The performance of medical image classification has been enhanced by deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which are typically trained with cross-entropy (CE) loss. However, when the label presents an intrinsic ordinal property in nature, e.g., development from benign to malignant tumor, CE loss cannot take into account such information allow for better generalization. To improve model gen...

Combinatorics coding is a new data coding method based on combinatorics. Ordinal computing is the core technology of in the combinatorics coding. Ordinal properties of combinatorics coding is studied in this paper. Firstly, the combinatorics coding theory and the correlative basic concepts are described. Then, the properties of the ordinal are revealed. The study indicates that the value of ord...

Recently, Schlicht and Stephan lifted the notion of automatic-structures to the notion of (finite-word) ordinal-automatic structures. These are structures whose domain and relations can be represented by automata reading finite words whose shape is some fixed ordinal α. We lift Delhommé’s relative-growth-technique from the automatic and tree-automatic setting to the ordinal-automatic setting. T...

How do we compare the complexities of various classes of structures? The Turing ordinal of a class of structures, introduced by Jockusch and Soare, is defined in terms of the number of jumps required for coding to be possible. The back-and-forth ordinal, introduced by Montalbán, is defined in terms of Σα-types. The back-and-forth ordinal is (roughly) bounded by the Turing ordinal. In this paper...

Article history: Received 25 October 2010 Accepted 31 March 2011 Available online 8 April 2011

Health questionnaires are often built up from sets of questions that are totaled to obtain a sum score. An important consideration in designing questionnaires is to minimize respondent burden. An increasingly popular method for efficient measurement is computerized adaptive testing; unfortunately, many health questionnaires do not meet the requirements for this method. In this paper, a new sequ...

PURPOSE To evaluate whether midsagittal (abdominal) obesity in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), waist circumference (WC) and body fat percentage are associated with lumbar disc degeneration in early adulthood. METHODS We obtained the lumbar MRI (1.5-T scanner) of 325 females and 233 males at a mean age of 21 years. Lumbar disc degeneration was evaluated using Pfirrmann classification. We ana...