In the present study a novel method is introduced to detect meaningful regions of a gray-level noisy images of binary structures. The method consists in generating surrogate data for an analyzed image. A surrogate image has the same (or almost the same) power spectrum and histogram of gray-level values as the original one but is random otherwise. Then minmax paths are generated in the original ...

Technology and societal changes are moving the global market rapidly towards a new economic order rooted in e-commerce. Hence, assessing and monitoring the e-readiness of a nation has become an increasing challenge. This paper proposes a framework to evaluate the e-readiness of a nation based on eight factors: digital infrastructure, macro economy, ability to invest, knowledgeable citizens, com...

this is a cross sectional study with aim of assessment and comparison between parents and female adolescents ' attitudes about the role of peers in decision making of adolescent in tehran. in this study 160 mother, 160 father and 160 female adolescents participated. with random selection 160 female adolescent with 14-19 years old from north, south , east and west of tehran were selected an...

the aim of the present study was to compare the broader autism phenotype in iranian parents of children with autism spectrum disorders and parents of typically developing children.parents of children with asd and parents of typically developing children were asked to complete the persian version of the autism spectrum quotient (aq). in the asd group, families included 204 parents (96 fathers an...

the aim of this study was to investigate the correlation between each parent’s body mass index (bmi) and maternal age with weight status of children. this was an analytic cross-sectional study which was conducted on 12-year-old students from different areas in rasht, north part of iran. the checklist included demographic characteristics such as age, maternal age during childbirth, student and m...

background: infants are regarded as a vulnerable group in need of nursing care, particularly during nicu admission. parents of these infants often experience emotional, psychological and physical upheavals. therefore, nurses can be of great help to the parents and facilitate a healthy transition from this period. improper communication with parents, who seek information on their infant’s condit...

most children in hospital have pain. seeing your child in pain or discomfort is incredibly difficult. pain in children is a public health concern of major significance in most parts of the world. we have learned that unrelieved pain causes the body to release certain chemicals that may actually delay healing, so it's important to work with child's nurses and doctors to help children f...

Recently, a new surrogate method, the Small–Shuffle (SS) surrogate method, has been proposed to investigate whether there is some kind of dynamics in irregular fluctuations, even if they are modulated by long term trends or periodicities. This situation is theoretically incompatible with the assumption underlying previously proposed surrogate methods. We apply the SS surrogate method to a varie...

In this supplementary section, we describe the Iterated Amplitude Adjusted Fourier Transform (IAAFT) method. This method was adapted for the construction of surrogate glial activities (see ‘Surrogate method’ section in the main text). The IAAFT is known for its applications in physics [1, 2] as well as econometrics [3, 4]. Described below is the procedure for a single loop of IAAFT. Let {G(t)}t...

Background Native T1 mapping is becoming established to help diagnose and monitor myocardial disease. The reproducibility of T1 mapping has not been well characterized, despite the important implications both for interpreting serial clinical studies, and for sample size calculation for surrogate endpoint in clinical trials. The SCMR consensus statement recommends measuring T1 in 2 imaging views...