Long-term Effects of Early Childhood Malaria Exposure on Education and Health: Evidence from Colonial Taiwan

We estimate the effects of early childhood malaria exposure on education and health at older ages by exploiting variations in malaria exposure risk around birth that resulted from a universal malaria eradication campaign in colonial Taiwan in the early 20th century. We find that malaria exposure around birth leads to lower life-time educational attainment and to worse mental and physical health outcomes in old age as reflected in particular in worse cognitive function, a higher likelihood of cardiovascular diseases and a higher mortality hazard, compared to those who were not exposed.malaria, early childhood, education, health, Taiwan

Application of Time-Fractional Order Bloch Equation in Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting

Magnetic resonance fingerprinting (MRF) is one novel fast quantitative imaging framework for simultaneous quantification of multiple parameters with pseudo-randomized acquisition patterns. The accuracy of the resulting multi-parameters is very important for clinical applications. In this paper, we derived signal evolutions from the anomalous relaxation using a fractional calculus. More specifically, we utilized time-fractional order extension of the Bloch equations to generate dictionary to provide more complex system descriptions for MRF applications. The representative results of phantom experiments demonstrated the good accuracy performance when applying the time-fractional order Bloch equations to generate dictionary entries in the MRF framework. The utility of the proposed method is also validated by in-vivo study.Comment: Accepted at 2019 IEEE 16th International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI 2019

Vehicle Coordinated Strategy for Vehicle Routing Problem with Fuzzy Demands

The vehicle routing problem with fuzzy demands (VRPFD) is considered. A fuzzy reasoning constrained program model is formulated for VRPFD, and a hybrid ant colony algorithm is proposed to minimize total travel distance. Specifically, the two-vehicle-paired loop coordinated strategy is presented to reduce the additional distance, unloading times, and waste capacity caused by the service failure due to the uncertain demands. Finally, numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches