2,136 research outputs found
Prognostic value of the Framingham cardiovascular risk equation and the UKPDS risk engine for coronary heart disease in newly diagnosed Type 2 diabetes: results from a United Kingdom study
No full textAIMS: To determine the prognostic value of the Framingham equation and the United Kingdom Prospective Diabetes Study (UKPDS) risk engine in patients with newly diagnosed Type 2 diabetes. METHODS: A community-based cohort (n=428; aged 30-74 years) free of clinically evident CVD and newly diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes were studied over a median 4.2 (sd+/-0.62) years. Predicted (using baseline variables at diagnosis) and observed proportions of primary CVD and CHD events were compared using the Framingham equations and the UKPDS risk engine (only CHD events). The discrimination (c-statistic) and calibration (HLchi2) of the risk equations were calculated. The sensitivity and specificity of the Framingham equation at a 15%, 10-year CHD risk threshold (NICE guidelines) was compared with that of the ADA lipid threshold (LDLc>or=2.6 mmol/l or triglycerides>or=4.5 mmol/l). RESULTS: The Framingham equations underestimated the overall number of cardiovascular events by 33% and coronary events by 32% and showed modest discrimination and poor calibration for CVD [c=0.673; HLchi2=32.8 (P<0.001)] and CHD risk [c=0.657; HLchi2=19.8 (P=0.011)]. Although the overall underestimate was lower and non-significant with the UKPDS risk engine for CHD (13%), its performance in terms of discrimination and calibration were similar [c=0.670; HLchi2=17.1 (P=0.029)]. The 15%, 10-year CHD risk threshold with both the Framingham and UKPDS risk engines had similar sensitivity for primary CVD as the lipid level threshold [85.7 and 89.8% vs. 93.9% (P=0.21 and 0.34)] and both had greater specificity [33.0 and 30.3% vs. 12.1% (P<0.001 and P<0.001)]. CONCLUSIONS: In people with newly diagnosed Type 2 diabetes, both the Framingham equation and UKPDS risk engine are moderately effective at identifying those at high-risk (discrimination) and are poor at quantifying risk (calibration). Nonetheless, at a population level, a 15% 10-year CHD risk threshold using either risk calculator has similar sensitivity as an approach based on a single lipid risk factor level and may have benefits in terms of cost-effectiveness given the improved specificit
Fleming, R.L. Sr., Fleming, R.L., Jr. & Bangdel, L.S. — Birds of Nepal, with reference to Kashmir and Sikkim. Katmandu, Nepal, chez le senior author (Box 229), 1976
No full textBourlière François. Fleming, R.L. Sr., Fleming, R.L., Jr. & Bangdel, L.S. — Birds of Nepal, with reference to Kashmir and Sikkim. Katmandu, Nepal, chez le senior author (Box 229), 1976. In: La Terre et La Vie, Revue d'Histoire naturelle, tome 31, n°2, 1977. p. 348
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe 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
An evaluation of the value of group education in recently diagnosed diabetes mellitus
No full textDiabetic patients have a 12% to 25% lifetime risk of developing foot complications leading to significant morbidity and mortality. The objective of this study was to assess the effectiveness of group education in improving patient awareness of foot care. The authors evaluated the effect of group size and areas in which knowledge seemed to be most affected. Patients attending a 2-hour teaching session between November 2005 and March 2006 were recruited. Patients filled in an 18-part questionnaire before and after the teaching session to assess knowledge. Fifty-nine patients recently diagnosed with diabetes mellitus or foot complications were recruited for 7 sessions. Analysis of the data showed a statistically significant improvement in foot care knowledge after the teaching session compared with before (69% to 85%, P 10; P < .025). These data show the benefit of group education about foot care for patients with diabetes. Smaller groups benefited more than larger ones did, which could be attributed to the sizes allowing for better interaction between the tutor and patient. As patient knowledge is variable from individual to individual, smaller teaching sessions may allow patients to address specific concern
Endobronchial ultrasound to assess airway wall thickening: validation in vitro and in vivo
No full textEndobronchial ultrasound (EBUS) allows identification of airway wall structures and could potentially be utilised for in vivo studies of airway thickening in asthma. The present study investigated whether inflation of the fluid-filled balloon sheath over the transducer (necessary to provide sonic coupling with the airway wall) influenced in vitro measurements. In vivo comparability of EBUS with high resolution computed tomography scanning (HRCT), an established method for measuring wall thickness, was determined in control subjects. The airway diameter and wall thickness were studied using EBUS in 24 cartilaginous airways obtained from four sheep, before and after balloon sheath inflation during immersion in saline. To assess EBUS versus HRCT comparability of airway measures in vivo, 12 control subjects underwent imaging of the posterior basal bronchus of the right lower lobe by both techniques. Intra- and interobserver agreement were also assessed. Results with and without the balloon sheath gave comparable measures of airway internal diameter and wall thickness in vitro. Statistical analysis showed agreement between EBUS and HRCT, and intra- and interobserver variability in vivo. The current study concludes that endobronchial ultrasound, which does not present a radiation risk, could be utilised in the in vivo study of cartilaginous airway wall remodelling in respiratory diseases, such as asthma
Horsemastership part 3: international perspectives of its therapeutic value
No full textIn previous opinion articles written by the authors, it has been proposed that horsemastership is an effective medium for therapy and education for young adults with additional needs. However, the existing research to support this proposal is informal and limited. Therefore, the first author carried out an international piece of research into the value of horsemastership to this group of people. A questionnaire using both quantitative and qualitative methods was completed by 21 professionals of various disciplines and countries who used horsemastership for therapeutic and educational purposes. This article gives a brief description of the methodology, including justification for the design selected, and discusses the relevance and implications of the results of this study. To pull together the three articles written by the authors, a final conclusion on the value of horsemastership to people with additional needs is drawn.<br/
Author Co-Citation Analysis (ACA): a powerful tool for representing implicit knowledge of scholar knowledge workers
Get PDFIn the last decade, knowledge has emerged as one of the most important and valuable organizational assets. Gradually this importance caused to emergence of new discipline entitled ―knowledge management‖. However one of the major challenges of knowledge management is conversion implicit or tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge. Thus Making knowledge visible so that it can be better accessed, discussed, valued or generally managed is a long-standing objective in knowledge management. Accordingly in this paper author co- citation analysis (ACA) will be proposed as an efficient technique of knowledge visualization in academia (Scholar knowledge workers)
Author Correction: Octyl itaconate enhances VSVΔ51 oncolytic virotherapy by multitarget inhibition of antiviral and inflammatory pathways
Get PDFCorrection to: Nature Communicationshttps://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-48422-x, published online 15 May 2024 The original version of this Article omitted from the author list the 28th author Rozanne Arulanandam, who is from the ‘Ottawa Hospital Research Insitute, Ottawa, ON, K1H 8L6, Canada’. Consequently, the following was added to the Author Contributions: ‘R.A. performed the revision experiments on cell lines shown in Figures 1 and 2, in particular, the virus titration and GFP measurements of virus infection in CT26wt and 76-9 with 4OI.’ The original version of this Article omitted funding details to R.L. The following was added to the Acknowledgements: ‘This research was supported by grants to R.L. from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) (PJT-169663).’ These have been corrected in both the PDF and HTML versions of the Article.<p/
Resilient video coding for wireless and peer-to-peer networks
No full textElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc
Secure signal processing: Privacy preserving cryptographic protocols for multimedia
No full textRecent advances in technology provided a suitable environment for the people in which they can benefit from online services in their daily lives. Despite several advantages, online services also constitute serious privacy risks for their users as the main input to algorithms are privacy sensitive such as demographic information, shopping patterns, medical records, etc. While traditional security mechanisms can eliminate a number of attacks from outside, these mechanisms can not protect the privacy of the users as the service provider itself constitutes the biggest potential risk. In this thesis, we focus on principled solutions to protect the privacy of users in multimedia applications. For this purpose we propose to keep the privacy-sensitive data safe by means of encryption during processing. This approach eliminates the risk of possible privacy abuse as the sensitive data is only available to the owner but no other party. However, once encrypted, the structure in data is destroyed as a consequence of the encryption procedure and thus we need appropriate tools to process encrypted data. Therefore, we focus on a number of cryptographic tools such as homomorphic encryption schemes and multiparty computation (MPC) techniques to realize privacy-preserving multimedia applications. The proposed principled solutions consider the signal processing aspect of the multimedia applications which is a new idea to the best of our knowledge. In particular, we focus on a number of prototypical applications namely, face detection, user clustering in a social network, recommendation generation and anonymous fingerprinting. Based on these selected applications, we addressed the major challenges for secure signal processing: data representation, data expansion, realizing linear and non-linear operations and efficiency of the proposed protocols in terms of communication and computational costs. We propose to scale and round the signal values prior to encryption as these operations are highly inefficient to be realized in the encrypted domain. Moreover, we reserve sufficient space in terms of bit length for each signal sample to accommodate the possible expansion in bit size in the subsequent processing steps. However, reserving more bits for signals does not contradict with the data expansion problem. As the cipher text space is much larger than the size of the original -- and even scaled -- signal samples, data expansion after encryption increases data transmission and storage costs significantly. In order to minimize the cost we propose to pack a number of signal samples in one encryption and process them when they are in the packed form. This approach requires cryptographic protocols particularly designed for the packed data but in the end saves considerable resources regarding bandwidth and storage capacity, even computational power. Homomorphism plays a crucial role in our proposed solutions. With the help of homomorphic encryption, we are able to implement linear operations such as correlation and projection without interaction. However, linear operations are only a part of the signal processing. For the non-linear operations like distance computation, thresholding and comparison, we exploit MPC techniques. These techniques are often interactive and computationally expensive compared to the original systems in plain. However, by using data packing and designing the protocols with care, the communication and computational costs were reduced significantly. In this thesis, we have shown that preserving privacy for multimedia signal processing is feasible. We determined the major challenges of secure signal processing and combined a set of cryptographic tools successfully with signal processing to realize the applications in the encrypted domain. The proposed solutions demonstrate that the privacy concerns in multimedia signal processing applications can be coped with by using cryptographic tools. Moreover, protocols that are designed to realize certain operations in the encrypted domain can be used in other applications and settings with a number of modifications.MediamaticsElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc
- …
