Background An internal pilot study is the first part of a substantive RCT where trial parameters are examined and data contribute to the final analyses. This two-phase design provides an opportunity to review pre-agreed ‘progression criteria’ that determine whether the internal pilot should continue into the main trial. Selecting appropriate criteria is critical but little is known about this a...

We characterize the equilibrium states for the two-phase Stefan problem with surface tension and with or without kinetic undercooling, and we analyze their stability in dependence of physical and geometric quantities.

We propose a supervised, two-phase framework to address the problem of paraphrase recognition (PR). Unlike most PR systems that focus on sentence similarity, our framework detects dissimilarities between sentences and makes its paraphrase judgment based on the significance of such dissimilarities. The ability to differentiate significant dissimilarities not only reveals what makes two sentences...

Increasing research efforts have been recently devoted to the coupling of microfluidic chip-integrated ionization sources to mass spectrometry (MS). Considering the limitations of microfluidic chips coupled with MS such as liquid spreading, dead volume, and manufacturing troubles, this paper proposed a new three-dimensional (3D) flow focusing (FF)-based microfluidic ionizing source. This source...

Article history: Received 10 June 2013 Received in revised form 21 November 2013 Accepted 29 December 2013 Available online 7 January 2014