bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Chronic non-bacterial osteitis from the patient perspective: a health services research through data collected from patient conferences
Authors: Silier Colen Cooper Gore , Greschik Justina , Gesell Susanne , Grote Veit , Jansson Annette F 
Published: December 2017

ObjectiveAlthough chronic non-bacterial osteitis (CNO) is an ever-increasingly recognised illness in the paediatric community and the adult healthcare community, a study to assess diagnosing, treatment and the psychosocial aspect of CNO from a large population pool was not available. We aimed to investigate CNO from the patient perspective.DesignHealth services research, patient survey.SettingLudwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) Pediatric Rheumatology Department CNO Conferences held in June 2013 and June 2015.ParticipantsUsing a patient survey developed by the LMU Pediatric Rheumatology Department, 105 patients from ages 5 to 63 years were assessed regarding CNO to include epidemiological data, medical history and treatment, initial symptoms, diagnostic procedures, current symptoms, associated diseases, current treating physicians, absences in school and work due to illness and the impact of illness on patient, family and friends.ResultsActive CNO was reported in 90% of patients present, with 73% being women and 27% being men. An overwhelming majority (70%) reported being diagnosed within 18 months of onset of symptoms; however, the initial diagnoses were wide-ranged to include malignancies in 36% to bacterial osteomyelitis in 30%, where the majority were treated with an antibiotic and/or were biopsied. When asked about the psychosocial aspect of this illness, 83% reported that non-bacterial osteitis (NBO) negatively impacted the family, 79% reported that NBO has negatively affected either school or work and 56% reported a negative impact on friendships.ConclusionDelay of diagnosis, living with differential diagnoses like malignancies and finding specialists for medical care are a few examples of what leads patients into searching for more information. The negative impact on daily life including family relationships, friendships and work/school highlights a need for better psychosocial support such as guidance counselling or psychological support due to three-quarters of patients receiving no such said support.
ABC Index: quantifying experienced burden of COPD in a discrete choice experiment and predicting costs
Authors: Goossens Lucas MA , Rutten-van Mölken Maureen PMH , Boland Melinde RS , Donkers Bas , Jonker Marcel F , Slok Annerika HM , Salomé Philippe L , van Schayck Onno CP , in ’t Veen Johannes CCM , Stolk Elly A 
Published: December 2017

ObjectiveThe Assessment of Burden of COPD (ABC) tool supports shared decision making between patient and caregiver. It includes a coloured balloon diagram to visualise patients’ scores on burden indicators. We aim to determine the importance of each indicator from a patient perspective, in order to calculate a weighted index score and investigate whether that score is predictive of costs.DesignDiscrete choice experiment.Setting and participantsPrimary care and secondary care in the Netherlands. 282 patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and 252 members of the general public participated.MethodsRespondents received 14 choice questions and indicated which of two health states was more severe. Health states were described in terms of specific symptoms, limitations in physical, daily and social activities, mental problems, fatigue and exacerbations, most of which had three levels of severity. Weights for each item-level combination were derived from a Bayesian mixed logit model. Weights were rescaled to construct an index score from 0 (best) to 100 (worst). Regression models were used to find a classification of this index score in mild, moderate and severe that was discriminative in terms of healthcare costs.ResultsFatigue, limitations in moderate physical activities, number of exacerbations, dyspnoea at rest and fear of breathing getting worse contributed most to the burden of disease. Patients assigned less weight to dyspnoea during exercise, listlessness and limitations with regard to strenuous activities. Respondents from the general public mostly agreed. Mild, moderate and severe burden of disease were defined as scores <20, 20–39 and ≥40. This categorisation was most predictive of healthcare utilisation and annual costs: €1368, €2510 and €9885, respectively.ConclusionsThe ABCIndex is a new index score for the burden of COPD, which is based on patients’ preferences. The classification of the index score into mild, moderate and severe is predictive of future healthcare costs.Trial registration numberNTR3788; Post-results.
BRain health and healthy AgeINg in retired rugby union players, the BRAIN Study: study protocol for an observational study in the UK
Authors: Gallo Valentina , McElvenny Damien , Hobbs Catherine , Davoren Donna , Morris Huw , Crutch Sebastian , Zetterberg Henrik , Fox Nick C , Kemp Simon , Cross Matthew , Arden Nigel K , Davies Madeleine A M , Malaspina Andrea , Pearce Neil 
Published: December 2017

IntroductionRelatively little is known about the long-term health of former elite rugby players, or former sportspeople more generally. As well as the potential benefits of being former elite sportspersons, there may be potential health risks from exposures occurring during an individual’s playing career, as well as following retirement. Each contact sport has vastly different playing dynamics, therefore exposing its players to different types of potential traumas. Current evidence suggests that these are not necessarily comparable in terms of pathophysiology, and their potential long-term adverse effects might also differ. There is currently limited but increasing evidence that poorer age-related and neurological health exists among former professional sportsmen exposed to repetitive concussions; however the evidence is limited on rugby union players, specifically.Methods and analysisWe present the protocol for a cross-sectional study to assess the association between self-reported history of concussion during a playing career, and subsequent measures of healthy ageing and neurological and cognitive impairment. We are recruiting a sample of approximately 200 retired rugby players (former Oxford and Cambridge University rugby players and members of the England Rugby International Club) aged 50 years or more, and collecting a number of general and neurological health-related outcome measures though validated assessments. Biomarkers of neurodegeneration (neurofilaments and tau) will be also be measured. Although the study is focusing on rugby union players specifically, the general study design and the methods for assessing neurological health are likely to be relevant to other studies of former elite sportspersons.Ethics and disseminationThe study has been approved by the Ethical Committee of London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (reference: 11634-2). It is intended that results of this study will be published in peer-reviewed medical journals, communicated to participants, the general public and all relevant stakeholders.
Feasibility of 2-D ultrasound shear wave elastography of fetal lungs in case of threatened preterm labour: a study protocol
Authors: Mottet Nicolas , Aubry Sébastien , Vidal Chrystelle , Boiteux Guillaume , Metz Jean-Patrick , Riethmuller Didier , Pazart Lionel , Ramanah Rajeev 
Published: December 2017

Introduction2-D ultrasound shear wave elastography (SWE) could be considered as a new noninvasive tool for monitoring fetal lung development based on evaluation of mechanical properties during pregnancy. Interesting results are available concerning the use of SWE on developing organs, especially on premature infants and animal models. The main objective in this study is to evaluate the feasibility of 2-D SWE in human fetal lungs between 24 and 34 weeks of gestation (WG). The secondary objective is to modellise fetal lung-to-liver elastography ratio (LLE ratio) and to assess variations between normal lung and lung surfactant-enriched after a corticosteroids course indicated for a threatened preterm labour (TPL).Methods/designA prospective case-control study will be performed between 24 and 34 WG. Fetal lungs and liver will be explored by SWE into two groups: fetuses of women with an uncomplicated pregnancy (control group) and fetuses of women with a TPL requiring administration of corticosteroids (cases group). LLE ratio will be defined as the value of the lung elasticity divided by the value of the liver elasticity.Primary judgement criterion is the value of elasticity modulus expressed in kilopascal. Lungs and liver will be explored through three measurements to define the most reproducible regions with the lowest intra- and inter-observer variability. Feasibility will be evaluated by assessing the number of examinations performed and the number of examinations with interpretable results. Intra- and inter-observer reproducibility will be evaluated by means of the intra-class correlation coefficient.Ethics and disseminationApproval of the study protocol was obtained from the human ethical research committee (Comité de Protection des Personnes EST II, process number 15/494) and the French National Agency for Medicines and Health Products Safety (process number 2015-A01575-44). All participants will sign a statement of informed consent.Trial registration numberNCT02870608; Recruiting.
Comparing the diagnostic accuracy of five common tumour biomarkers and CA19-9 for pancreatic cancer: a protocol for a network meta-analysis of diagnostic test accuracy
Authors: Ge Long , Pan Bei , Song Fujian , Ma Jichun , Zeraatkar Dena , Zhou Jianguo , Tian Jinhui 
Published: December 2017

IntroductionSurgical resection is the only curative treatment for patients with resectable pancreatic cancer. Unfortunately, 80%–85% of patients present with locally advanced or metastatic unresectable pancreatic cancer at the time of diagnosis. Detection of pancreatic cancer at early stages remains a great challenge due to lack of accurate detection tests. Recommendations in existing clinical practice guidelines on early diagnosis of pancreatic cancer are inconsistent and based on limited evidence. Most of them endorse measuring serum CA19-9 as a complementary test, but also state that it is not recommended for diagnosing early pancreatic cancer. There are currently no other tumour-specific markers recommended for diagnosing early pancreatic cancer. This study aims to evaluate and compare the accuracy of five common tumour biomarkers (CA242,carcino-embryonic antigen (CEA)), CA125, microRNAs and K-ras gene mutation) and CA19-9 and their combinations for diagnosing pancreatic cancer using network meta-analysis method, and to rank these tests using a superiority index.Methods and analysisPubMed, EMBASE and the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials will be searched from inception to April 2017. The search will include the above-mentioned tumour biomarkers for diagnosing pancreatic cancer, including CA19-9. The risk of bias for each study will be independently assessed as low, moderate or high using criteria adapted from the Quality Assessment of Diagnostic Accuracy Studies 2. Network meta-analysis will be performed using STATA V.12.0 and R software V.3.4.1. The competing diagnostic tests will be ranked by a superiority index.Ethics and disseminationEthical approval and patient consent are not required since this study is a network meta-analysis based on published studies. The results of this network meta-analysis will be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal for publication.PROSPERO registration numberCRD42017064627.
Senior high-cost healthcare users’ resource utilization and outcomes: a protocol of a retrospective matched cohort study in Canada
Authors: Muratov Sergei , Lee Justin , Holbrook Anne , Paterson J Michael , Guertin Jason Robert , Mbuagbaw Lawrence , Gomes Tara , Khuu Wayne , Pequeno Priscila , Costa Andrew P , Tarride Jean-Eric 
Published: December 2017

IntroductionSenior high-cost users (HCUs) are estimated to represent 60% of all HCUs in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province. To improve our understanding of individual and health system characteristics related to senior HCUs, we will examine incident senior HCUs to determine their incremental healthcare utilisation and costs, characteristics of index hospitalisation episodes, mortality and their regional variation across Ontario.Methods and analysisA retrospective, population-based cohort study using administrative healthcare records will be used. Incident senior HCUs will be defined as Ontarians aged ≥66 years who were in the top 5% of healthcare cost users during fiscal year 2013 but not during fiscal year 2012. Each HCU will be matched to three non-HCUs by age, sex and health planning region. Incremental healthcare use and costs will be determined using the method of recycled predictions. We will apply multivariable logistic regression to determine patient and health service factors associated with index hospitalisation and inhospital mortality during the incident year. The most common causes of admission will be identified and contrasted with the most expensive hospitalised conditions. We will also calculate the ratio of inpatient costs incurred through admissions of ambulatory care sensitive conditions to the total inpatient expenditures. The magnitude of variation in costs and health service utilisation will be established by calculating the extremal quotient, the coefficient of variation and the Gini mean difference for estimates obtained through multilevel regression analyses.Ethics and disseminationThis study has been approved by Hamilton Integrated Research Ethics Board (ID#1715-C). The results of the study will be distributed through peer-reviewed journals. They also will be disseminated at research events in academic settings, national and international conferences as well as with presentations to provincial health authorities.
Is computer-assisted instruction more effective than other educational methods in achieving ECG competence among medical students and residents? Protocol for a systematic review and meta-analysis
Authors: Viljoen Charle André , Scott Millar Rob , Engel Mark E , Shelton Mary , Burch Vanessa 
Published: December 2017

IntroductionAlthough ECG interpretation is an essential skill in clinical medicine, medical students and residents often lack ECG competence. Novel teaching methods are increasingly being implemented and investigated to improve ECG training. Computer-assisted instruction is one such method under investigation; however, its efficacy in achieving better ECG competence among medical students and residents remains uncertain.Methods and analysisThis article describes the protocol for a systematic review and meta-analysis that will compare the effectiveness of computer-assisted instruction with other teaching methods used for the ECG training of medical students and residents. Only studies with a comparative research design will be considered. Articles will be searched for in electronic databases (PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, Academic Search Premier, CINAHL, PsycINFO, Education Resources Information Center, Africa-Wide Information and Teacher Reference Center). In addition, we will review citation indexes and conduct a grey literature search. Data extraction will be done on articles that met the predefined eligibility criteria. A descriptive analysis of the different teaching modalities will be provided and their educational impact will be assessed in terms of effect size and the modified version of Kirkpatrick framework for the evaluation of educational interventions. This systematic review aims to provide evidence as to whether computer-assisted instruction is an effective teaching modality for ECG training. It is hoped that the information garnered from this systematic review will assist in future curricular development and improve ECG training.Ethics and disseminationAs this research is a systematic review of published literature, ethical approval is not required. The results will be reported according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis statement and will be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal. The protocol and systematic review will be included in a PhD dissertation.PROSPERO registration numberCRD42017067054; Pre-results.
Assessment of bullet effectiveness based on a human vulnerability model
Authors: Liu Susu , Xu C , Wen Y , Li G , Zhou J 
Published: December 2017

IntroductionPenetrating wounds from explosively propelled fragments and bullets are the most common causes of combat injury. There is a requirement to assess the potential effectiveness of bullets penetrating human tissues in order to optimise preventive measures and wound trauma management.MethodsAn advanced voxel model based on the Chinese Visible Human data was built. A digital human vulnerability model was established in combination with wound reconstruction and vulnerability assessment rules, in which wound penetration profiles were obtained by recreating the penetration of projectiles into ballistic gelatin. An effectiveness evaluation method of bullet penetration using the Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS) was developed and solved using the Monte Carlo sampling method.ResultsThe effectiveness of rifle bullets was demonstrated to increase with increasing velocity in the range of 300–700 m/s. When imparting the same energy, the effectiveness of the 5.56 mm bullet was higher than the 7.62 mm bullet in this model.ConclusionsThe superimposition of simulant penetration profiles produced from ballistic gelatin simulant has been used to predict wound tracts in damaged tissues. The authors recognise that determining clinical effectiveness based on the AIS scores alone without verification of outcome by review of clinical hospital records means that this technique should be seen more as a manner of comparing the effectiveness of bullets than an injury prediction model.
Electrical conduction hysteresis in carbon black–filled butyl rubber compounds
Authors: Alzamil M. A. , Alfaramawi K. , Abboudy S. , Abulnasr L. 
Published: December 2017

Temperature and concentration dependence of electrical resistance of butyl rubber filled with GPF carbon black was carried out. Current–voltage (I–V) characteristics at room-temperature were also investigated. The I–V characteristics show that the behavior is linear at small voltages up to approximately 0.15 V and currents up to 0.05 mA indicating that the conduction mechanism was probably due to electron tunneling from the end of conductive path to the other one under the action of the applied electric field. At higher voltages, a nonlinear behavior was noticed. The nonlinearity was attributed to the joule heating effects.Electrical resistance of the butyl/GPF composites was measured as a function of temperature during heating and cooling cycles from 300 K and upward to a specific temperature. When the specimens were heated up, the resistance was observed to increase continuously with the rise of temperature. However, when the samples were cooled down, the resistance was observed to decrease following a different path. The presence of conduction hysteresis behavior in the resistance–temperature curves during the heating and cooling cycles was then verified. The electrical conduction of the composite system is supposed to follow an activation conduction mechanism. Activation energy was calculated at different filler concentrations for both the heating and cooling processes.
Pipelined Parallel Join and Its FPGA-Based Acceleration
Authors: Yoshimi Masato , Oge Yasin , Yoshinaga Tsutomu 
Published: December 2017

A huge amount of data is being generated and accumulated in data centers, which leads to an important increase in the required energy consumption to analyze these data. Thus, we must consider the redesign of current computer systems architectures to be more friendly to applications based on distributed algorithms that require a high data transfer rate.
Novel computer architectures that introduce dedicated accelerators to enable near-data processing have been discussed and developed for high-speed big-data analysis. In this work, we propose a computer system with an FPGA-based accelerator, namely, interconnected-FPGAs, which offers two advantages: (1) direct data transmission and (2) offloading computation into data-flow in the FPGA. In this article, we demonstrate the capability of the proposed interconnected-FPGAs system to accelerate join operations in a relational database. We developed a new parallel join algorithm, PPJoin, targeted to big-data analysis in a shared-nothing architecture. PPJoin is an extended version of the NUMA-based parallel join algorithm, created by overlapping computation by multicore processors and data communication. The data communication between computational nodes can be accelerated by direct data transmission without passing through the main memory of the hosts. To confirm the performance of the PPJoin algorithm and its acceleration process using an interconnected-FPGA platform, we evaluated a simple query for large tables. Additionally, to support availability, we also evaluated the actual benchmark query. Our evaluation results confirm that the PPJoin algorithm is faster than a software-based query engine by 1.5--5 times. Moreover, we experimentally confirmed that the direct data transmission by interconnected FPGAs reduces computational time around 20% for PPJoin.
Halide
Authors: Ragan-Kelley Jonathan , Adams Andrew , Sharlet Dillon , Barnes Connelly , Paris Sylvain , Levoy Marc , Amarasinghe Saman , Durand Frédo 
Published: December 2017

Writing high-performance code on modern machines requires not just locally optimizing inner loops, but globally reorganizing computations to exploit parallelism and locality---doing things such as tiling and blocking whole pipelines to fit in cache. This is especially true for image processing pipelines, where individual stages do much too little work to amortize the cost of loading and storing results to and from off-chip memory. As a result, the performance difference between a naive implementation of a pipeline and one globally optimized for parallelism and locality is often an order of magnitude. However, using existing programming tools, writing high-performance image processing code requires sacrificing simplicity, portability, and modularity. We argue that this is because traditional programming models conflate the computations defining the
algorithm
with decisions about intermediate storage and the order of computation, which we call the
schedule.

We propose a new programming language for image processing pipelines, called Halide, that separates the algorithm from its schedule. Programmers can change the schedule to express many possible organizations of a single algorithm. The Halide compiler then synthesizes a globally combined loop nest for an entire algorithm, given a schedule. Halide models a space of schedules which is expressive enough to describe organizations that match or outperform state-of-the-art hand-written implementations of many computational photography and computer vision algorithms. Its model is simple enough to do so often in only a few lines of code, and small changes generate efficient implementations for x86, ARM, Graphics Processors (GPUs), and specialized image processors, all from a single algorithm.
Halide has been public and open source for over four years, during which it has been used by hundreds of programmers to deploy code to tens of thousands of servers and hundreds of millions of phones, processing billions of images every day.