Fu Jen Catholic University

About: Fu Jen Catholic University is a education organization based out in Taipei, Taiwan. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Medicine. The organization has 6842 authors who have published 9512 publications receiving 171005 citations. The organization is also known as: FJU & Fu Jen.

Determining terminal-pair reliability based on edge expansion diagrams using OBDD

Abstract: For calculating terminal-pair reliability, most published algorithms are based on the sum of disjoint products. However, these tree-based partitions lack the capability to avoid redundant computation due to the isomorphic sub-problems. To overcome these problems, an efficient methodology to evaluate the terminal-pair reliability, based on edge expansion diagrams using OBDD (ordered binary decision diagram) is presented. First, the success path function of a given network is constructed based on OBDD by traversing the network with diagram-based edge expansion. Then the reliability of the network is obtained by directly evaluating on this OBDD recursively. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated by performing experiments on benchmarks collected by previous works including the larger networks (from 4 to 2/sup 99/ paths). A dramatic improvement, as demonstrated by the experimental results for a 2-by-n lattice network is that the number of OBDD nodes is only linearly proportional to the number of stages, and is much better than previous algorithms which have exponential complexity by using the sum of disjoint products. The CPU time of reliability calculation for a 100-stage lattice network is only about 2.5 seconds with 595 nodes generated on a SPARC 20 workstation with 128 MBytes of memory. Thus, with this approach, the terminal-pair reliability of large networks can be efficiently evaluated better than thought possible.

Hepatitis C virus infection and increased risk of cerebrovascular disease.

Abstract: Background and Purpose—The association between hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection and cerebrovascular disease remains controversial. This study aimed to assess the risk of lethal cerebrovascular diseases associated with chronic HCV infection. Methods—In this community-based prospective cohort study, 23 665 residents (aged 30 to 65 years) were enrolled in 1991 to 1992. They were personally interviewed using structured questionnaires and provided blood samples for various serological and biochemical tests at study entry. Serum HCV RNA level and HCV genotype were tested for participants seropositive for antibodies against HCV (anti-HCV). Deaths from cerebrovascular disease during follow-up were ascertained by computerized linkage with National Death Certification profiles from 1991 to 2008 (International Classification of Diseases, 9th Revision 430 to 438). Multivariate-adjusted hazard ratio with 95% CI was estimated for each risk predictor. Results—There were 255 cerebrovascular deaths during 382 011 person-...