for switched-capacitor (SC) converters is proposed in this paper, featuring a fast dynamic response, wide line and load operation ranges, and simplicity in implementation. To illustrate the operation principle of this nonlinear control method and to demonstrate its simplicity in design, a dual-phase unity gain SC converter is examined. A new co...

Mixed-model assembly lines have been recognized as a major enabler to handle product variety. However, the assembly process becomes very complex when the number of product variants is high, which, in turn, may impact the system performance in terms of quality and productivity. This paper considers the variety induced manufacturing complexity in manual mixed-model assembly lines where operators ...

The problem of dictionary matching is a classical problem in string matching: given a set S of d strings of total length n characters over an (not necessarily constant) alphabet of size σ, build a data structure so that we can match in a any text T all occurrences of strings belonging to S. The classical solution for this problem is the Aho-Corasick automaton which finds all occ occurrences in ...

In the path minimum query problem, we preprocess a tree on n weighted nodes, such that given an arbitrary path, we can locate the node with the smallest weight along this path. We design novel succinct indices for this problem; one of our index structures supports queries in O(α(m,n)) time, and occupiesO(m) bits of space in addition to the space required for the input tree, where m is an intege...

MicroPET imaging studies using (18)F-nifene, a new positron emission tomography (PET) radiotracer for nicotinic acetylcholinergic receptors (nAChR) α4β2 receptors in rats, have been carried out. Rats were imaged for 90 min after intravenous injection of (18)F-nifene (0.8 to 1 mCi), and binding potential (BP(ND)) was measured. (18)F-Nifene binding to thalamic and extrathalamic brain regions was ...