Nowadays, data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a well-established non-parametric methodology for performance evaluation and benchmarking. DEA has witnessed a widespread use in many application areas since the publication of the seminal paper by Charnes, Cooper and Rhodes in 1978. However, to the best of our knowledge, no published work formally addressed out-of-sample evaluation in DEA. In this p...

Dyson et al. [Dyson, R.G., Allen, R., Camanho, A.S., Podinovski, V.V., Sarrico, C.S., Shale, E.A., 2001. Pitfalls and protocols in DEA. European Journal of Operational Research 132, 245–259] suggest that the application of DEA presents a range of problems and they suggest that the systematic collection and reporting of these problems would significantly enhance DEA practice. It is widely accept...

Lidocaine bears in its structure both an aromatic ring and a terminal amine, which can be protonated at physiological pH, linked by an amide group. Since lidocaine causes multiple inhibitory actions on nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs), this work was aimed to determine the inhibitory effects of diethylamine (DEA), a small molecule resembling the hydrophilic moiety of lidocaine, on Torp...

Dear DEA [2] Description: This series of five clinical vignettes focuses on common concerns of clinicians and illustrates the relationship between the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and health professionals, noting that the DEA can help explain federal regulations on legally prescribing controlled substances to patients. Authors: Heit HA, Covington E, Good PM. Source: Pain Medicine field...

In performance evaluations, data without explicit inputs (such as index data, pure output data) are widely used. To directly use such data, this paper presents a study on building DEA models without explicit inputs,DEA-WEI models, in which convexity assumption is considered to be satisfied while the ratio data are constructed. Finally, an example of the modified DEA-WEI model is presented and c...

INTRODUCTION The anti-fibrotic hormone, relaxin, has been inferred to disrupt transforming growth factor (TGF)-β1/Smad2 phosphorylation (pSmad2) signal transduction and promote collagen-degrading gelatinase activity via a nitric oxide (NO)-dependent pathway. Here, we determined the extent to which NO, soluble guanylate cyclase (sGC) and cyclic guanosine monophosphate (cGMP) were directly involv...

OBJECTIVES This study examined how ethanolamines (EAs) with the same functional alcohol group (HOCH(2)CH(2)), such as mono-EA (MEA), di-EA (DEA), and tri-EA (TEA), in water-based metalworking fluids (wbMWFs) are vaporized, condensed, and transformed by heat generated during metalworking. METHODS Two types of experimental apparatus were manufactured to achieve these objectives. RESULTS Vapor...