1,720,956 research outputs found

    Multiscale analysis of short-term cardiorespiratory signals

    No full text
    We present the multi-scale entropy analysis of short-term physiological time series of simultaneously acquired samples of heart rate, blood pressure and lung volume, from healthy subjects and from subjects with Chronic Heart Failure. Evaluating the complexity of signals at the multiple time scales inherent in physiologic dynamics, we find new quantitative indicators which are statistically correlated with the pathology. As the multi-scale entropy analysis has been applied up to now to 24 hours electrocardiographic signals, these results on short-term recordings enlarge the applicability of the method. In the same spirit of the multi-scale entropy approach, we also propose a multi-scale approach, to evaluate interactions between time series, by performing a multivariate autoregressive modelling of the coarse grained time series. We then address the problem of classifying a subject as healthy or affected by Chronic Heart Failure on the basis of all the collected indicators

    Structure-Based Prediction of hERG-Related Cardiotoxicity: A Benchmark Study

    No full text
    : Drug-induced blockade of the human ether-à-go-go-related gene (hERG) channel is today considered the main cause of cardiotoxicity in postmarketing surveillance. Hence, several ligand-based approaches were developed in the last years and are currently employed in the early stages of a drug discovery process for in silico cardiac safety assessment of drug candidates. Herein, we present the first structure-based classifiers able to discern hERG binders from nonbinders. LASSO regularized support vector machines were applied to integrate docking scores and protein-ligand interaction fingerprints. A total of 396 models were trained and validated based on: (i) high-quality experimental bioactivity information returned by 8337 curated compounds extracted from ChEMBL (version 25) and (ii) structural predictor data. Molecular docking simulations were performed using GLIDE and GOLD software programs and four different hERG structural models, namely, the recently published structures obtained by cryoelectron microscopy (PDB codes: 5VA1 and 7CN1) and two published homology models selected for comparison. Interestingly, some classifiers return performances comparable to ligand-based models in terms of area under the ROC curve (AUCMAX = 0.86 ± 0.01) and negative predictive values (NPVMAX = 0.81 ± 0.01), thus putting forward the herein proposed computational workflow as a valuable tool for predicting hERG-related cardiotoxicity without the limitations of ligand-based models, typically affected by low interpretability and a limited applicability domain. From a methodological point of view, our study represents the first example of a successful integration of docking scores and protein-ligand interaction fingerprints (IFs) through a support vector machine (SVM) LASSO regularized strategy. Finally, the study highlights the importance of using hERG structural models accounting for ligand-induced fit effects and allowed us to select the best-performing protein conformation (made available in the Supporting Information, SI) to be employed for a reliable structure-based prediction of hERG-related cardiotoxicity

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

    Full text link
    The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed

    Variations on the Author

    Full text link
    “Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship

    Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis

    Full text link
    We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis

    Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts

    Full text link
    We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more sophisticated methods

    Author Index

    No full text
    Nao informado

    koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist

    No full text
    We have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used

    Statistical assessment of discriminative features for protein-coding and non coding cross-species conserved sequence elements

    No full text
    Abstract Background The identification of protein coding elements in sets of mammalian conserved elements is one of the major challenges in the current molecular biology research. Many features have been proposed for automatically distinguishing coding and non coding conserved sequences, making so necessary a systematic statistical assessment of their differences. A comprehensive study should be composed of an association study, i.e. a comparison of the distributions of the features in the two classes, and a prediction study in which the prediction accuracies of classifiers trained on single and groups of features are analyzed, conditionally to the compared species and to the sequence lengths. Results In this paper we compared distributions of a set of comparative and non comparative features and evaluated the prediction accuracy of classifiers trained for discriminating sequence elements conserved among human, mouse and rat species. The association study showed that the analyzed features are statistically different in the two classes. In order to study the influence of the sequence lengths on the feature performances, a predictive study was performed on different data sets composed of coding and non coding alignments in equal number and equally long with an ascending average length. We found that the most discriminant feature was a comparative measure indicating the proportion of synonymous nucleotide substitutions per synonymous sites. Moreover, linear discriminant classifiers trained by using comparative features in general outperformed classifiers based on intrinsic ones. Finally, the prediction accuracy of classifiers trained on comparative features increased significantly by adding intrinsic features to the set of input variables, independently on sequence length (Kolmogorov-Smirnov P-value ≤ 0.05). Conclusion We observed distinct and consistent patterns for individual and combined use of comparative and intrinsic classifiers, both with respect to different lengths of sequences/alignments and with respect to error rates in the classification of coding and non-coding elements. In particular, we noted that comparative features tend to be more accurate in the classification of coding sequences – this is likely related to the fact that such features capture deviations from strictly neutral evolution expected as a consequence of the characteristics of the genetic code.</p
    corecore