Search results for " trees"
showing 10 items of 214 documents
Evapotranspiration from an Olive Orchard using Remote Sensing-Based Dual Crop Coefficient Approach
2013
A remote sensing-based approach to estimate actual evapotranspiration (ET) was tested in an area covered by olive trees and characterized by Mediterranean climate. The methodology is a modified version of the standard FAO-56 dual crop coefficient procedure, in which the crop potential transpiration, T p, is obtained by directly applying the Penman-Monteith (PM) equation with actual canopy characteristics (i.e., leaf area index, albedo and canopy height) derived from optical remote sensing data. Due to the minimum requirement of in-situ ancillary inputs, the methodology is suitable also for applications on large areas where the use of tabled crop coefficient values become problematic, due to…
Negative biopsy of focal hepatic lesions: Decision tree model for patient management
2019
OBJECTIVE. The purpose of this study was to investigate patient- and procedure-related variables affecting the false-negative rate of ultrasound (US)-guided liver biopsy and to develop a standardized patient-tailored predictive model for the management of negative biopsy results. MATERIALS AND METHODS. We retrospectively included 389 patients (mean age ± SD, 62 ± 12 years old) who had undergone US-guided liver biopsy of 405 liver lesions between January 1, 2013, and June 30, 2015. We collected multiple patient- and procedure-related variables. By comparing pathology reports of biopsy and the reference standard (further histology or imaging follow-up), we were able to categorize the biopsy r…
Factors of local recurrence and organ preservation with transoral laser microsurgery in laryngeal carcinomas; CHAID decision-tree analysis.
2018
BACKGROUND Indications of transoral laser microsurgery (TLM) are conditioned by the risk of local relapse. OBJECTIVE To evaluate prognostic factors of local relapse and local control with TLM (LC-TLM). METHODS Local relapse and LC-TLM were evaluated in 1119 patients. Logistic regression and CHAID decision tree analysis were performed. RESULTS Local relapse correlated to previous radiotherapy failure (8.45, CI 95%: 2.64-27.03; P < .001), paraglottic involvement (2.42, CI: 1.41-4.15; P = .001), anterior commissure involvement (2.12, CI: 1.43-3.14; P < .001), grade of differentiation (1.74, CI: 1.18-2.57; P = .005), and alcohol consumption (1.4, CI: 0.99-1.98; P = .057). Local relapse tended t…
A decision tree to help determine the best timing and antiretroviral strategy in HIV-infected patients.
2011
SUMMARYOptimal antiretroviral strategies for HIV-infected patients still need to be established. To this end a decision tree including different antiretroviral strategies that could be adopted for HIV-infected patients was built. A 10-year follow-up was simulated by using transitional probabilities estimated from a large cohort using a time-homogeneous Markov model. The desired outcome was for patients to maintain a CD4 cell count of >500 cells/mm3without experiencing AIDS or death. For patients with a baseline HIV viral load ⩾5 log10copies/ml, boosted protease inhibitor-based immediate highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) allowed them to spend 12% more time with CD4 ⩾500/mm3than…
Non-invasive diagnosis in a case of bronchopulmonary sequestration and proposal of diagnostic algorhythm
2008
The case of a 43-year-old woman with intralobar pulmonary sequestration, Pryce type one, is presented. The medical history was characterised by recurrent bronchopneumonia, productive cough with purulent sputum and hemoptysis in the last three years. Diagnosis was made by CT angiography: multiplanar, maximum intensity projection and volume rendering reconstructions were visualised. A volume reduction of middle and lower lobe with multiple cyst-like bronchiectasis was detected and no evident relationship with tracheobronchial tree was pointed out. Reconstructions aimed at evaluating bronchial structures demonstrated no patency of middle and lower lobar bronchi. The study carried out after con…
Combination of osteopontin and activated leukocyte cell adhesion molecule as potent prognostic discriminators in HER2- and ER-negative breast cancer.
2010
Background: To analyse the discriminative impact of osteopontin (OPN) and activated leukocyte cell adhesion molecule (ALCAM), combined with human epidermal growth factor 2 (HER2) and oestrogen receptor (ER) in breast cancer. Methods: Osteopontin, ALCAM, HER2 and ER mRNA expression in breast cancer tissues of 481 patients were analysed (mRNA microarray analysis, kinetic RT–PCR). Hierarchical clustering was performed in training cohort A (N=100, adjuvant treatment) and validation cohorts B (N=200, no adjuvant treatment, low-risk) and C (N=181, adjuvant treatment, high-risk). Results: Negative/low ER and HER2, high OPN and low ALCAM mRNA expression helped to identify patients at particularly h…
STRATEGY TO INCREASE THE FARM COMPETITIVENESS
2014
Italy’s wine-growing production structure is highly pulverized. So, for many wine-growing farms loweri ng the production cost represents the only way of gain ing a competitive advantage. Production at average unit costs lower than competitors allows to improve prof itability. Among farming operations, winter pruning and tying of productive vine-branches require a high hu man labor. For this reason the paper presents the r esults of research conducted on a sample of Sicilian wine- producing farms in order to study the cost-effectiv eness to make the pruning and the subsequent ligation of productive branches with tools that facilitate the work. The economic analysis, after the determination o…
Re-giardinieri e Natura selvaggia. Implicazioni politico-simboliche dello sradicamento, taglio e trasporto in città degli alberi nella Mesopotamia de…
2022
In Sumerian mythological literature, as in coeval Akkadian one, between the end of the 3rd and the beginning of the 2nd millennium, the ruler, foremost among them Gilgameš, on several occasions uproots and/or cuts down trees. These trees should be understood as elements of a wider ‘Wilderness’, with which they share a powerful and ambiguous ontological otherness compared to the city and, more generally, to the land of Sumer. The action of the king on the tree, like that of a farmer or gardener, with the consequent realization of ‘artefacts’, allows, through a cultural organization of the power of the tree, the renewal of the relationship, always subject to crisis, between the human communit…
A weighted distance-based approach with boosted decision trees for label ranking
2023
Label Ranking (LR) is an emerging non-standard supervised classification problem with practical applications in different research fields. The Label Ranking task aims at building preference models that learn to order a finite set of labels based on a set of predictor features. One of the most successful approaches to tackling the LR problem consists of using decision tree ensemble models, such as bagging, random forest, and boosting. However, these approaches, coming from the classical unweighted rank correlation measures, are not sensitive to label importance. Nevertheless, in many settings, failing to predict the ranking position of a highly relevant label should be considered more seriou…
Efficient pruning of multilayer perceptrons using a fuzzy sigmoid activation function
2006
This Letter presents a simple and powerful pruning method for multilayer feed forward neural networks based on the fuzzy sigmoid activation function presented in [E. Soria, J. Martin, G. Camps, A. Serrano, J. Calpe, L. Gomez, A low-complexity fuzzy activation function for artificial neural networks, IEEE Trans. Neural Networks 14(6) (2003) 1576-1579]. Successful performance is obtained in standard function approximation and channel equalization problems. Pruning allows to reduce network complexity considerably, achieving a similar performance to that obtained by unpruned networks.