574 research outputs found
Is exercise treadmill testing useful for detecting heart disease in women?
Exercise treadmill testing has a sensitivity of 70% and specificity of 61% for the detection of coronary artery disease (CAD) in women (strength of recommendation [SOR]: A, based on a meta-analysis). It is useful for detecting CAD in symptomatic women who have an intermediate risk as determined by age and symptoms (SOR: C, based on expert opinion). Exercise treadmill testing may also have an application in determining exercise capacity and potential as a tool to predict cardiovascular death in women (SOR: A, cohort study)
What are the risks and benefits of elective induction for uncomplicated term pregnancies?
Elective induction of labor for term, singleton, uncomplicated pregnancies appears safe for both the mother and infant (strength of recommendation [SOR]: B). The benefit of elective induction for nonmedical reasons is unclear (SOR: B)
How useful are autoantibodies in diagnosing thyroid disorders?
Thyrotropin receptor antibodies (TRAb) may be mildly elevated in a variety of thyroid disorders, but a TRAb level >10 U/L increases the probability of Graves' disease by a moderate to large degree (strength of recommendation [SOR]: B, cross-sectional study). A positive or negative thyroid peroxidase antibody (TPOAb) test increases or decreases the probability of autoimmune thyroid disease by only a small to moderate degree (SOR: B, 3 cross-sectional studies)
Corticosteroids for presumed pneumocystis pneumonia in patients with HIV infection
Adjunctive corticosteroids decrease mortality in patients with HIV infection who have moderate to severe hypoxemia and suspected or confirmed pneumocystis pneumonia. Corticosteroids lead to a higher incidence of herpetic lesions, but not other opportunistic conditions. (Strength of recommendation: A, based on a systematic review of randomized controlled trials [RCTs].
Benchmarks for testing community detection algorithms on directed and weighted graphs with overlapping communities
Many complex networks display a mesoscopic structure with groups of nodes
sharing many links with the other nodes in their group and comparatively few
with nodes of different groups. This feature is known as community structure
and encodes precious information about the organization and the function of the
nodes. Many algorithms have been proposed but it is not yet clear how they
should be tested. Recently we have proposed a general class of undirected and
unweighted benchmark graphs, with heterogenous distributions of node degree and
community size. An increasing attention has been recently devoted to develop
algorithms able to consider the direction and the weight of the links, which
require suitable benchmark graphs for testing. In this paper we extend the
basic ideas behind our previous benchmark to generate directed and weighted
networks with built-in community structure. We also consider the possibility
that nodes belong to more communities, a feature occurring in real systems,
like, e. g., social networks. As a practical application, we show how
modularity optimization performs on our new benchmark.Comment: 9 pages, 13 figures. Final version published in Physical Review E.
The code to create the benchmark graphs can be freely downloaded from
http://santo.fortunato.googlepages.com/inthepress
What is angular cheilitis and how is it treated?
Cheilitis is a broad term that describes inflammation of the lip surface characterized by dry scaling and fissuring. Specific types are atopic, angular, granulomatous, and actinic. Angular cheilitis is commonly seen in primary care settings, and it specifically refers to cheilitis that radiates from the commissures or corners of the mouth. Other terms synonymous with angular cheilitis are perlèche, commissural cheilitis, and angular stomatitis. Evidence reveals that topical ointment preparations of nystatin or amphotericin B treat angular cheilitis (strength of recommendation [SOR]: A, 2 small placebo-controlled studies). Improving oral health through regular use of xylitol or xylitol/chlorhexidine acetate containing chewing gums decreases angular cheilitis in nursing home patients (SOR: B, 1 cluster randomized, placebo-controlled trial)
Efficient Implementation of a Synchronous Parallel Push-Relabel Algorithm
Motivated by the observation that FIFO-based push-relabel algorithms are able
to outperform highest label-based variants on modern, large maximum flow
problem instances, we introduce an efficient implementation of the algorithm
that uses coarse-grained parallelism to avoid the problems of existing parallel
approaches. We demonstrate good relative and absolute speedups of our algorithm
on a set of large graph instances taken from real-world applications. On a
modern 40-core machine, our parallel implementation outperforms existing
sequential implementations by up to a factor of 12 and other parallel
implementations by factors of up to 3
LaserTank is NP-complete
We show that the classical game LaserTank is -complete, even
when the tank movement is restricted to a single column and the only blocks
appearing on the board are mirrors and solid blocks. We show this by reducing
-SAT instances to LaserTank puzzles.Comment: 5 page
ECONOMICS OF VARIABLE RATE NEMATICIDE FOR SUGAR BEETS
The benefit of applying fumigant for control of the sugar beet nematode on a variable versus uniform rate basis is examined. Compared to fumigating an entire filed at a constant full-label rate, varialbe rate application provides a savings ranging from 69/ac (lightly infested field).Crop Production/Industries,
Prophylactic oxytocin: Before or after placental delivery?
Timing alone doesn't influence the drug's efficacy in preventing postpartum bleeding (strength of recommendation: B, randomized controlled trial [RCT] and prospective cohort studies)
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