Microfluidic devices are widely used for biomedical applications based on microscopy or other optical detection methods. However, the materials commonly used for microfabrication typically have a high refractive index relative to water, which can create artifacts at device edges and limit applicability to applications requiring high-precision imaging or morphological feature detection. Here we ...

PURPOSE Ventilatory inhomogeneity indexes in critically ill mechanically ventilated patients could be of importance to optimize ventilator settings in order to reduce additional lung injury. The present study compared six inhomogeneity indexes calculated from the oxygen washout curves provided by the rapid oxygen sensor of the LUFU end-expiratory lung volume measurement system. METHODS Inhomo...

A prevalent view of working memory (WM) considers it to be capacity-limited, fixed to a set number of items. However, recent shared resource models of WM have challenged this “quantized” account using measures of recall precision. Although this conceptual framework can account for several features of visual WM, it remains to be established whether it also applies to auditory WM. We used a novel...

The sampling, quantization, and estimation of a bounded dynamic-range bandlimited signal affected by additive independent Gaussian noise is studied in this work. For bandlimited signals, the distortion due to additive independent Gaussian noise can be reduced by oversampling (statistical diversity). The pointwise expected mean-squared error is used as a distortion metric for signal estimate in ...

Multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) that deals with multiple criteria in decision-making environments has been explicitly applied to various decision-making fields. Nevertheless, the critical issues of uncertainty and inaccuracy generally and gradually exists in the majority of the MCDM processes because of (1) prejudice and preference of decision-makers or experts as well as (2) the insuf...

We report a highly accurate phase-based technique for measuring arbitrarily long optical distance with subnanometer precision. The method employs a Michelson interferometer with a pair of harmonically related light sources, one cw and the other low coherence. By slightly detuning (~2 nm) the center wavelength of the low-coherence source between scans of the target sample, we can use the phase r...

Most manual grips can be divided in precision and power grips on the basis of phylogenetic and functional considerations. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare human brain activity during force production by the right hand when subjects used a precision grip and a power grip. During the precision-grip task, subjects applied fine grip forces between the tips of the index finge...

Traditional quality indexes (Inertia, DB, . . . ) are known to be method-dependent indexes that do not allow to properly estimate the quality of the clustering in several cases, as in that one of complex data, like textual data. We thus propose an alternative approach for clustering quality evaluation based on unsupervised measures of Recall, Precision and F-measure exploiting the descriptors o...

Enterprise search differs from Internet search in many ways. The notion of a “good” answer to a query is quite different. On an intranet, the notion of a “good” answer is often defi ned as the “right” answer. Finding the right answer is often more diffi cult than fi nding the best answer. On the other hand, nowadays when searching on Internet, a large amount of information returned for a query,...