Search results for "result"

Women’s empowerment and child mortality: the case of Bangladesh

2018

Inter-and intra-tester reliability of a battery of cervical movement control dysfunction tests

2015

Abstract Background Apart from the cranio-cervical flexion test and the deep neck flexor endurance test, evidence related to reliability of cervical movement control dysfunction tests is lacking. Objectives This study investigated the inter- and intra-tester reliability of a battery of cervical movement control dysfunction tests and the effect of clinician experience on reliability in 15 patients with chronic neck pain and 17 non-neck pain controls. In addition, it explored whether impaired performance on this battery of tests was more frequently observed in the neck pain group. Design Inter and intra-tester reliability study. Method Participants were videotaped while performing a battery o…

Experimental observations of upstream overdeepening

2005

The issue of morphodynamic influence in meandering streams is investigated through a series of laboratory experiments on curved and straight flumes. Both qualitative and quantitative observations confirm the suitability of the recent theoretical developments (Zolezzi & Seminara 2001) that indicate the occurrence of two distinct regimes of morphodynamic influence, depending on the value of the width ratio of the channel β. The threshold value βR separating the upstream from the downstream influence regimes coincides with the resonant value discovered by Blondeaux & Seminara (1985). Indeed it is observed that upstream influence may occur only in relatively wide channels, while narrower stream…

Deep learning and process understanding for data-driven Earth system science

2017

Machine learning approaches are increasingly used to extract patterns and insights from the ever-increasing stream of geospatial data, but current approaches may not be optimal when system behaviour is dominated by spatial or temporal context. Here, rather than amending classical machine learning, we argue that these contextual cues should be used as part of deep learning (an approach that is able to extract spatio-temporal features automatically) to gain further process understanding of Earth system science problems, improving the predictive ability of seasonal forecasting and modelling of long-range spatial connections across multiple timescales, for example. The next step will be a hybri…

Determination of phenytoin in plasma by molecularly imprinted solid-phase extraction.

2001

Abstract A molecularly imprinted polymer (MIP) using phenytoin as template and methacrylamide as the functional monomer was prepared. The selectivity was measured by comparing capacity factors of phenytoin and other structurally related compounds. The polymer was evaluated as a selective sorbent in molecularly imprinted solid-phase extraction (MISPE). Several washing solvents were tested to study their ability to disrupt the non-specific interactions occurring between the sample and the polymer matrix and the role of water in the recognition process was also investigated. It was shown that the key step of successful sample extraction is the right choice of the washing solvent. Plasma sample…

Measurement of lean body mass using bioelectrical impedance analysis: a consideration of the pros and cons

2017

The assessment of body composition has important applications in the evaluation of nutritional status and estimating potential health risks. Bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA) is a valid method for the assessment of body composition. BIA is an alternative to more invasive and expensive methods like dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry, computerized tomography, and magnetic resonance imaging. Bioelectrical impedance analysis is an easy-to-use and low-cost method for the estimation of fat-free mass (FFM) in physiological and pathological conditions. The reliability of BIA measurements is influenced by various factors related to the instrument itself, including electrodes, operator, subject, a…

Towards the development of a fossil bone geochemical standard: An inter-laboratory study

2007

Ten international laboratories participated in an inter-laboratory comparison of a fossil bone composite with the objective of producing a matrix and structure-matched reference material for studies of the bio-mineralization of ancient fossil bone. We report the major and trace element compositions of the fossil bone composite, using in-situ method as well as various wet chemical digestion techniques. For major element concentrations, the intra-laboratory analytical precision (%RSDr) ranges from 7 to 18%, with higher percentages for Ti and K. The %RSDr are smaller than the inter-laboratory analytical precision (%RSDR; 100% was found for the high field strength elements (Hf, Th, Zr, Nb). The…

The Application of Machine Learning Algorithms to the Analysis of Electromyographic Patterns From Arthritic Patients

2009

The main aim of our study was to investigate the possibility of applying machine learning techniques to the analysis of electromyographic patterns (EMG) collected from arthritic patients during gait. The EMG recordings were collected from the lower limbs of patients with arthritis and compared with those of healthy subjects (CO) with no musculoskeletal disorder. The study involved subjects suffering from two forms of arthritis, viz, rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and hip osteoarthritis (OA). The analysis of the data was plagued by two problems which frequently render the analysis of this type of data extremely difficult. One was the small number of human subjects that could be included in the in…

Mutual nonlinear prediction of cardiovascular variability series: Comparison between exogenous and autoregressive exogenous models

2007

A model-based approach to perform mutual nonlinear prediction of short cardiovascular variability series is presented. The approach is based on identifying exogenous (X) and autoregressive exogenous (ARX) models by K-nearest neighbors local linear approximation, and estimates the predictability of a series given the other as the squared correlation between original and predicted values of the series. The method was first tested on simulations reproducing different types of interaction between non-identical Henon maps, and then applied to heart rate (HR) and blood pressure (BP) variability series measured in healthy subjects at rest and after head-up tilt. Simulations showed that different c…

Procedimento estratégico em três estágios de seleção de variáveis para a obtenção de resultados equilibrados na pesquisa em saúde pública

2018

Multidisciplinary research in public health is approached using methods from many scientific disciplines. One of the main characteristics of this type of research is dealing with large data sets. Classic statistical variable selection methods, known as “screen and clean”, and used in a single-step, select the variables with greater explanatory weight in the model. These methods, commonly used in public health research, may induce masking and multicollinearity, excluding relevant variables for the experts in each discipline and skewing the result. Some specific techniques are used to solve this problem, such as penalized regressions and Bayesian statistics, they offer more balanced results a…