Root-Mean Square Error

Despite the wide use of surface electromyography (EMG) recorded during dynamic exercises, the reproducibility of EMG variables has not been fully established in a course of a dynamic leg exercise. The aim of this study was to investigate the reproducibility of eight lower limb muscles activity level during a pedaling exercise performed until exhaustion.Eight male were tested on two days held three days apart. Surface EMG was recorded from vastus lateralis, rectus femoris (RF), vastus medialis, semimembranosus, biceps femoris, gastrocnemius lateral, gastrocnemius medianus and tibialis anterior during incremental exercise test. The root mean square, an index of global EMG activity, was averaged every five crank revolutions (corresponding to about 3 s at 85 rpm) throughout the tests.Despite inter-subjects variations, we showed a high reproducibility of the activity level of lower limb muscles during a progressive pedaling exercise performed until exhaustion. However, RF muscle seemed to be the less reproducible of the eight muscles investigated during incremental pedaling exercise. These results suggest that each subject adopt a personal muscle activation strategy in a course of an incremental cycling exercise but fatigue phenomenon can induce some variations in the most fatigable muscles (RF).

This work represents a comparative study for the methods of registration for dental panoramic X-ray images. The study tried to find the best registration technique used to register images of the jaw. Three image registration techniques are implemented and applied to dental panoramic X-ray images in both spatial domain and wavelet domain. The first technique is based on cross-correlation. The second one depends on selecting control points from both the reference and the input images. The last technique is based on maximization of mutual information between the two images. In the wavelet domain, discrete wavelet transform (DWT) has been performed to the reference image and the test image before the three techniques have been applied. Then the registration methods have been applied using approximation coefficients in the registration procedure. After finishing the registration steps, inverse discrete wavelet transform (IDWT) has been applied in order to obtain the registered image. The...

In this study, the fifth-generation Pennsylvania State University–National Center for Atmospheric Research Mesoscale Model (MM5) with three-dimensional variational data assimilation (3DVAR) is utilized to investigate influences of GPS occultation refractivity on simulations of typhoons past Taiwan. Two recent cases were simulated, including Typhoon Nari in September 2001 and Typhoon Nakri in July 2002. The GPS observation data are taken from the Challenging Minisatellite Payload for Geophysical Research and Application (CHAMP) and Satélite de Aplicaciones Científicas-C (SAC-C) satellites that provide several retrieved refractivity profiles in the simulated domain near the initialization time. Through 3DVAR, the observed refractivity can be quickly ingested into the model initial conditions to recover the information over the ocean. The initial moisture increments from ingested GPS refractivity soundings exhibit a maximum magnitude of about 1.5 g kg−1 associated with temperature incr...

This paper investigates typical behaviors like damped oscillations in fractional order (FO) dynamical systems. Such response occurs due to the presence of, what is conceived as, pseudo-damping and meta-damping in some special class of FO systems. Here, approximation of such damped oscillation in FO systems with the conventional notion of integer order damping and time constant has been carried out using Genetic Algorithm (GA). Next, a multilayer feed-forward Artificial Neural Network (ANN) has been trained using the GA based results to predict the optimal pseudo and meta-damping from knowledge of the maximum order or number of terms in the FO dynamical system.

We describe a simple method to validate data collected from a study using the deuterium oxide dose-to-the-mother technique for breastfeeding evaluation. We used human milk intake calculation spreadsheets (n=180). The calculation was performed by fitting the deuterium enrichment data to a model for water turnover in the mother and in the baby. We assumed that the validity of the results is as high as the square root mean square error (SRMSE) between calculated and fitted data is low. Based on the original spreadsheets that fitted well with the model (n=87), we developed a simple prediction of the SRMSE and we used it as cutoff to check, correct (by removing enrichment data) and validate or remove the other spreadsheets. We found a cutoff dependent on the measured enrichment () that was. √∑(). And the mean SRMSE (90%CI) of the fitted sheets was 23.37 mg.kg-1 (22.01 mg.kg-1 , 24.73 mg.kg-1) with a maximum of 38.96 mg.kg-1. After correction we noticed that the number of enrichments removed per file varied from 1 to 4. We observed within the corrected spreadsheets a significant reduction (p≤0.0001, n=53) of the SRMSE (90%CI) from 49.78 mg.kg-1 (46.35 mg.kg-1 , 53.20mg.kg-1) before correction to 25.88 mg.kg-1 (24.13 mg.kg-1 , 27.64 mg.kg-1) after correction. We also observed that after correction, the mean difference (90%CI) of HM respectively non-HM that was 29.34 mg.kg-1 (21.71 mg.kg-1 , 36.97 mg.kg-1) respectively 24.13 mg.kg-1 (17.4 mg.kg-1 , 30.79 mg.kg-1) was strongly (p≤0.0001, n=53) different from zero. Therefore, the correction is very important to optimizing the results.