Chemical structures of organic compounds are characterized numerically by a variety of structural descriptors, one of the earliest and most widely used being the Wiener index W, derived from the interatomic distances in a molecular graph. Extensive use of such structural descriptors or topological indices has been made in drug design, screening of chemical databases, and similarity and diversit...

Multimodal medical image fusion (MIF) plays an important role in clinical diagnosis and therapy. Existing MIF methods tend to introduce artifacts, lead to loss of image details or produce low-contrast fused images. To address these problems, a novel spiking cortical model (SCM) based MIF method has been proposed in this paper. The proposed method can generate high-quality fused images using the...

OBJECTIVE To assess the validity of the London handicap scale (LHS) using a simple unweighted scoring system compared with traditional weighted scoring METHODS 323 patients admitted to hospital with acute stroke were followed up by interview 6 months after their stroke as part of a trial looking at the impact of a family support organiser. Outcome measures included the six item LHS, the Dartm...

The carbon emission of China’s industry accounts for more than 70% of the total in the nation, thus the implementation of carbon emission quota trading in industry is of great importance to realize China’s national carbon emission reduction targets. Meanwhile, the allocation of carbon emission quota among sectors or enterprises proves the first and critical step. For this reason, this paper con...

Composite indicators aggregate domain-specific information in one index, on the basis of which countries can be assigned a relative ranking. Recently, the road safety community got convinced of the policy supporting role of indicators in terms of benchmarking, target setting and selection of measures. However, combining the information of a set of relevant risk indicators in one index presentin...

Stress level detection is important for human error prevention and health care services. Speech based stress level detection is the most effective as speech data can be obtained in nonintrusive and inexpensive ways. In this paper, we explore the features that use Double-Layered Subband (DLS) filter for detecting stress level from speech. Spectral Centroid Frequency (SCF) and Spectral Centroid A...

In this study, spectral properties of speech sounds were used to test functional spectral resolution in people who use cochlear implants (CIs). Specifically, perception of the /ba/-/da/ contrast was tested using two spectral cues: Formant transitions (a fine-resolution cue) and spectral tilt (a coarse-resolution cue). Higher weighting of the formant cues was used as an index of better spectral ...

Screening mammography can distort estimated effects in breast cancer risk models due to associations with other risk factors. Mammography information was available in the Nurses' Health Study from 1988, and 1,815 incident breast cancers were accrued through 2000 among 55,625 women with risk factor data. Logistic models were fit for screening mammography, and inverse probability weighting was us...

Five rapid visual stream assessment methods were applied to 65 restored streams in North Carolina, and the results were correlated with measured macroinvertebrate community metrics to evaluate predictive ability. The USEPA Rapid Bioassessment Protocol (RBP), USDA Stream Visual Assessment Protocol (SVAP), Peterson’s Riparian Channel and Environmental Inventory (RCE), NCSU Eco-Geomorphological As...

The accurate comparison of inter-individual 3D image brain datasets requires non-affine transformation techniques (warping) to reduce geometric variations. Constrained by the biological prerequisites we use in this study a landmark-based warping method with weighted sums of displacement vectors, which is enhanced by an optimization process. Furthermore, we investigate fast automatic procedures ...