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Background Client-centric quality of care (QoC) in family planning (FP) services are imperative for contraceptive method adoption and continuation. Less is known about the choice of contraceptive method in India beyond responses to the three common questions regarding method information, asked in demographic and health surveys. This study argues for appropriate measurement of method choice and assesses...
We have investigated the formation of nanoripples on the surface of germanium, Ge(100), due to the effect of 100-keV Ar + ion irradiation. The irradiation was carried out at different incidence angles from 0° to 75° in steps of 15° with respect to the surface normal with a fixed ion fluence of approximately 3 × 10 17 ions/cm 2 . Atomic force...
Message Passing Interface (MPI) has been the predominant standardized system for writing parallel and distributed applications. However, while MPI has been the software system of choice for traditional parallel and distributed computing platforms such as large compute clusters and Grid, MPI is not the system of choice for cloud platforms. The primary reasons for this is the lack of low latency high...
Polygon overlay is one of the complex operations in computational geometry. It is applied in many fields such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), computer graphics and VLSI CAD. Sequential algorithms for this problem are in abundance in literature but there is a lack of distributed algorithms especially for MapReduce platform. In GIS, spatial data files tend to be large in size (in GBs) and the...
Windows Azure is an emerging cloud platform that provides application developers with APIs to write scientific and commercial applications. However, the steep learning curve to understand the unique architecture of the cloud platforms in general and continuously changing Azure APIs specifically, make it difficult for the application developers to write cloud based applications. During our extensive...
An efficient parallel priority queue is at the core of the effort in parallelizing important non-numeric irregular computations such as discrete event simulation scheduling and branch-and-bound algorithms. GPGPUs can provide powerful computing platform for such non-numeric computations if an efficient parallel priority queue implementation is available. In this paper, aiming at fine-grained applications,...
Processing of extremely large polygonal (vector-based) spatial datasets has been a long-standing research challenge for scientists in the Geographic Information Systems and Science (GIS) community. Surprisingly, it is not for the lack of individual parallel algorithm; we discovered that the irregular and data intensive nature of the underlying processing is the main reason for the meager amount of...
Processing of extremely large polygonal (vector-based) spatial datasets has been a long-standing research challenge for scientists in the Geographic Information Systems and Science (GIS) community. Surprisingly, it is not for the lack of individual parallel algorithm; we discovered that the irregular and data intensive nature of the underlying processing is the main reason for the meager amount of...
Bilateral filtering is an ubiquitous tool for several kinds of image processing applications. This work explores multicore and many core accelerations for the embarrassingly parallel yet compute-intensive bilateral filtering kernel. For many core architectures, we have created a novel pair-symmetric algorithm to avoid redundant calculations. For multicore architectures, we improve the algorithm by...
Spatial overlay processing is a widely used compute- intensive GIS application that involves aggregation of two or more layers of maps to facilitate intelligent querying on the collocated output data. When large GIS data sets are represented in polyg- onal (vector) form, spatial analysis runs for extended periods of time, which is undesirable for time-sensitive applications such as emergency response...
GIS polygon-based (also know as vector-based) spatial data overlay computation is much more complex than raster data computation. Processing of polygonal spatial data files has been a long standing research question in GIS community due to the irregular and data intensive nature of the underlying computation. The state-of-the-art software for overlay computation in GIS community is still desktop-based...
Cloud computing is becoming mainstream for High Performance Computing (HPC) application development over the last few years. However, even though many vendors have rolled out their commercial cloud infrastructures, the service offerings are usually only best-effort based, without any performance guarantees. Cloud computing effectively saves the eScience developer the hassles of resource provisioning...
With the proliferation of multicore and manycore architectures, memory hierarchy plays an important role in realizing expected performance of memory intensive scientific applications. A vast majority of scientific applications require a priority based data structure to discriminate among available data elements, for instance, a priority based data structure is imperative for extracting the earliest...
To report our current methods of patient positioning, establishing the pneumoperitoneum, port placement, and helpful maneuvers during the procedure that have been refined over the course of our initial experience with robotic laparoscopic radical prostatectomy (RLRP). RLRP is gaining popularity as a minimally invasive technique for treating patients with organ-confined prostate cancer. Because this...
Pelvic lipomatosis is a rare disorder of benign mature adipose tissue proliferation around the bladder and rectum. Most cases are associated with proliferative cystitis, in particular, cystitis glandularis. The etiology of pelvic lipomatosis and its association with proliferative cystitis are not well understood. This is the first reported case of familial pelvic lipomatosis. The pathogenesis and...
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