BACKGROUND The aims of this study were to evaluate whether a diversity of healthy foods in a household would decrease the availability of unhealthy foods and to evaluate the association between a healthy dietary diversity score (DDS) and nutritional status among adults. METHODS Data from the 2002-2003 Brazilian Household Budget Survey were used. This nationwide survey used a two-stage samplin...

This paper presents a novel technique for simplifying a triangulated surface at different levels of resolution. While most existing algorithms, based on iterative vertex decimation, employ the distance for error metric, the proposed algorithm utilizes an edge criterion for removing a vertex. An interior angle of a vertex is defined as the maximum value of all possible angles formed by combinati...

conclusions using the maximum dose depth from pdd curves and the inverse square law, the required ssdeff to calculate the dose distribution of the electron beam can be calculated. objectives the aim of this study was to determine the effective source-surface distance (ssdeff) of an electron linear accelerator (linac), and its dependence on energy and depth. materials and methods a varian linac ...

Replication is a topic of interest in the distributed computing, distributed systems, and database communities. Decision support systems became practical with the development of minicomputer, timeshare operating systems and distributed computing. Replicated data may get insufficient due to system failure, fault tolerance, and reliability. A partial Replication is quantized in the replication sy...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate morphological changes of the apical surface after root canal preparation with 1 mm beyond the apical foramen using ProTaper Universal (PTU) files, K3 files and Twisted files (TF), respectively. METHODS Seventy teeth with a centered apical foramen and 70 teeth with a deviated apical foramen were included as group A and group B respectively. In each group, 20 teeth were ra...

Currently recommended control measures for treating leprosy with multidrug therapy should control the spread of drug-resistant strains; however, dapsone (DDS) resistance continues to be reported. Comprehensive estimates of drug-resistant leprosy are difficult to obtain due to the cumbersome nature of the conventional drug susceptibility testing method using mouse footpad inoculation, which requ...

in many applications, ranking of decision making units (dmus) is a problematic technical task procedure to decision makers in data envelopment analysis (dea), especially when there are extremely efficient dmus. in such cases, many dea models may usually get the same efficiency score for different dmus. hence, there is a growing interest in ranking techniques yet. the purpose of this paper is ra...

In this paper, a new soft computing group decision method based on the concept of compromise ratio is introduced for determining decision makers (DMs)' weights through the group decision process under uncertainty. In this method, preferences and judgments of the DMs or experts are expressed by linguistic terms for rating the industrial alternatives among selected criteria as well as the relativ...