Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cost-effectiveness of a collaborative care program for primary care patients with persistent depression.

OBJECTIVE The authors evaluated the incremental cost-effectiveness of stepped collaborative care for patients with persistent depressive symptoms after usual primary care management. METHOD Primary care patients initiating antidepressant treatment completed a standardized telephone assessment 6-8 weeks after the initial prescription. Those with persistent major depression or significant subthreshold depressive symptoms were randomly assigned to continued usual care or collaborative care. The collaborative care included systematic patient education, an initial visit with a consulting psychiatrist, 2-4 months of shared care by the psychiatrist and primary care physician, and monitoring of follow-up visits and adherence to medication regimen. Clinical outcomes were assessed through blinded telephone assessments at 1, 3, and 6 months. Health services utilization and costs were assessed through health plan claims and accounting data. RESULTS Patients receiving collaborative care experienced a mean of 16.7 additional depression-free days over 6 months. The mean incremental cost of depression treatment in this program was $357. The additional cost was attributable to greater expenditures for antidepressant prescriptions and outpatient visits. No offsetting decrease in use of other health services was observed. The incremental cost-effectiveness was $21.44 per depression-free day. CONCLUSIONS A stepped collaborative care program for depressed primary care patients led to substantial increases in treatment effectiveness and moderate increases in costs. These findings are consistent with those of other randomized trials. Improving outcomes of depression treatment in primary care requires investment of additional resources, but the return on this investment is comparable to that of many other widely accepted medical interventions.
Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises in Mauritius and their Owner-Managers: Does Education Matter?

This paper examines the effect of the education level of owner-managers on the performance of small and medium-sized enterprises in Mauritius. It captures the effect of the level of education of owner-managers as measured by primary, secondary and tertiary education and finds that education is an important characteristic of the owner-manager which contributes positively to firm performance. Tertiary educated owner-managers contribute more to firm performance. Hence, entrepreneurs should be encouraged to improve their education levels and more highly educated individuals should be encouraged to set up firms as they are likely to have better performing firms that create more employment.
Trends in the Epidemiology of the First Attack of Acute Pancreatitis: A Systematic Review

Objective: To systematically review trends in the epidemiology of the first attack of acute pancreatitis (AP) based on reported population-based studies. Methods: From Medline, we retrieved 18 full-length English language peer-reviewed original articles published from 1966 to June 2005 with population-based information on the epidemiology of first-attack AP. Trends over time were analyzed based on study- and country-specific data and the study site (UK vs non-UK). Results: Eight studies were from the UK and 10 from other European centers. An increase in the annual incidence per 100,000 for first-attack AP was reported in 10 of 12 studies with longitudinal data from 4 countries (UK, Sweden, Denmark, and Netherlands). The overall AP incidence seems to be higher in non-UK studies compared with that of UK, partly explained by a higher incidence of alcoholic pancreatitis in non-UK studies. A linear trend for increase in gallstone pancreatitis incidence over time was observed irrespective of the study site (UK or non-UK). The AP incidence and mortality increased with age. Gallstone pancreatitis was more common in female subjects, and alcoholic pancreatitis was more common in middle-aged male subjects. The AP case fatality (%) has decreased over time, but the overall population mortality rate per 100,000 has remained unchanged. Recurrence after the first attack is milder with a substantially lower mortality. Conclusions: The incidence of AP seems to be increasing. Differences in the incidence and etiology between and within countries reflect differences in the risk factor prevalence. Case-fatality rate, but not the population-based mortality rate, decreased over time.
Focal appendicitis confined to the tip: diagnosis at US.

PURPOSE To evaluate the diagnostic value of graded-compression ultrasonography (US) for the diagnosis of focal appendicitis confined to the tip. MATERIALS AND METHODS During a 4-year period, US was performed in 1,450 patients with clinically suspected acute appendicitis. Of these patients, 443 had appendicitis at pathologic examination, 20 of whom had focal appendicitis confined to the tip. Focal appendicitis confined to the tip was defined as occurring when the resected specimen had inflammation only at the distal third of the appendix. RESULTS Of 20 patients with focal appendicitis confirmed at pathologic examination, 17 patients (85%) had focal appendicitis that was correctly diagnosed at US. The remaining three patients' appendices were diagnosed at US as normal (false-negative cases). Five patients had perforation at the tip, and one patient had an appendicolith. CONCLUSION Although US appears to be fairly accurate in the diagnosis of focal appendicitis confined to the tip, the entire length of the appendix should be evaluated in order to avoid a false-negative diagnosis.
Bayesian Lipschitz Constant Estimation and Quadrature

Lipschitz quadrature methods provide an approach to one-dimensional numerical integration on bounded domains. On the basis of the assumption that the integrand is Lipschitz continuous with a known Lipschitz constant, these quadrature rules can provide a tight error bound around their integral estimates and utilise the Lipschitz constant to guide exploration in the context of adaptive quadrature. In this paper, we outline our ongoing work on extending this approach to settings where the Lipschitz constant is probabilistically uncertain. As the key component, we introduce a Bayesian approach for updating a subjectively probabilistic belief of the Lipschitz constant. Combined with any Lipschitz quadrature rule, we obtain an approach for translating a sample into an integral estimate with probabilistic uncertainty intervals. The paper concludes with an illustration of the approach followed by a discussion of open issues and future work.
Non-local Means using Adaptive Weight Thresholding

Non-local means (NLM) is a popular image denoising scheme for reducing additive Gaussian noise. It uses a patch-based approach to find similar regions within a search neighborhood and estimates the denoised pixel based on the weighted average of all pixels in the neighborhood. All weights are considered for averaging, irrespective of the value of the weights. This paper proposes an improved variant of the original NLM scheme by thresholding the weights of the pixels within the search neighborhood, where the thresholded weights are used in the averaging step. The threshold value is adapted based on the noise level of a given image. The proposed method is used as a two-step approach for image denoising. In the first step the proposed method is applied to generate a basic estimate of the denoised image. The second step applies the proposed method once more but with different smoothing strength. Experiments show that the denoising performance of the proposed method is better than that of the original NLM scheme, and its variants. It also outperforms the state-of-the-art image denoising scheme, BM3D, but only at low noise levels ( σ ≤ 80).
Palm Print Identification Using Improved Histogram of Oriented Lines

Automatic palmprint identification has received much attention in security applications and law enforcement. The performance of a palmprint identification system is improved by means of feature extraction and classification. Feature extraction methods such as Subspace learning are highly sensitive to the rotation variances, translation and illumination in image identification. Thus, Histogram of Oriented Lines (HOL) has not obtained promising performance for palmprint recognition so far. In this paper, we propose a new descriptor of palmprint named Improved Histogram of Oriented Lines (IHOL), which is an alternative of HOL. Improved HOL is not very sensitive to changes of translation and illumination, and has the robustness against small transformations whereas the small translation and rotations make no change in histogram value adjustment of the proposed work. The experiment results show that based on IHOL, with Principal Component Analysis (PCA) subspace learning can achieve high recognition rates. The proposed method (IHOL-Cosine distance) improves 1.30% on PolyU I database, and similarly (IHOL-Euclidean distance) improves 2.36% on COEP database compared with existing HOL method.
Introduction de l'ingénierie ontologique dans la méthodologie de développement des progiciels de gestion des collectivités territoriales

Resume. The multiplication of trades, management and decision levels in semiautonomous regions generates communication difficulties for internal management dialogue, between humans as well as between ERP systems. Yet human interoperability, just like machine interoperability is essential in managing the organisation and providing the information that decision makers need to clarify. MGDIS, editor of management and implementation software solutions for public organisations means to use ontologies to forward multi-agent communication, to give a meaning to exchanges and to evaluate the concordance of actions done.
On MIMO channel capacity: an intuitive discussion

For a general MIMO communication channel, the use of the linear minimum mean-squared-error (LMMSE) estimator followed by the separate substream decoding is not a capacity-wise optimal scheme. In this paper, the author presents analytical computations of the MIMO channel capacity. The article relates the capacity to the covariance matrix of the LMMSE estimate that provides a clear interpretation of the concept of capacity as well some optimal transceiver design schemes that aim to achieve channel capacity.
A Hierarchical Book Representation of Word Embeddings for Effective Semantic Clustering and Search

Semantic word embeddings have shown to cluster in space based on linguistic similarities that are quantifiably captured using simple vector arithmetic. Recently, methods for learning distributed word vectors have progressively empowered neural language models to compute compositional vector representations for phrases of variable length. However, they remain limited in expressing more generic relatedness between instances of a larger and non-uniform sized body-of-text. In this work, we propose a formulation that combines a word vector set of variable cardinality to represent a verse or a sentence, with an iterative distance metric to evaluate similarity in pairs of non-conforming verse matrices. In contrast to baselines characterized by a bag of features, our model preserves word order and is more sustainable in performing semantic matching at any of a verse, chapter and book levels. Using our framework to train word vectors, we analyzed the clustering of bible books exploring multidimensional scaling for visualization, and experimented with book searches of both contiguous and out-of-order parts of verses. We report robust results that support our intuition for measuring book-to-book and verse-to-book similarity.
Comment on: Heterogeneity in meta-analysis should be expected and appropriately quantified.

Higgins in his commentary on the study by Patsopoulos and coworkers outlines some of the limitations of I in assessing heterogeneity in a metaanalysis. These limitations have perhaps not been as explicitly explained before. They have particular implications for assessing heterogeneity in meta-analyses of cohort and database studies and this aspect is worthy of further comment. As pointed out by Higgins, I is not a point estimate of the between-study heterogeneity. It is the proportion of total variation in the point estimates that is attributable to between-study heterogeneity. The total variation is comprised of between-study variation and within-study variation. If the individual studies have large sample size, such that the within-study variation is small, then I could be large (say475%), even if the between-study variation is small. This is particularly a problem for meta-analyses of cohort and database studies, which typically have large sample sizes. The advantages I are that it does not depend on the number of studies in the meta-analysis or the effect measure used (e.g. odds ratio, risk ratio, hazard ratio, mean). However, it does depend on the size (precision) of the individual studies. It might be sensible to compare I across different meta-analyses, where the component randomised controlled trials (RCTs) all have about the same sample size. However, it is not sensible to compare I across meta-analyses of RCTs (sample size in the 100s) and meta-analyses of cohort or database studies (sample size in the 1000s). An alternative is to report the between-study variance ( ), calculated as part of a random-effects meta-analysis. The disadvantage of 2 is that it depends on the effect measure (e.g. odds ratio, risk ratio, hazard ratio); that is, it does not provide a standardized way of measuring heterogeneity. Meta-analyses of large observational studies (that address policy questions) are increasingly being used to support funding decisions. Statisticians should strive to display and communicate the results in a way that is useful to decision makers. In this context, little would be lost if quantitative measures of statistical heterogeneity (e.g. Q and its P-value, I, ) were not reported. As Higgins points out, any amount of heterogeneity is acceptable, provided pre-defined inclusion criteria are met. A more useful approach would be to focus attention on the forest plot. If one or more studies are outliers, then there is more uncertainty about the mean measure of effect across all studies. This uncertainty is not necessarily adequately depicted by the confidence interval from a random effects meta-analysis, so that judgement is needed when applying results (as in all areas of applied statistics). Increasingly complex analyses, which are mysterious and difficult for nonstatisticians to understand, do not necessarily shed light on the problem at hand.
Why physicians ought not to perform virginity tests

In this article I argue that it is not morally justified for physicians to perform virginity tests. First, I contend that, on the basis of the principle of non-maleficence, physicians should not perform virginity tests, because of the potential harms to those who are tested that can result from such tests. Second, I highlight some of the social harms that the practice causes, and argue that physicians ought not to be complicit in causing these harms. Third, I argue that physicians ought not to perform virginity tests on the grounds that testing for virginity is scientifically impossible, and physicians are morally obliged to practise according to scientific principles. Finally, I contend that an ethically sound response to virginity testing requires that the medical profession as a whole should follow the example of the Quebec College of Physicians in declaring this practice by physicians as unethical.
Characterization of Frzb‐Cre transgenic mouse

The Wnt family of glycoproteins is involved in numerous developmental and disease processes in higher eukaryotes, exerting their action by binding to cell‐surface receptors. In the extracellular space, Wnts are negatively regulated by secreted antagonists that either bind to the receptors directly (Dkk1) or to Wnt molecules themselves (Sfrp‐FRZB family), preventing its subsequent binding to the receptor. Here we report on a transgenic mouse expressing Cre under the control of the mouse Frzb promoter element. Analysis of the Cre expression was carried out at 10.5 and 14.5 dpc using the ROSA26R mouse line. Expression of the transgenic construct was detected in the limbs, the heart, the nasal epithelium, bone, whiskers, and around the orbita of the eye. The mouse could be used for conditional gene modification in those tissues. genesis 40:200–204, 2004. © 2004 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Public ignorant about telemedicine, survey finds.

A recent PricewaterhouseCoopers survey ( HealthInsiders , Fall/Winter 2000) found that fewer than one-third (29.0%) of respondents knew that videoconferencing could be used to conduct medical tests and make diagnoses. The survey, in which a representative sample of 2592 Canadians aged 15 and older
Imaging Calcium Concentration Dynamics in Small Neuronal Compartments

Calcium and its regulation play central roles diverse physiologic processes. Quantification of calcium concentrations ([Ca2+]) in small neuronal compartments is crucial to understanding Ca2+-dependent signaling. Here, we describe techniques that are optimized for 2-photon imaging of [Ca2+] dynamics in small compartments such as dendrites and dendritic spines.
Numerical analysis of very fast transient overvoltage in GIS

Very fast transient over voltage (VFTO) is a kind of phenomenon which commonly occurs in gas insulated switchgear(GIS), and is also receiving more and more attention since it may endanger GIS internal insulation and secondary equipment. For this reason, combining with the VFTO phenomenon in GIS, this paper completed the numerical simulation calculation of VFTO transient process gone through by gas gap in GIS, established an one-dimensional self-consistent hydrodynamic model of gas discharging, in which the electron and ion continuity equations and the Poisson equation of coupled electric field are contained, furthermore, utilized the improved SG algorithm and finite difference method to get numerical solutions of the above equations. This not only provided a new calculation method for VFTO simulation study, but also the breakdown process of GIS gas gap caused by VFTO can be clearly described by simulation results. At the same time, this paper as well showed the numerical simulation results of breakdown characteristics under different atmosphere pressure and different SF6/N2 partial pressure ratio, and obtained VFTO time-frequency relations image and three dimensional graphic of gas-gap electric field distribution which is evolved over time. The results show that the frequency bands that VFTO appears mostly are those between 50MHz to 270MHz; when pressure is increased to 0.4∼0.6Mpa, the recovery strength of GIS insulation is greatly improved; without increasing the pressure, most of the insulation strength of SF6 gas mixture are less than that of pure SF6.
Intrinsic MOSFET parameter fluctuations due to random dopant placement

Intrinsic fluctuations in threshold voltage, subthreshold swing, saturation drain current and subthreshold leakage of ultrasmall-geometry MOSFET's due to random placement of dopant atoms in the channel are examined using novel physical models and a Monte Carlo simulator. These fluctuations are shown to pose severe barriers to the scaling of supply voltage and channel length and thus, to the minimization of power dissipation and switching delay in multibillion transistor chips of the future. In particular, using the device technology and the level of integration projections of the National Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors for the next 15 years, standard and maximum deviations of threshold voltage, drive current, subthreshold swing and subthreshold leakage are shown to escalate to 40 and 600 mV, 10 and 100%, 2 and 20 mV/dec, and 10 and 10 8 %, respectively, in the 0.07 μm, 0.9 V complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology generation with 1.3-64 billion transistors on a chip in 2010. While these deviations can be reduced to some degree by selecting optimal values of channel width, the associated penalties in dynamic and static power, and in packing density demand improved MOSFET structures aimed at minimizing parameter deviations.
Signal detection and discrimination for medical devices using windowed state space filters

We introduce a model-based approach for computationally efficient signal detection and discrimination, which is relevant for biological signals. Due to its low computational complexity and low memory need, this approach is well-suited for low power designs, as required for medical devices and implants. We use linear state space models to gain recursive, efficient computation rules and obtain the model parameters by minimizing the squared error on discrete-time observations. Furthermore we combine multiple models of different time-scales to match superpositions of signals of variable length. To give immediate access to our method, we highlight the use in several practical examples on standard and on esophageal ECG signals. This method was adapted and improved as part of a research and development project for medical devices.
Psychopharmacology of Central Serotonergic Systems

Serotonin neurons in the rostral and caudal brainstem raphe nuclear groups give rise to collateralized ascending and descending projections which provide modulatory input into most networks throughout the entire neuraxis. The rostral raphe system is interconnected with target forebrain areas through reciprocal limbic-midbrain loops, which suggests that serotonin has a role in the regulation of complex intelligent adaptive behavior. Serotonergic pathways sensitize brainstem and spinal cord central rhythmic pattern generators which organize repetitive autonomic and motor activities, e.g. oral-buccal and nutritive behaviors, facilitate tonically active motor neurons innervating antigravity muscles, and disfacilitate somatosensory information processing. Serotonin effects are mediated by multiple receptor subtypes with distinct pre- and postsynaptic localization and regional distribution pattern. They belong to the G protein superfamily, coupling to adenylate cyclase (5-HT1,4,5,6,7) or phospholipase C (5-HT2), and to the ligand-gated ion channel superfamily (5-HT3). Drugs acting at these receptors are known to modulate various aspects of cooperative social behavior and responding latency, i.e. impulsivity, in a variety of experimental models of anxiety and depression. The clinical efficacy of the so-called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) in disorders characterized by poor impulse control, e.g. bulimia nervosa, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and violent suicidal or homicidal behavior, may likewise be due to improved responding latency.
Geomorphic zones mapping and development status monitoring of coral reefs in Xisha, China

Mapping regional spatial patterns of coral reef geomorphology provides the primary information to understand the constructive processes in the reef ecosystem. The technique of remote sensing plays an increasingly important role in the protection and management of coral reef ecosystems. In this paper, an object-based image analysis (OBIA) method was presented to map intra-reef geomorphology of coral reefs in Xisha, China using Landsat 8 satellite imagery. Based on the geomorphic results, five indices were further calculated to describe the atoll shape characteristics and evaluate the development status of different coral reefs in Xisha.