OBJECTIVE In many countries, neurosurgical care is concentrated in regional centres, which often necessitates the inter-hospital transfer of patients with head injury for optimal treatment. The aim of this study was to evaluate the role of teleradiology in the management of head-injured patients when-referred from a district general hospital to a tertiary neurosurgical centre. METHODS Prospec...

In many application areas, there is a need for inter-disciplinary collaboration and education. However, such collaboration and education are not easy. On the example of our participation in a cyberinfrastructure project, we show that many obstacles on the path to successful collaboration and education can be overcome if we take into account that each person’s knowledge of a statement is often a...

in scpc-dama satellite networks, the baseband rrc pulse shaping is utilized to reduce the bandwidth and inter symbol interference (isi). but the variation in carrier's envelope, which expands the spectrum and ultimately increases the bandwidth, causes isi and quadrature channel crosstalk (qcc). the goal of this paper is to introduce a method to shape baseband rrc pulses, in order to make a near...

In this paper, we report on our practical experiences using the Mobile IPv6 protocol in an integrated LAN-WLAN-GPRS testbed. Through detailed analysis from packet traces of inter-network (vertical) handovers conducted over the testbed, we examine the performance of transport protocols such as TCP during such handoffs. The considerable differences in link-layer characteristics between the differ...

Conventional Web image search engines can return reasonably accurate results for queries containing concrete terms, but the results are less accurate for queries containing only abstract terms, such as “spring” or “peace.” To improve the recall ratio without drastically degrading the precision ratio, we developed a method that replaces an abstract query term given by a user with a set of concre...

Introduction: It is possible to achieve spatial encoding by repeated gradient (Fourier) encoding, using multiple coils (parallel Imaging), or by repeating the acquisition with different RF modulation profiles (RF encoding). Partially Parallel Imaging (PPI) combines Fourier and coil encoding, enabling reconstruction with reduced phase encoding steps but with a signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) penalty...

Coordinated global efforts to prevent and control malaria have been a tour-de-force for public health, but success appears to have reached a plateau in many parts of the world. While this is a multifaceted problem, policy strategies have largely ignored genetic variations in humans as a factor that influences both selection and dosing of antimalarial drugs. This includes attempts to decrease to...

This study examines whether higher state cigarette taxes can be used to improve birth outcomes. Data on the outcomes of interest are taken from the 1989–1992 Natality Detail files, generating a sample of roughly 10.5 million births. The results suggest that smoking participation among pregnant women declines and average birth weights rise when excise taxes are increased. These results can be us...

Software performance evaluation relies on the ability of simple models to predict the performance of complex systems. Often, however, the models are not capturing potentially relevant effects in system behavior, such as sharing of memory caches or sharing of cores by hardware threads. The goal of this paper is to investigate whether and to what degree a simple linear adjustment of service deman...