Objective Acute basilar artery occlusion (BAO) is associated with severe neurological dysfunction and high mortality rates. The benefits of mechanical thrombectomy in BAO have not been explored in recent clinical trials. Therefore, we analyzed outcomes of stent retriever mechanical thrombectomy for BAO, and compared with anterior circulation occlusions (ACO). Methods In total, 161 consecutive...

Mary Downs, Executive Director Craig Hanna, Director of Public Policy Cori Uccello, Senior Health Fellow Heather Jerbi, Senior Health Policy Analyst An Actuarial Perspective on Accountable Care Organizations The Affordable Care Act (ACA) and regulations implementing it incorporate a concept that some health reform proponents have advocated for several years: an Accountable Care Organization (AC...

While plants can phytoremediate soils that are contaminated with petroleum hydrocarbons, adding microbes to remediate contaminated sites with petroleum-degrading microorganisms and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) is not well understood. The phytoremediation of Arabian medium crude oil (ACO) was done with a Lolium multiflorum system inoculated with an AMF (Glomus intraradices) and a mixture o...

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a non-centralised, multihop, wireless network that lacks a common infrastructure and hence it needs self-organisation. The biggest challenge in MANETs is to find a path between communicating nodes, which is the MANET routing problem. Biology-inspired techniques such as ant colony optimisation (ACO) which have proven to be very adaptable in other problem domain...

Ant colony optimization (ACO) is the algorithm that has inspired from natural behavior of ants life, which the ants leaved pheromone to search food on the ground. In this paper, ACO is introduced for resolving the edge detection in the biomedical image. Edge detection method based on ACO is able to create a matrix pheromone that shows information of available edge in each location of edge pixel...

The Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) technique was inspired by the ants' behavior throughout their exploration for food. In nature, ants wander randomly, seeking for food. After succeeding, they return to their nest. During their move, they lay down pheromone that forms an evaporating chemical path. Other ants that locate this trail, follow it and reinforce it, since they also lay down pheromone. ...

Creating accountable care organizations (ACOs) has been widely discussed as a strategy to control rapidly rising healthcare costs and improve quality of care; however, building an effective ACO is a complex process involving multiple stakeholders (payers, providers, patients) with their own interests. Also, implementation of an ACO is costly in terms of time and money. Immature design could cau...

The apical hook of dark-grown dicotyledonous seedlings is a protective structure resulting from an inhibition of cell elongation on the inner portion of the hook. This differential growth response is mediated by ethylene. Expression of the gene encoding 1-aminocyclopropane-1-carboxylate oxidase (ACO), the terminal enzyme in ethylene biosynthesis, is induced by ethylene via a positive feedback l...

This article proposes a novel MPPT algorithm based on the firefly and elite ant system-trained Elman neural network (FA-EAS-ElmanNN). First, position of fireflies is randomly initialized by (FA), meanwhile individuals with higher attractiveness degree value are selected as optimal solution. Second, extra pheromones artificially released to boost positive feedback effect convergence rate system ...