BACKGROUND Despite successful reperfusion therapy of acute myocardial infarction and complete restoration of infarct-related artery patency, the improvement of systolic function in long-term outcome depends on preserved microvasculature integrity. Myocardial contrast echocardiography (MCE) is a useful technique for identification of viable myocardium. AIM To assess the value of real-time myoc...

1 Department of Geography, University of Leicester, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK, Tel +44 (0)116 252 3812, Fax +44 (0)116 252 3854, 2 School of Geography, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT 3 International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Schlossplatz 1, A-2361, Laxenburg, Austria Tel +43 (0)2236 807 0, Fax: +43 (0)2236 71 313 4 Centre for Mountain Studies, Perth College-UHI, Perth, PH1 2NX, ...

Myocardial contrast echocardiography (MCE) is a relatively new technique that utilises the intravascular injection of microbubbles of air.' As these bubbles traverse the coronary microcirculation, they produce myocardial opacification that can be seen and measured. During their transit through the myocardium these bubbles remain entirely within the intravascular space and, if they are small, th...

Magnetocaloric effect (MCE) and thermal conductivity of two gadolinium hydroxides, Gd(OH)3 (1) and Gd2O(OH)4(H2O)2 (2), are investigated. Magnetic studies indicate that both 1 and 2 exhibit antiferromagnetic interaction, and the MCE values for 1 and 2 at 2 K and ΔH = 7 T are 62.00 J kg(-1) K(-1) and 59.09 J kg(-1) K(-1), respectively. Investigation of their thermal conductivity reveals that the...

Multi-criteria evaluation (MCE) is perhaps the most fundamental of decision support operations in geographical information systems (GIS). This paper reviews two main MCE approaches employed in GIS, namely Boolean and Weighted Linear Combination (WLC), and discusses issues and problems associated with both. To resolve the conceptual di€ erences between the two approaches, this paper proposes the...

The paper presents a framework for sensitivity analysis (SA) in spatial multiple criteria evaluation (S-MCE). The framework focuses on three aspects of S-MCE: spatiality, scope, and cardinality. Spatiality stresses the importance of spatial criteria and spatial weights that should be explicitly considered in GIS-based MCE. Scope relates to the extent of SA, ranging from local one-at-a-time crit...

OBJECTIVES The purpose was to examine the cardioprotective effects of recombinant P-selectin glycoprotein ligand-immunoglobulin (rPSGL-Ig) in ischemia-reperfusion injury by real-time myocardial contrast echocardiography (MCE). BACKGROUND P-selectin mediates leukocyte recruitment into areas of inflammation. METHODS Sixteen pigs underwent 45 min of left anterior descending coronary artery occ...

In this paper, we present the Maximum Normalized Likelihood Estimation (MNLE) algorithm and its application for discriminative training of HMMs for continuous speech recognition. The objective of this algorithm is to maximize the normalized frame likelihood of training data. Instead of gradient descent techniques usually applied for objective function optimization in other discriminative algori...

Epidermolysis bullosa simplex with migratory circinate erythema (EBS-MCE) is a rare EBS subtype characterised by migratory blistering lesions that resolve with brownish pigmentation. It is caused by a recurrent readthrough mutation, c.1649delG, in the tail of keratin 5. Here, we report a child with EBS-MCE and investigated the immunologic mechanisms underlying the migratory lesions in this pati...

This article shows that the Minimum Classification Error (MCE) criterion function commonly used for discriminative design of speech recognition systems is equivalent to a Parzen window based estimate of the theoretical Bayes classification risk. In this analysis, each training token is mapped to the center of a Parzen kernel in the domain of a suitably defined random variable. The kernels are s...