LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Usefulness of modified Pulmonary Index Score (mPIS) as a quantitative tool for the evaluation of severe acute exacerbation in asthmatic children.

BACKGROUND
Acute exacerbation of asthma is divided qualitatively into mild, moderate, and severe attacks and respiratory failure. This system is, however, not suitable for estimating small changes in respiratory condition with time and for determining the efficacy of treatments, because it has a qualitative, but not quantitative nature.


METHODS
To evaluate the usefulness of quantitative estimation of asthma exacerbation, modified Pulmonary Index Score (mPIS) values were measured in 87 asthmatic children (mean age, 5.0 ± 0.4 years) during hospitalization. mPIS was calculated by adding the sum of scores for 6 items (scores of 0-3 were given for each item). These consisted of heart rate, respiratory rate, accessory muscle use, inspiratory-to-expiratory flow ratio, degree of wheezing, and oxygen saturation in room air. Measurements were made at visits and at hospitalization and were then made twice a day until discharge.


RESULTS
mPIS values were highly correlated among raters. mPIS values at visits were 9.1 ± 0.1 and 12.6 ± 0.4 in subjects with moderate and severe attacks, respectively (p < 0.001). mPIS values of subjects requiring continuous inhalation therapy (CIT) with isoproterenol in addition to systemic steroids were significantly higher than the values of those without CIT (12.0 ± 0.5 and 9.3 ± 0.2, respectively, p < 0.001). A score of 10 was suggested to be the optimal cutoff for distinguishing between subjects requiring and not requiring CIT, from the perspectives of both sensitivity and specificity. mPIS at hospitalization correlated well with the period until discharge, suggesting that this score was a useful predictor for the clinical course after hospitalization.


CONCLUSIONS
mPIS could be a useful tool for several aspects during acute asthma attacks, including the determination of a treatment plan, and prediction of the period of hospitalization in admitted patients, although prospective studies would be required to establish our hypothesis.
Smoothing Noisy Data with Spline Functions Estimating the Correct Degree of Smoothing by the Method of Generalized Cross-Validation *

Smoothing splines are well known to provide nice curves which smooth discrete, noisy data. We obtain a practical, effective method for estimating the optimum amount of smoothing from the data. Derivatives can be estimated from the data by differentiating the resulting (nearly) optimally smoothed spline. We consider the model yi=g(ti)+e~, i= 1, 2 . . . . . n, tie[0 , 1], where geW2 ~'~) = {f: j; f , , .... f(mi~ abs. cont., f(m~ ~2 [0, 1 ] }, and the {el} are random errors with E e i=0, E eie~=a z 6~j. The error variance a 2 may be unknown. As an estimate ofg we take the solution g,, a to the problem: Find f ~ W2 ("~ to minimize 1 1_ ~ (f(t j) y~)2 + 2 S (f(")(u)) 2 du. The function g,, a is a smoothing polynomial n j = l 0 spline of degree 2m-1 . The,parameter 2 controls the tradeoff between the 1 "roughness" of the solution, as measured by S [f(m)(u)]2 du, and the infidelity to 0
Is magnification necessary to confirm visual inspection of cervical abnormalities? A randomized trial in Peru.

OBJECTIVES
Cervical cancer is the leading cause of cancer death among women in developing countries. This study was designed to evaluate whether visual inspection with acetic acid and magnification (VIAM) improved confirmation of cervical lesions as compared to confirmation with visual inspection with acetic acid (VIA) without magnification when used by physicians.


METHODS
From April-December 2004, women in San Martin, Peru, who were referred as VIA-positive by an "obstetriz" (a professional midwife with 6 years of university training) were randomized into two groups for confirmatory screening by a physician using either VIA or VIAM with an AviScope, a hand-held 4x magnification scope with a green light source. The reference standard for the presence or absence of cervical neoplasia was colposcopy and directed biopsy, as required.


RESULTS
A total of 358 women participated in the study; 161 had a confirmatory examination with VIAM and 159 with VIA. Sensitivity for low- or high-grade lesions was 68% with VIA and 77% with VIAM, and specificity was 62% with VIA and 63% with VIAM; however, these differences were not statistically significant.


CONCLUSIONS
For settings where physician confirmation of cervical abnormalities identified through visual inspection is required and available, this study demonstrates that VIAM had no significant advantage over VIA.
Beyond atopy: multiple patterns of sensitization in relation to asthma in a birth cohort study.

RATIONALE
The pattern of IgE response (over time or to specific allergens) may reflect different atopic vulnerabilities which are related to the presence of asthma in a fundamentally different way from current definition of atopy.


OBJECTIVES
To redefine the atopic phenotype by identifying latent structure within a complex dataset, taking into account the timing and type of sensitization to specific allergens, and relating these novel phenotypes to asthma.


METHODS
In a population-based birth cohort in which multiple skin and IgE tests have been taken throughout childhood, we used a machine learning approach to cluster children into multiple atopic classes in an unsupervised way. We then investigated the relation between these classes and asthma (symptoms, hospitalizations, lung function and airway reactivity).


MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS
A five-class model indicated a complex latent structure, in which children with atopic vulnerability were clustered into four distinct classes (Multiple Early [112/1053, 10.6%]; Multiple Late [171/1053, 16.2%]; Dust Mite [47/1053, 4.5%]; and Non-dust Mite [100/1053, 9.5%]), with a fifth class describing children with No Latent Vulnerability (623/1053, 59.2%). The association with asthma was considerably stronger for Multiple Early compared with other classes and conventionally defined atopy (odds ratio [95% CI]: 29.3 [11.1-77.2] versus 12.4 [4.8-32.2] versus 11.6 [4.8-27.9] for Multiple Early class versus Ever Atopic versus Atopic age 8). Lung function and airway reactivity were significantly poorer among children in Multiple Early class. Cox regression demonstrated a highly significant increase in risk of hospital admissions for wheeze/asthma after age 3 yr only among children in the Multiple Early class (HR 9.2 [3.5-24.0], P < 0.001).


CONCLUSIONS
IgE antibody responses do not reflect a single phenotype of atopy, but several different atopic vulnerabilities which differ in their relation with asthma presence and severity.
Validity of a clinical decision rule-based alert system for drug dose adjustment in patients with renal failure intended to improve pharmacists' analysis of medication orders in hospitals

OBJECTIVE
The main objective of this study was to assess the diagnostic performances of an alert system integrated into the CPOE/EMR system for renally cleared drug dosing control. The generated alerts were compared with the daily routine practice of pharmacists as part of the analysis of medication orders.


MATERIALS AND METHODS
The pharmacists performed their analysis of medication orders as usual and were not aware of the alert system interventions that were not displayed for the purpose of the study neither to the physician nor to the pharmacist but kept with associate recommendations in a log file. A senior pharmacist analyzed the results of medication order analysis with and without the alert system. The unit of analysis was the drug prescription line. The primary study endpoints were the detection of drug dose prescription errors and inter-rater reliability (Kappa coefficient) between the alert system and the pharmacists in the detection of drug dose error.


RESULTS
The alert system fired alerts in 8.41% (421/5006) of cases: 5.65% (283/5006) "exceeds max daily dose" alerts and 2.76% (138/5006) "under-dose" alerts. The alert system and the pharmacists showed a relatively poor concordance: 0.106 (CI 95% [0.068-0.144]). According to the senior pharmacist review, the alert system fired more appropriate alerts than pharmacists, and made fewer errors than pharmacists in analyzing drug dose prescriptions: 143 for the alert system and 261 for the pharmacists. Unlike the alert system, most diagnostic errors made by the pharmacists were 'false negatives'. The pharmacists were not able to analyze a significant number (2097; 25.42%) of drug prescription lines because understaffing.


CONCLUSION
This study strongly suggests that an alert system would be complementary to the pharmacists' activity and contribute to drug prescription safety.
Relaxed Balance through Standard Rotations

We consider binary search trees, where rebalancing transformations need not be connected with updates but may be delayed. For standard AVL tree rebalancing, we prove that even though the rebalancing operations are un-coupled from updates, their total number is bounded by O(M log(M +N)), where M is the number of updates to an AVL tree of initial size N. Hence, relaxed balancing of AVL trees comes at no extra cost asymptotically. Furthermore , our scheme diiers from most other relaxed balancing schemes in an important aspect: No rebalancing transformation can be done in the wrong direction, i.e., no performed rotation can make the tree less balanced. Moreover, each performed rotation indeed corresponds to a real imbalance situation in the tree. Our results are important in designing eecient concurrency control strategies for main-memory databases. Main-memory search structures have gained new applications in large embedded systems, such as switching systems for mobile telephones.
Animated wrinkle maps

An efficient method for rendering animated wrinkles on a human face is presented. This method allows an animator to independently blend multiple wrinkle maps across multiple regions of a textured mesh such as the female character shown in Figure 1. This method is both efficient in terms of computation as well as storage costs and is easily implemented in a real-time application using modern programmable graphics processors.
Risk Parity Portfolio vs. Other Asset Allocation Heuristic Portfolios

OMID SHAKERNIA is a senior researcher at Research Affiliates, LLC, in Newport Beach, CA. shakernia@rallc.com Traditional strategic asset allocation theory is deeply rooted in the mean–variance portfolio optimization framework developed by Markowitz [1952] for constructing equity portfolios. However, the mean–variance optimization methodology is diff icult to implement due to the challenges associated with estimating the expected returns and covariances for asset classes with accuracy. Subjective estimates on forward returns and risks can often be inf luenced by behavioral biases of the investor, such as over-estimating expected returns due to the recent strong performance of an asset class or under-estimating risk due to personal familiarity with an asset class. Empirical estimates based on historical data are often far too noisy to be useful, especially if risk premia and correlations for asset classes are time varying. Additionally, the possibility of “paradigm shift” in the capital market makes historical data far less relevant for forecasting the future evolution of asset returns. This last concern is especially relevant today given the hypothesis on a “new normal” for the global economy postulated by Gross [2009]. The challenges in the implementation of Markowitz’s portfolio optimization have led to a wide gap between the theory of the practice and the practice of the theory. In practice, institutional pension portfolios largely take on a 60/40 equity/bond allocation, with alternative asset classes, at the margin, garnering only modest weights. It is unlikely that this portfolio posture falls out of an exercise in constrained portfolio mean–variance optimization; rather it is a hybrid child of legacy portfolio practice and return targeting. Using historical realized risk premia to guide our capital market return expectations, assuming a 9.0% equity return and a 6.5% bond returns, the 60/40 portfolio conveniently achieves the 8% portfolio return target that is common to most pension funds. As more asset classes, such as real estate, commodities, and emerging market securities, are added to the investment universe, weights are reallocated from stocks and bonds modestly to these alternative assets. Most pension funds hold a 60/40 equity/bond variant portfolio despite the significantly larger universe of investable asset classes. Undoubtedly, these incremental allocations improve portfolio mean–variance eff iciency by improving diversification; however, it is also likely that more-optimal asset allocation methods or heuristics can be created.
A new optimization method: Big Bang-Big Crunch

Nature is the principal source for proposing new optimization methods such as genetic algorithms (GA) and simulated annealing (SA) methods. All traditional evolutionary algorithms are heuristic population-based search procedures that incorporate random variation and selection. The main contribution of this study is that it proposes a novel optimization method that relies on one of the theories of the evolution of the universe; namely, the Big Bang and Big Crunch Theory. In the Big Bang phase, energy dissipation produces disorder and randomness is the main feature of this phase; whereas, in the Big Crunch phase, randomly distributed particles are drawn into an order. Inspired by this theory, an optimization algorithm is constructed, which will be called the Big Bang–Big Crunch (BB–BC) method that generates random points in the Big Bang phase and shrinks those points to a single representative point via a center of mass or minimal cost approach in the Big Crunch phase. It is shown that the performance of the new (BB–BC) method demonstrates superiority over an improved and enhanced genetic search algorithm also developed by the authors of this study, and outperforms the classical genetic algorithm (GA) for many benchmark test functions. q 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Preoperative Chemotherapy for Colorectal Liver Metastases: Impact on Hepatic Histology and Postoperative Outcome

Some investigators have suggested that preoperative chemotherapy for hepatic colorectal metastases may cause hepatic injury and increase perioperative morbidity and mortality. The objective of the current study was to examine whether treatment with preoperative chemotherapy was associated with hepatic injury of the nontumorous liver and whether such injury, if present, was associated with increased morbidity or mortality after hepatic resection. Two-hundred and twelve eligible patients who underwent hepatic resection for colorectal liver metastases between January 1999 and December 2005 were identified. Data on demographics, clinicopathologic characteristics, and preoperative chemotherapy details were collected and analyzed. The majority of patients received preoperative chemotherapy (n = 153; 72.2%). Chemotherapy consisted of fluoropyrimidine-based regimens: 5-FU monotherapy, 31.6%; irinotecan, 25.9%; and oxaliplatin, 14.6%. Among those patients who received chemotherapy, the type of chemotherapy regimen predicted distinct patterns of liver injury. Oxaliplatin was associated with increased likelihood of grade 3 sinusoidal dilatation (p = 0.017). Steatosis >30% was associated with irinotecan (27.3%) compared with no chemotherapy, 5-FU monotherapy, and oxaliplatin (all p < 0.05). Irinotecan also was associated with steatohepatitis, as two of the three patients with steatohepatitis had received irinotecan preoperatively. Overall, the perioperative complication rate was similar between the no-chemotherapy group (30.5%) and the chemotherapy group (35.3%) (p = 0.79). Preoperative chemotherapy was also not associated with 60-day mortality. In patients with hepatic colorectal metastases, preoperative chemotherapy is associated with hepatic injury in about 20 to 30% of patients. Furthermore, the type of hepatic injury after preoperative chemotherapy was regimen-specific.
Security Requirements Elicitation Using View Points for Online System

Security is of great concern for software engineering community for the development of online systems. To handle all the security issues properly we need to have well defined process for Security engineering and this process should be integrated with software development life cycle (SDLC). For integrating security engineering with SDLC the requirement engineers should have clearly understanding of what security requirements are and he/she is able to distinguish security requirements from various architectural and behavioral constraints. In this paper we go on to define a process for security requirements elicitation presenting techniques for activities like requirements discovery, analysis, prioritization and management. With true security requirements identified as early as possible and systematically identified, Architecture team can choose most appropriate mechanism to implement them.
Surface roughness prediction in turning using artificial neural network

In this work, a back propagation neural network model has been developed for the prediction of surface roughness in turning operation. A large number of experiments were performed on mild steel work-pieces using high speed steel as the cutting tool. Process parametric conditions including speed, feed, depth of cut, and the measured parameters such as feed and the cutting forces are used as inputs to the neural network model. Roughness of the machined surface corresponding to these conditions is the output of the neural network. The convergence of the mean square error both in training and testing came out very well. The performance of the trained neural network has been tested with experimental data, and found to be in good agreement.
“You Obviously Just Have to Put on a Brave Face”: A Qualitative Study of the Experiences and Coping Styles of Men With Rheumatoid Arthritis

OBJECTIVE
To explore the experiences, coping styles, and support preferences of male rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients.


METHODS
Six focus groups comprised 22 men with RA. Transcripts were analyzed using inductive thematic analysis.


RESULTS
Three overarching themes describe the experiences, coping styles, and support preferences of men with RA. In "challenges to masculinity," the men described a "reduction in strength and abilities," which can lead to loss of independence, "challenges to masculine identity and role," and "loss of power and control." Coping by "getting through life with RA" meant dealing with RA by "just getting on with it," "information seeking," engaging in "destructive behaviors," and "withdrawing socially." Preferred "sources of support" tended not to include friends, as they were perceived to lack understanding or support. For acceptable support the men reported a preference for information-giving sessions rather than a discussion group, but there was no agreement on whether these should be mixed-sex or men only, or who should run the sessions.


CONCLUSION
Male patients reported a range of coping styles and support preferences to address their experiences of living with RA, many of which may not be shared with women. Further research is needed to investigate whether these findings exist in a larger sample and whether the support preferences of men with RA are broadly different from those of women with RA to decide whether there is a clinical need to design a service for the potentially different needs of men.
Adaptive web caching: towards a new global caching architecture

An adaptive, highly scalable, and robust web caching system is needed to effectively handle the exponential growth and extreme dynamic environment of the World Wide Web. Our work presented last year sketched out the basic design of such a system [31]. This sequel paper reports our progress over the past year. To assist caches making Web query forwarding decisions, we sketch out the basic design of a URL routing framework. To assist fast searching within each cache group, we let neighbor caches share content information (borrowing work elsewhere on efficient hashing functions). Equipped with the URL routing table and neighbor cache contents, a cache in the revised design can now search the local group, and forward all missing queries quickly and efficiently, thus eliminating both the waiting delay and the overhead associated with multicasted queries. The paper also presents a proposal for incremental deployment that provides a smooth transition from the currently deployed cache infrastructure to the new design.
Changes in cognitive domains during three years in patients with Alzheimer's disease treated with donepezil

BACKGROUND
The objective was to identify separate cognitive domains in the standard assessment tools (MMSE, ADAS-Cog) and analyze the process of decline within domains during three years in Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients with donepezil treatment.


METHOD
AD patients (n = 421) were recruited from a clinical multi-centre study program in Sweden. Patients were assessed every six months during three years. All patients received donepezil starting directly after study entry. After dropouts, 158 patients remained for analyses over three years. Data for the other patients were analysed until they dropped out (4 groups based on length in study).


RESULTS
Factor analyses of all items suggested that there were three intercorrelated factors: a General, a Memory and a Spatial factor for which we constructed corresponding domains. Overall there was a cognitive improvement at six months followed by a linear drop over time for the three domains. Some group and domain differences were identified. Patients who remained longer in the study had better initial performance and a slower deterioration rate. The early dropouts showed no improvement at six months and many dropped out due to side effects. The other groups displayed a performance improvement at six months that was less pronounced in the Memory domain. Before dropping out, deterioration accelerated, particularly in the Spatial domain.


CONCLUSION
The course of illness in the three domains was heterogeneous among the patients. We were not able to identify any clinically relevant correlates of this heterogeneity. As an aid we constructed three algorithms corresponding to the cognitive domains, which can be used to characterize patients initially, identify rapid decliners and follow the course of the disease.
A survey on sentiment detection of reviews

The sentiment detection of texts has been witnessed a booming interest in recent years, due to the increased availability of online reviews in digital form and the ensuing need to organize them. Till to now, there are mainly four different problems predominating in this research community, namely, subjectivity classification, word sentiment classification, document sentiment classification and opinion extraction. In fact, there are inherent relations between them. Subjectivity classification can prevent the sentiment classifier from considering irrelevant or even potentially misleading text. Document sentiment classification and opinion extraction have often involved word sentiment classification techniques. This survey discusses related issues and main approaches to these problems. 2009 Published by Elsevier Ltd.