One hundred and five sequential transjugular core liver biopsies (TJLBx) were performed in 101 patients with coagulopathy and/or ascites using the 19-gauge Quick-Core Biopsy (QCB) needle. Two-hundred and seventy-three cores were obtained in 295 passes (92. 5%). One-hundred and two of the 105 procedures (97.1%) led to a histopathologic diagnosis. One of the three nondiagnostic biopsies was done because of severe autolysis of the liver. There was one subcapsular hematoma, one hepatic arteriovenous fistula, and one liver capsular puncture. Two minor neck hematomas occurred. One death was reported (unrelated to the procedure). QCB needle TJLBx is an effective and relatively safe way to obtain core liver samples.

This article presents several techniques for integrating information from a rule-based machine translation (RBMT) system into a statistical machine translation (SMT) framework. These techniques are grouped into three parts that correspond to the type of information integrated: the morphological, lexical, and system levels. The first part presents techniques that use information from a rule-based morphological tagger to do morpheme splitting of the Arabic source text. We also compare with the results of using a statistical morphological tagger. In the second part, we present two ways of using Arabic diacritics to improve SMT results, both based on binary decision trees. The third part presents a system combination method that combines the outputs of the RBMT and the SMT systems, leveraging the strength of each. This article shows how 123 68 R. Zbib et al. language specific information obtained through a deterministic rule-based process can be used to improve SMT, which is mostly language-independent.

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