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Previous multicenter/multinational studies were evaluated to determine the frequency of the absence of cerebrospinal fluid pleocytosis in patients with central nervous system infections, as well as the clinical impact of this condition. It was found that 18% of neurosyphilis, 7.9% of herpetic meningoencephalitis, 3% of tuberculous meningitis, 1.7% of Brucella meningitis, and 0.2% of pneumococcal meningitis cases did not display cerebrospinal fluid pleocytosis. Most patients were not immunosuppressed. Patients without pleocytosis had a high rate of unfavorable outcomes and thus this condition should not be underestimated. © 2017 The Author(s)

Objectives: The analytical performances of the Sebia capillary electrophoresis (CE), Roche turbidimetric inhibition immunoassay (TINIA), Tosoh G8 cation-exchange high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and Premier boronate affinity chromatography methods were evaluated. Capillary electrophoresis (CE) was accepted as a comparative method. Design and Methods: This study comprised randomly chosen 224 whole blood samples from the diabetic and non-diabetic patients. HbA1c level was quantified using four methods as follows: Roche TINIA, Premier Hb9210 boronate affinity chromatography, Tosoh G8 cation-exchange HPLC and Sebia CE. The analytical performances of the methods were evaluated with imprecion, bias estimation and comparison studies. Results: The results of all precision studies CV% were under 2.0%. The accepted goals for imprecision are 2.8% (IFCC) and

Common spatial pattern (CSP) method is widely used in brain machine interface (BMI) applications to extract features from the multichannel neural activity through a set of spatial projections. These spatial projections minimize the Rayleigh quotient (RQ) as the objective function, which is the variance ratio of the classes. The CSP method easily overfits the data when the number of training trials is not sufficiently large and it is sensitive to daily variation of multichannel electrode placement, which limits its applicability for everyday use in BMI systems. To overcome these problems, the amount of channels that is used in projections, should be limited to some adequate number. We introduce a spatially sparse projection (SSP) method that exploits the unconstrained minimization of a new objective function with approximated l(1) penalty. Unlike the RQ this new objective function depends on the magnitude of the sparse filter. The SSP method is employed to classify the multiclass ECoG and two class EEG data sets. We compared our results with a recently introduced sparse CSP solution based on l(0) norm. Our method outperforms the standard CSP method and provides comparable results to l(0) norm based solution and it is associated with less computational complexity. We also conducted several simulation studies on the effect of noisy channel and intersession variability on the performance of the CSP and sparse filters. (c) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

IEEE 17th Signal Processing and Communications Applications Conference -- APR 09-11, 2009 -- Antalya, TURKEY WOS: 000273935600046 Assessment of baroreflex sensitivity (BRS) using vasoactive drugs is widely accepted in clinical research. It has been reported that decrease in BRS is an indicative of increased risk of sudden cardiac death. Due to its clinical importance, alternative baroreflex assessment methods have been developed which eliminate use of drugs and since then they are called non-invasive methods. In this study BRS index obtained by drug based assessment was predicted from subset of noninvasive BRS indices extracted from heart rate and systolic pressure time series. A leave one out method was employed to search subset of indices which gives the highest correlation with invasive and predicted BRS. Two predictors provided the highest correlation (0.87). The algorithm selected consistently normalized cross-power in Mayer frequency band and average magnitude square coherence in high frequency band as predictors for all 16 subjects. IEEE

Background: Bongaarts's model of Ci calculation was used to calculate the contribution of breast-feeding to family planning.Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted in the area of İstanbul (TURKEY) Silivri Public Health Practice and Research Center between the dates of 20th May-1st October 2005. In this study whole under 1 year old babies, composed the sample (n=1247). Bongaarts model can be summarized as Total Fertility Rate (TFR)= TF x Ci x CA x CC x Cm and takes its bases from TF ( total fertility). Ci is the Postparum infekunditi index. Ci= 20"(18.5+i) is calculated by this formula. The first menstruation period, after pregnancy ends, was taken as the value ‘i'.Results: The average age for the total 1247 mothers who contributed to this study was 26.7±5.2 (R: 16 - 50) yr. The women whose menstruation turned back (n=830), the average amenore period was found as 3.0±1.9 (1-12 months). Ci's average value was 0.94±0.07 (0,66-1.03) and a r= -0.08, P= 0.012 correlation was appointed between mother's age and Ci. 7.7% of partici­pants (n: 96) used breast-feeding as a contraceptive method. These participants used breast-feeding as contracep­tion for 16.9±14.5 wk.Conclusions: Breast-feeding is a reliable and a positive affecting method of family planning for both improving the baby and mother's health. Furthermore also by affecting TFR over Ci, it provides a positive contribution to society health.

Date of Conference: 3-7 September 2007 Conference Name: 15th European Signal Processing Conference, EURASIP 2007 We apply a sparse signal representation approach to impact acoustic signals to discriminate between empty and full hazelnuts. The impact acoustic signals are recorded by dropping the hazelnut shells on a metal plate. The impact signal is then approximated within a given error limit by choosing codevectors from a special dictionary. This dictionary was generated from sub-dictionaries that are individually generated for the impact signals corresponding to empty and full hazelnut. The number of codevectors selected from each sub-dictionary and the approximation error within initial codevectors are used as classification features and fed to a Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA). We also compare this algorithm with a baseline approach. This baseline approach uses features which describe the time and frequency characteristics of the given signal that were previously used for empty and full hazelnut separation. Classification accuracies of 98.3% and 96.8% were achieved by the proposed approach and base algorithm respectively. The results we obtained show that sparse signal representation strategy can be used as an alternative classification method for undeveloped hazelnut separation with higher accuracies.

ISL Altran;Galileo Avionics;Selex Sistemi Intergrati;STMicroelectronics;University of Pisa 14th European Signal Processing Conference, EUSIPCO 2006 --4 September 2006 through 8 September 2006 -- Florence -- We introduce a new technique for the classification of motor imagery electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings in a Brain Computer Interface (BCI) task. The technique is based on an adaptive time-frequency analysis of EEG signals computed using Local Discriminant Bases (LDB) derived from Local Cosine Packets (LCP). Unlike prior work on adaptive time-frequency analysis of EEG signals, this paper uses arbitrary non-dyadic time segments and adaptively selects the size of the frequency bands used for feature extractions. In an offline step, the EEG data obtained from the C3/C4 electrode locations of the standard 10/20 system is adaptively segmented in time, over a non-dyadic grid. This is followed by a frequency domain clustering procedure in each adapted time segment to maximize the discrimination power of the resulting time-frequency features. Then, the most discriminant features from the resulting arbitrarily segmented time-frequency plane are sorted. A Principal Component Analysis (PCA) step is applied to reduce the dimensionality of the feature space. The online step simply computes the reduced dimensionality features determined by the offline step and feeds them to the linear discriminant. The algorithm was applied to all nine subjects of the BCI Competition 2002. The classification performance of the proposed algorithm varied between 70% and 92.6% across subjects using just two electrodes. The average classification accuracy was 80.6%. For comparison, we also implemented an Adaptive Autoregressive model based classification procedure that achieved an average classification rate of 76.3% on the same subjects, and higher error rates than the proposed approach on each individual subject.

This descriptive - analytical study was carried out during the year 2000 in order to formulate a classification system to determine the adolescents at high risk for Premenstrual Syndrome (PMS) and who need a detailed evaluation. Subjects were divided two groups according to DSM- IV criteria for premenstrual disforic disorder (PMDD) and Premenstrual Assessment Form (PAF) scoring system.

In Turkey, the first population and family planning law was accepted by the government in 1965, and this law was revised in 1982. This study was carried out to evaluate the family planning methods of women who applied to rural health centers of Kucukcekmece and were willing to use the health-care service and consultancy about birth control methods. The data of the study were gathered by means of an appropriate inquiry form and face-to-face interview with the women willing to use the family planning service between September 1998 and June 1999 at the health-care centers of Kucukcekmece of Istanbul. There were 699 women participants in the study. The last pregnancy of 27.2% (n = 175) of the women had been undesired; 86.8% of all the women who participated in the study declared that they did not desire any more children, but only 81.3% (n = 568) out of these were using a method to protect from pregnancy. The most frequently known (84.8%) and used (45.9%) method of the participants was an intrauterine device (IUD), and 80.8% of the women using an IUD wanted to continue using that method. A total of 223 women (39.3%) using any method protecting from pregnancy became pregnant. Approximately half (57.8%) of those occurred during the use of withdrawal. According to the findings of this study, the level of knowledge about family planning and the consequent behavior of the women within the fertile age group are better than the average of Turkey, but still not satisfactory.

The free vibration problem of non-cylindrical helical springs such as hyperboloidal, barrel and conical is studied by the stiffness method considering the effects of rotary inertias, axial and shear deformations. The cylindrical helical element stiffness matrices with twelve degrees of freedom, which are obtained numerically by the transfer matrix method, are employed in the formulation. The consistent element mass matrices of spatial straight element are also implicated in the analysis. The general eigenvalue problem is solved by the subspace iteration and Jacobi's methods. After verifying the results obtained, effects of the number of active coils, the helix pitch angle, the ratio of diameters of minimum cylinder to maximum cylinder, the ratio of diameters of wire to maximum cylinder, and circular and rectangular sections on the free vibration frequencies are investigated.