introduction: evaluating patient with acute scrotum is based on medical history (e.g. age), physical examination, blood tests, urine analysis and imaging studies. differential diagnosis may be difficult. efficacy of serum acute phase proteins in patients with acute scrotum was assessed in this study. materials and methods : 45 patients were recruited and allocated within three sub-groups; acute...

This paper discusses the various challenges encountered during iterative testing of an insurance company’s home page prototypes. The study focuses on the methodology details, including the selection of prototypes and usability evaluation methods and the considerations for practical trade-offs. During Phase 1, six individual think-aloud interviews were conducted to compare three prototypes. Part...

In superconductors, and in other systems with a local U(1) gauge invariance, there are two mechanisms that form topological defects in phase transitions. In addition to the standard Kibble mechanism, thermal fluctuations of the magnetic field also lead to defect formation. This mechanism is specific to local gauge theories, predicts a qualitatively different spatial defect distribution and is t...

In this paper we present a novel method for the numerical solution of linear transport equations, which is based on ridgelets. Such equations arise for instance in radiative transfer or in phase contrast imaging. Due to the fact that ridgelet systems are well adapted to the structure of linear transport operators, it can be shown that our scheme operates in optimal complexity, even if line sing...

We study a zero-range process where the jump rates do not only depend on the local particle configuration, but also on the size of the system. Rigorous results on the equivalence of ensembles are presented, characterizing the occurrence of a condensation transition. In contrast to previous results, the phase transition is discontinuous and the system exhibits ergodicity breaking and metastable ...

In the Chinese language, a verb may have its dependents on its left, right or on both sides. The ambiguity resolution of right-side dependencies is essential for dependency parsing of sentences with two or more verbs. Previous works on shiftreduce dependency parsers may not guarantee the connectivity of a dependency tree due to their weakness at resolving the right-side dependencies. This paper...

The phase vocoder has become a popular method for timestretching audio (altering its play rate without changing its pitch) in recent years. Despite continuing improvements to the algorithm itself for enhanced audio quality, the latency introduced by the processing is less wellunderstood. Such an understanding is crucial for accurate synchronization in the context of a larger interactive multime...

Image features such as step edges, lines and Mach bands all give rise to points where the Fourier components of the image are maximally in phase. The use of phase congruency for marking features has signiicant advantages over gradient based methods. It is a dimension-less quantity that is invariant to changes in image brightness or contrast, hence it provides an absolute measure of the signiica...

We study the effect of long-term habituation signatures of auditory selective attention reflected in the instantaneous phase information of the auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) at four distinct stimuli levels of 60, 70, 80, and 90 dB SPL. The analysis is based on the single-trial level. The effect of habituation can be observed in terms of the changes (jitter) in the instantaneous phase...

This paper presents a method that recovers high-quality 3D absolute coordinates point by point with only five binary patterns. Specifically, three dense binary dithered patterns are used to compute the wrapped phase; and the average intensity is combined with two additional binary patterns to determine fringe order pixel by pixel in phase domain. The wrapped phase is temporarily unwrapped point...