PURPOSE To identify the causes of blindness and severe visual impairment (BL/SVI) in children attending schools for the blind in Sri Lanka, and to provide optical devices and ophthalmic treatment where indicated. METHODS Two hundred and six children under 16 years from 13 schools for the blind in Sri Lanka were examined by a team of ophthalmologists and optometrists. Data were entered in the ...

Prior research suggests that negative affectivity (NA) may have a direct adverse effect on coronary circulation, whereas forgiveness may provide cardioprotection. This study examined whether NA and forgiveness were independently related to aortic hemodynamics and the subendocardial viability index (SVI), a marker of coronary perfusion. A sample of 131 adults (M = 21.11 years, SD = 2.52) were ev...

BACKGROUND Pulse pressure/stroke volume indexed to height(2.04) (PP/SVi) is a validated measure of arterial stiffness, but its relation to carotid atherosclerosis is unknown. METHODS Clinical, echocardiographic, and carotid ultrasound data from 6,209 hypertensive patients without prevalent cardiovascular (CV) disease in the Campania Salute Network were analyzed. The population was grouped int...

Species occurrence data provide crucial information for biodiversity studies in the current context of global environmental changes. Such studies often rely on a limited number of occurrence data collected in the field and on pseudo-absences arbitrarily chosen within the study area, which reduces the value of these studies. To overcome this issue, we propose an alternative method of prospection...

OBJECTIVE Brain atrophy and subdural hygroma were well known factors that enlarge the subdural space, which induced formation of chronic subdural hematoma (CSDH). Thus, we identified the subdural volume that could be used to predict the rate of future CSDH after head trauma using a computed tomography (CT) volumetric analysis. METHODS A single institution case-control study was conducted invo...

Stochastic variational inference (SVI) lets us scale up Bayesian computation to massive data. It uses stochastic optimization to fit a variational distribution, following easy-to-compute noisy natural gradients. As with most traditional stochastic optimization methods, SVI takes precautions to use unbiased stochastic gradients whose expectations are equal to the true gradients. In this paper, w...

Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) is a framework for performing likelihood-free posterior inference for simulation models. Stochastic Variational inference (SVI) is an appealing alternative to the inefficient sampling approaches commonly used in ABC. However, SVI is highly sensitive to the variance of the gradient estimators, and this problem is exacerbated by approximating the likelihood....

Stochastic variational inequalities (SVI) provide a means for modeling various optimization and equilibrium problems where data are subject to uncertainty. Often it is necessary to estimate the true SVI solution by the solution of a sample average approximation (SAA) problem. This paper proposes three methods for building confidence intervals for components of the true solution, and those inter...

RATIONALE A critical reduction in central blood volume (CBV) is often characterized by hemodynamic instability. Restoration of a volume deficit may be established by goal-directed fluid therapy guided by respiration-related variation in systolic- and pulse pressure (SPV and PPV). Stroke volume index (SVI) serves as a surrogate end-point of a fluid challenge but tissue perfusion itself has not b...

Activated sludge process has been widely adopted to remove pollutants in wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). However, stable operation of activated sludge process is often compromised by the occurrence of filamentous bulking. The aim of this study is to build a proper model for timely diagnosis and prediction of filamentous sludge bulking in an activated sludge process. This study developed a ...