OBJECTIVES The sleep of nursing home residents is fragmented by frequent awakening episodes associated, at least in part, with environmental variables, including noise and light changes. The purpose of this study was to improve sleep by reducing the frequency of nighttime noise and light changes. PARTICIPANTS AND SETTING Two hundred sixty-seven incontinent nursing home residents in eight nurs...

BACKGROUND Thyroid hormones (THs) are well known for their genomic effects but recently several studies revealed their actions as rapid modulators of membrane receptors. In particular, fast thyroxine effect on GABA(A) receptors have been reported. We addressed question whether presynaptic mechanisms can be also involved in modulation of GABAergic transmission by thyroxine. METHODS Using patch...

AIMS To evaluate the endothelial quality of corneas obtained from pseudophakic donors and to compare the data with matched phakic controls. METHODS Corneas from eyes with posterior chamber intraocular lenses (PCIOLs) and corneas from phakic eyes (controls) were stored for 1-2 weeks in organ culture and then examined after staining with Alizarin red S. The corneas were divided into two groups ...

The use of different discretization techniques can be expected to affect the classification bias and variance of naive-Bayes classifiers. We call such an effect discretization bias and variance. Proportional kinterval discretization (PKID) tunes discretization bias and variance by adjusting discretized interval size and number proportional to the number of training instances. Theoretical analys...

After a brief description of the essentials Monte Carlo simulation methods and definition efficiency, rationale for variance-reduction techniques is presented. Popular applicable to simulations radiation transport are described motivated. The focus on those that can be used with any code, irrespective strategies track charged particles; they operate by manipulating either number weights transpo...

Ground-breaking recent work by Carr and Lee extends well-known results for variance swaps to arbitrary functions of realized variance, provided a zero-correlation assumption is made. We give a detailed mathematical analysis of some of their computations and work out the cases of volatility swaps and calls on variance. The latter leads to an ill-posed problem that we solve using regularization t...

PURPOSE This paper describes a method to achieve consistent clinical image quality in (18)F-FDG scans accounting for patient habitus, dose regimen, image acquisition, and processing techniques. METHODS Oncological PET/CT scan data for 58 subjects were evaluated retrospectively to derive analytical curves that predict image quality. Patient noise equivalent count rate and coefficient of variat...

The large variance of the Wigner Ville distribution makes smoothing essential for producing readable estimates of the time varying power spectrum of noise corrupted signals Since linear smoothing trades reduced variance for increased bias of the signal components we explore two nonlinear estimation techniques based on soft thresholding in an orthonormal basis representation Soft thresholding pr...