Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT) is defined as the movement of genetic material from one strain of species to another. Bacteria, being an asexual organism were always believed to transfer genes vertically. But recent studies provide evidence that shows bacteria can also transfer genes horizontally. HGT plays a major role in evolution and medicine. It is the major contributor in bacterial evolutio...

With the wide application, the recognition accuracy of unimodal biometric systems has to contend with a variety of problems such as background noise, signal noise and distortion, and environment or device variations. This paper combines face and iris features for developing a multimode biometric system, which is able to diminish the above mentioned problems of unimodal biometrics as well as to ...

Background: Amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) and mild-to-moderate Alzheimer’s disease (AD) are clinically distinct but impact cognitive and functional ability similarly. Comprehensive assessment of cognitive and functional deficits may prove useful in informing differential diagnosis in early stages of dementia and in informing endpoint selection in therapeutic AD trials. Objective: Th...

We investigate the sequence-dependent properties of proteins that determine the dual requirements of stability of the native state and its kinetic accessibility using simple cubic lattice models. Three interaction schemes are used to describe the potentials between nearest neighbor non-bonded beads. We show that, under the simulation conditions when the native basin of attraction (NBA) is the m...

This paper addresses the problem of model misspecification bias when estimating cohort-level determinants of child height-for-age zscore (HAZ) using data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS). I show that the combination of DHS survey design and the biological realities of child health in developing countries create an artifact that can strongly bias regression estimates when identifica...

This paper presents a method for crop yield forecast based on remote sensing and official data. The method uses a statistical approach to extract different pixels of smoothed NDVI data derived from MODIS sensor to be used as proxies for sugarcane yield estimation at a municipal scale. From 368 municipalities with yield's historical data from 2003 to 2012, three groups were created based on acre...

Classic support based approaches efficiently address frequent sequence mining. However, support based mining has been shown to suffer from a bias towards short sequences. In this paper, we propose a method to resolve this bias when mining the most frequent sequences. In order to resolve the length bias we define norm-frequency, based on the statistical zscore of support, and use it to replace s...

Classic support based approaches efficiently address frequent sequence mining. However, support based mining has been shown to suffer from a bias towards short sequences. In this paper, we propose a method to resolve this bias when mining the most frequent sequences. In order to resolve the length bias we define norm-frequency, based on the statistical zscore of support, and use it to replace s...

A 14-year-old girl with type-III Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS) underwent a dual energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) evaluation of the bone mineral density (BMD) in the scoliotic lumbar spine (L-spine), which measured 0.464 g/ cm (T-score: -5.3, Z-score: -4.23) (Picture 1). The BMD was found to be 0.230 g/cm (T-score: -4.5) in the deformed distal forearm and 0.181 g/cm (T-score: -4.1) in the ultrad...

Methods: This study decomposes existing temporal aberration detection algorithms into two sequential stages and investigates the individual impact of each stage on outbreak detection performance. The data forecasting stage (Stage 1) generates predictions of time series values a certain number of time steps in the future based on historical data. The anomaly measure stage (Stage 2) compares feat...