Background: Hospital accreditation is an external evaluation of a hospital’s structures, processes and results by an independent professional accreditation body using pre-established optimum standards. Hospital accreditation has an important role in improving quality, safety, effectiveness and efficiency of hospital services. A generic questionnaire is usually used to accredit all hospitals. Ho...

today, along with enhancement of social well-being andeconomic development, demand for transportation is growing increasingly.many countries are seeking for providing transportation servicesat a reasonable price. therefore, optimization of carrying goods on nationalor international roads is highly important in terms of costs andtransportation indicator, so that the goods are shipped at minimumc...

In this paper, optimal generation expansion planning (GEP) is investigated considering purchase prices, profits of independent power producers (IPPs) and reliability criteria using a new method based on hybrid coded Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). In this approach, optimal purchase price of each IPP is obtained by HCGA and reliability criteria are calculated by PSO...

The workflow scheduling problem which is considered difficult on the Grid becomes even more challenging when multiple scheduling criteria are used for optimization. The existing approaches can address only certain variants of the multi-criteria workflow scheduling problem, usually considering up to two contradicting criteria being scheduled in some specific Grid environments. A comprehensive de...

BACKGROUND T1 mapping is widely used today in CMR, however, it underestimates true T1 values and its measurement error is influenced by several acquisition parameters. The purpose of this study was the extraction of accurate T1 data through the utilization of comprehensive, parallel Simulations for QUAntifying RElaxation Magnetic Resonance constants (SQUAREMR) of the MOLLI pulse sequence on a l...

Flocks participating in sire referencing schemes can achieve greater genetic gains than those achievable by within-flock selection. However, requirements for joining these schemes can be prohibitive to some producers. The objectives of this study were to determine whether less restrictive schemes or schemes of shorter duration could achieve rates of gain and reduce inbreeding as efficiently as ...

While holding great development opportunities to be seized, Africa has been identified as particularly vulnerable to climate changes, and the ZRB is no exception to that. With increasing demands to the Zambezi system in terms or water and energy, and rising challenges in the form of less runoff due to climate change, it is paramount to plan ahead. In particular, it must be understood how major ...

The Agricultural Policy Environmental eXtender (APEX) model is capable of estimating edge-of-field water, nutrient, and sediment transport and is used to assess the environmental impacts of management practices. The current practice is to fully calibrate the model for each site simulation, a task that requires resources and data not always available. The objective of this study was to compare m...

Using the most recent atmospheric neutrino data, as well as short-baseline, longbaseline and tritium β-decay data we show that the joint interpretation of the LSND, solar and atmospheric neutrino anomalies in (3+1) sterile neutrino schemes is severely disfavored, in contrast to the theoretically favored (2+2) schemes.

Causal diagrams have a long history of informal use and, more recently, have undergone formal development for applications in expert systems and robotics. We provide an introduction to these developments and their use in epidemiologic research. Causal diagrams can provide a starting point for identifying variables that must be measured and controlled to obtain unconfounded effect estimates. The...