Independent component analysis (ICA) is popular in many applications, including cognitive neuroscience and signal processing. Due to computational constraints, principal component analysis is used for dimension reduction prior to ICA (PCA+ICA), which could remove important information. The problem is that interesting independent components (ICs) could be mixed in several principal components th...

Purpose: Life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology is a well-established analytical method to quantify environmental impacts, which has been mainly applied to products. However, recent literature would suggest that it has also the potential as an analysis and design tool for processes, and stresses that one of the biggest challenges of this decade in the field of process systems engineering (PSE)...

BACKGROUND Substantial uncertainty surrounds the specificity of the Direct Agglutination Test (DAT) for visceral leishmaniasis (VL) in clinical suspects, since no good gold standard exists for unequivocally identifying diseased subjects. We explored the Latent Class Analysis (LCA) modelling technique to circumvent this problem. PATIENTS AND METHODS Data on 149 clinical suspects recruited in 1...

The genetic defects underlying approximately half of all retinitis pigmentosa (RP) cases are unknown. A number of genes responsible for Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA) may also cause RP when they are mutated. Our previous study revealed that variants in the most frequently mutated nine exons accounted for approximately half of the mutations detected in a cohort of patients with LCA. The aim of...

In the Integrated Product Policy Communication of 2003, the European Commission recognised Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) as “the best framework for assessing the potential environmental impacts of products”. It also identified “the need to improve data availability and quality worldwide by internationally cooperating on LCA data and methods”. To address this situation and to foster standardizatio...

Latent class analysis (LCA) is a method of assessing and correcting measurement error in surveys. The local independence assumption in LCA assumes that indicators are independent from each other condition on the latent variable. Violation of this assumption leads to unreliable results. We explored this issue by using LCA to estimate the prevalence of illicit drug use in the Iranian Mental Healt...

BACKGROUND Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA) is a visual disease which is caused by RPE65 mutations and results in retinal degeneration and severe vision loss in early infancy. According to previous researches, mutations of the RPE65 gene account for 16% of all cases of LCA. This study aimed to identify RPE65 gene mutations in Chinese patients with LCA. METHODS We recruited 52 sporadic patient...

Littoral cell angioma (LCA) is a rare primary vascular neoplasm of the spleen that originates from the endothelial littoral cell lining of the red pulp sinuses. LCA has mostly benign behavior with a few reported cases of malignancy. LCA is associated with comorbid visceral organ cancers and immunosuppressive states. We report a case of LCA with synchronous renal cell carcinoma and features of e...