Acute hyperglycemia is common in critically ill patients. Strict control of blood glucose (BG) concentration has been considered important because hyperglycemia is associated independently with increased intensive care unit mortality. After intensive insulin therapy was reported to reduce mortality in selected surgical critically ill patients, lowering of BG levels was recommended as a means of...

The University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH), Remote Sensing Systems (RSS), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have constructed long-term temperature records for deep atmospheric layers using satellite Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) and Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU) observations. However, these groups disagree on the magnitude of global temperature trends s...

Background: Inclusion of inhomogeneity corrections in intensity modulated small fields always makes conformal irradiation of lung tumor very complicated in accurate dose delivery.Objective: In the present study, the performance of five algorithms via Monte Carlo, Pencil Beam, Convolution, Fast Superposition and Superposition were evaluated in lung cancer Intensity Modulated Radiotherapy plannin...

This paper raises the issue of speech database reduction adapted to a specific domain for Text-To-Speech (TTS) synthesis application. We evaluate several methods: a database pruning technique based on the statistical behaviour of the unit selection algorithm and a novel method based on the KullbackLeibler divergence. The aim of the former method is to eliminate the least selected units during t...

Melanomas remain associated with dismal prognosis because they are naturally resistant to apoptosis and they markedly metastasize. Up-regulated expression of sodium pump alpha sub-units has previously been demonstrated when comparing metastatic to non-metastatic melanomas. Our previous data revealed that impairing sodium pump alpha1 activity by means of selective ligands, that are cardiotonic s...

The blood-brain barrier (BBB) is a dynamic and highly selective permeable interface between central nervous system (CNS) and periphery that regulates the brain homeostasis. Increasing evidences of neurological disorders and restricted drug delivery process in brain make BBB as special target for further study. At present, neurovascular unit (NVU) is a great interest and highlighted topic of pha...

Unit tests for object-oriented classes can be generated automatically using search-based testing techniques. As the search algorithms are typically guided by structural coverage criteria, the resulting unit tests are often long and confusing, with possible negative implications for developer adoption of such test generation tools, and the difficulty of the test oracle problem and test maintenan...

This paper describes the unit selection component of the open source text-to-speech system OpenMary. It is a generic unit selection component with parameterisable target and join cost functions followed by optional signal post-processing, and it has been created for the Blizzard challenge 2006. We describe the creation process, the core properties of the system and the preparation of a synthesi...

We propose several cost functions for registration of shapes encoded with Euclidean and/or nonEuclidean information (unit vectors). Our framework is assessed for estimation of both rigid and non-rigid transformations between the target and model shapes corresponding to 2D contours and 3D surfaces. The experimental results obtained confirm that using the combination of a point’s position and uni...

A genetic algorithm has been used to generate crystal framework structures, including that of sodalite and chabazite, from the knowledge of only the unit cell dimensions, constituent elements and by defining exclusion zones–regions within the unit cell where the constituent elements are forbidden, as opposed to being discouraged. We present details of a direct approach to restricting the possib...