We praise the article by Mokhtari-Zaer et al. (2015) published in the Avicenna Journal of Phytomedicine on the effects of saffron on smooth muscle activity (Mokhtari-Zaer et al., 2015). It was a well-designed and interesting study on the therapeutic properties of Crocus sativus which is a precious plant cultivated in our country. We do believe that along with all other medicinal effects, saffro...

The purpose of this paper is to further develop exponential approximation, using Stein’s method of exchangeable pairs. The first use of exchangeable pairs in exponential approximation was in the paper Chatterjee et al. (2011), which studied the spectrum of the Bernoulli-Laplace Markov chain. Unfortunately the results in Chatterjee et al. (2011), which use the Kolmogorov metric, are very complic...

Many scientific fields generate data in three-dimensional space. These fields include fluid dynamics, medical imaging, and X-ray crystallography. In all contexts, a common difficulty exists: how best to represent the data visually and analytically. One approach involves generating level sets: two-dimensional surfaces consisting of all points with a given value in the space. With large datasets ...

We propose a technique to obtain accurate and smooth surfaces of patient specific vascular structures, using two steps: segmentation and reconstruction. The first step provides accurate and smooth centerlines of the vessels, together with cross section orientations and cross section fitting. The initial centerlines are obtained from a homotopic thinning of the vessels segmented using a level se...

Ellingsrud and Peskine showed in [ElP] that there are finitely many components of the Hilbert scheme of P containing smooth surfaces not of general type. The upper bound for the degree of such surfaces has recently been reduced to 105 (cf. [BF]). Quite a bit of work has been put into trying to construct such surfaces of high degree. So far the record is 15, which coincides with the conjectural ...

Ellingsrud and Peskine showed in [ElP] that there are finitely many components of the Hilbert scheme of P containing smooth surfaces not of general type. The upper bound for the degree of such surfaces has recently been reduced to 105 (cf. [BF]). Quite a bit of work has been put into trying to construct such surfaces of high degree. So far the record is 15, which coincides with the conjectural ...