Aim To compare the treatment planning decisions made by undergraduate and postgraduate dental students before after training on use of Dental Practicality Index (DPI). Methodology One hundred eight were randomly assigned to test (DPI) or control groups. The baseline knowledge was assessed in first session; both groups shown 15 clinical scenarios asked assign one four plan options (no treatment,...

OBJECTIVES The Child Health Utility 9D (CHU9D) is a new generic preference-based measure of health-related quality of life developed for children aged 7 to 11 years. There is increasing interest in its potential for application in adolescents, and previous research has demonstrated that it shows good construct validity here. This article further examines its practicality and validity in adolesc...

Recent advances in coding theory have produced two classes of codes, turbo codes and low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, which approach the Shannon limit of channel capacity while admitting efficient implementations of message encoding and decoding in software. Theoretic results about the latter have been shown to apply to the former, hence we examine the evolution of LDPC codes from their o...

Introduction: Free-breathing, non-gated time-resolved scans carry great potential for applications such as cardiac imaging, catheter tracking and image guided therapy. However, insufficient temporal resolution and problems with real-time reconstruction have limited their use. The sliding window algorithm solves the second problem, but is known to introduce temporal blurring. Modern approaches s...

Commonly used RNA folding programs compute the minimum free energy structure of a sequence under the pseudoknot exclusion constraint. They are based on Zuker's algorithm which runs in time O(n(3)). Recently, it has been claimed that RNA folding can be achieved in average time O(n(2)) using a sparsification technique. A proof of quadratic time complexity was based on the assumption that computat...

Tuberculin skin testing (TST) and chest X-ray are the conventional methods used for tracing suspected tuberculosis (TB) patients. The purpose of the study was to calculate the cost incurred by Penang General Hospital on performing one contact tracing procedure using an activity based costing approach. Contact tracing records (including the demographic profile of contacts and outcome of the cont...

Prefetching and buffering sequential reads offers the possibility of improving disk performance both in terms of throughput, by reading multiple requests in a single larger read, and in terms of access time, where prefetched requests could be serviced immediately from disk cache. This study shows that there is considerable opportunity for such prefetching, and that most of the potential benefit...

Poly-controlled partial evaluation (PCPE) is a flexible approach for specializing logic programs, which has been recently proposed. It takes into account repertoires of global control and local control rules instead of a single, predetermined, combination. Thus, different global and local control rules can be assigned to different call patterns, obtaining results that are hybrid in the sense th...