The impact of cancer incidence on catastrophic health expenditure in Iran with a Bayesian spatio-temporal analysis

Background : We investigated the impact of cancer incidence on CHE in Iran by considering spatial variation across provinces as well as temporal trends. Methods : Data from Household Income-Expenditure Survey were merged with cancer incidence rates during 2011-2016. We developed a Bayesian hierarchical model to explore the spatial and temporal patterns of CHE and its associated factors at provincial level. We used a Besag-York-Mollie2 prior and a random walk prior for spatial and temporal random effects respectively. All statistical analysis was carried out in R software. Results : All-type cancer incidence (OR per SD (95% CrI) = 1.16 (1.02, 1.32)), unemployment rate (1.08 (1.01, 1.15)) and income equity (0.88 (0.81, 0.97)) have important association with CHE. Percentage of urbanization and percentage of poverty were not statistically significant. Conclusion : The results suggest the development of new policies to protect cancer patients against financial hardship, narrow the gap in income inequality and solve the problem of high unemployment rate to reduce the level of CHE at provincial level.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Generalization of rateless codes for unequal error protection and recovery time: Asymptotic analysis

Abstract-In this paper, we propose rateless codes that provide unequal error protection (UEP) property. We analyze the asymptotic properties of these codes under the iterative decoding algorithm. We further verify our work with simulations. The simulation results indicate that the proposed codes have strong UEP property. Moreover, the UEP property does not have a considerable drawback on the overall performance of the codes. We also discuss that the proposed codes can provide unequal recovery time (URT). This means that given a target bit error rate, different parts of information bits can be decoded after receiving different amounts of encoded bits. This implies that the information bits can be recovered in a progressive manner. This URT property may be used for sequential data recovery in video/audio streaming

FTS : a distributed energy-efficient broadcasting scheme using fountain codes for multihop wireless networks

We investigate the problem of reliable and energy-efficient one-to-all broadcasting in multihop wireless networks, and propose fractional transmission scheme (FTS) - a low-complexity and scalable broadcasting scheme. FTS exploits the broadcasting nature of wireless channels and random encoding of rateless codes to reduce energy consumption while ensuring reliable delivery of packets to all nodes in the network. In the proposed scheme, different neighbors of a node share the responsibility of transmitting packets by sending only a fraction of encoded packets required by the node to successfully receive the data sent by the source. A detailed analysis of the performance of FTS is presented for grid and random deployment networks. Further, extensive simulations compare our scheme with present energy-efficient methods such as random linear coding, multipoint relaying, dominant pruning, and broadcast incremental power scheme. Simulations reveal that FTS offers good performance and adaptability at a low computational cost.

Low-Density Parity-Check Codes for Volume Holographic Memory Systems

We investigate the application of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes in volume holographic memory (VHM) systems. We show that a carefully designed irregular LDPC code has a very good performance in VHM systems. We optimize high-rate LDPC codes for the nonuniform error pattern in holographic memories to reduce the bit error rate extensively. The prior knowledge of noise distribution is used for designing as well as decoding the LDPC codes. We show that these codes have a superior performance to that of Reed-Solomon (RS) codes and regular LDPC counterparts. Our simulation shows that we can increase the maximum storage capacity of holographic memories by more than 50 percent if we use irregular LDPC codes with soft-decision decoding instead of conventionally employed RS codes with hard-decision decoding. The performance of these LDPC codes is close to the information theoretic capacity

Identification of Early Maladaptive Schemas Based on Young Questionnaire in High School Girls of Qom City, Iran

Background and Objectives: Schema is a cognitive and emotional pattern, which can affect individual behaviors. This study was performed to investigate mental health problems and personality characteristics in female students in Qom city. Methods: This cross-sectional study was carried out on 151 female students of Qom high schools in three disciplines of Mathematical Sciences, Humanities, and Experimental Sciences in 2011-2012 academic years. Sampling was performed in two steps; first cluster sampling and then stratified sampling with proportional allocation to each cluster. Participants answered a 75-question questionnaire, &ldquo;Young Early Maladaptive Schemas&rdquo;. Data were analyzed using Kruskal&ndash;Wallis, spearman correlation coefficient, and Lambda statistics. Results: The mean age of the students was 15&plusmn;1.5 years. Unrelenting standards schemas (in domain of over vigilance/inhibition), failure and dependency (in dimension of impaired autonomy), and defectiveness and shame (in dimension of disconnection and rejection) had the highest mean scores, respectively. None of the mean scores had a significant difference according to three academic groups. But the correlation between the schemas was statistically significant in the academic groups (p<0.05). Conclusion: In this study, 2 out of the 4 schemas with the highest mean belonged to impaired performance domain. Given that this schema is formed by parental behavior during childhood, therefore, one of the strategies can be training of parents to improve children&rsquo;s confidence and not over caring of them. &nbsp