Decision support system to help choose between an ITE or a BTE hearing aid

A decision support system (DSS) is used for analysing a situation and making decisions. The goal of this research is to mine a large set of heterogeneous audiology data and create a DSS to help audiology technicians to choose between an ITE or BTE hearing aid. Although, in many cases such a choice is clear cut, but at other times this system could be used as a second opinion to predict the hearing aid type. A number of data mining techniques, such as clustering of audiograms, association analysis of variables (such as, age, gender, diagnosis, masker, mould and free text keywords) using contingency tables and principal component analysis on audiograms were used to find candidate variables to be combined into a DSS. The DSS was created using the techniques of logistic regression, Naïve Bayesian analysis and Bayesian networks, and these systems were tested and validated on test data to see which of the techniques produced the better results. This DSS takes air and bone conduction frequencies, age, gender, diagnosis, masker, mould and some free text words associated with a patient as input and gives as the output a decision as to whether the patient would be more likely to prefer an ITE or a BTE hearing aid type. The highest agreement between predicted results and actual hearing aid type in the data were obtained using Bayesian networks, with 93 to 94 percent similarity overall, with a precision of 0.91 for ITE and 0.96 for BTE. The reason for this might be that the Bayesian network also considers interaction between variables while the other two techniques (logistic regression and Naïve Bayesian analysis) consider only the individual variables. One of the important features of this DSS is that once the final choice of hearing aid type is predicted, the decision process can be tracked back to see which factors (variables) contributed how much to the final decision. The theoretical upper bound of classifier performance is the inter-annotator agreement (Altman, 1991), in this case the rate at which two expert audiologists would assign the same hearing aid to the same patient. Unfortunately, this type of data was not included in the audiology database

Difficult Pain

El dolor que presenten les dones és sovint un enigma. També per la ciència mèdica. En aquest escrit explico com l’assistència al dolor crònic que les dones presenten més sovint m’ha representat un repte professional i també personal. Per travessar aquet repte, he mirat de posar en contacte diferents aspectes de la meva experiència, fugint de la compartimentació que la major part de les disciplines universitàries del coneixement ens proposen. Ha estat un privilegi i un plaer fer-ho al costat d’un grup de recerca de Duoda i de l’obra de l’artista Cori Mercadé. El resultat ha estat sorprenent per a mi mateixa. Una mirada i una comprensió nova respecte del que representen —d’oportunitat i de recreació de la realitat— els diagnòstics mèdics. I alhora com els modifica l’ús que en fem qui les patim i qui les assistim. El dolor difícil, que de vegades s’ha expressat com Stabat Mater, demana el treball de les paraules.The pain that women present with is often an enigma. For medical science too. In this text I explain how attending to the chronic pain that women most often present with has supposed both a professional and personal challenge for me. In order to respond to that challenge, I have sought to bring different aspects of my experience together, escaping the compartmentalization that most university disciplines of knowledge offer us. It has been a privilege and a pleasure to do so alongside a research group from Duoda and the work of the artist Cori Mercadé. The result has been surprising even for me. A new perspective and understanding in regards to what —in terms of opportunity and recreation of reality— medical diagnoses represent. And, at the same time, how it changes the way that we use them for those who suffer and those who attend. Difficult pain, which has sometimes been expressed as Stabat Mater, requires the work of words

Conceptual Based Hidden Data Analytics and Reduction Method for System Interface Enhancement Through Handheld devices

With the increasing demand placed on online systems by users, many organizations and companies are seeking to enhance their online interfaces to facilitate the search process on their hidden databases. Usually, users issue queries to a hidden database by using the search template provided by the system. In this thesis, a new approach based mainly on hidden database reduction preserving functional dependencies is developed for enhancing the online system interface through a small screen device. The developed approach is applied to online market systems like eBay. Offline hidden data analysis is used to discover attributes and their domains and different functional dependencies. In this thesis, a comparative study between several methods for mining functional dependencies shows the advantage of conceptual methods for data reduction. In addition, by using online consecutive reductions on search results, we adopted a method of displaying results in order of decreasing relevance. The validation of the proposed designed and developed methods prove their generality and suitability for system interfacing through continuous data reductions.NPRP-07-794-1-145 grant from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of Qatar foundation

Roles of VAMP3 in melanoma cell migration and integrin trafficking.

Integrins are major receptors for cell adhesion to the extracellular matrix, and play key roles in various cellular processes including adhesion, migration, proliferation and survival. Apart from developmental and physiological events, integrins are involved in many pathological conditions including cancer metastasis. During cell migration, the exocytosis of integrins at the cell front contributes to the formation and stabilization of protrusions. Previous studies showed that VAMP3, a SNARE protein that mediates exocytosis, is important in integrin trafficking and cell migration. However, the mechanism by which VAMP3 participates in integrin trafficking is not clear. Since VAMP3 is over expressed in melanoma, the current study determines the roles of VAMP3 in melanoma cell migration and integrin trafficking. shRNA-induced silencing of VAMP3 inhibited the migration of B16F10 melanoma cells by more than 60% without affecting cell proliferation. VAMP3 knockdown diminished cell adhesion to Matrigel and fibronectin. Furthermore, VAMP3 silencing resulted in the accumulation of ß1, a3 and a5 integrins in lysosomes, indicating that VAMP3 mediates vesicle trafficking of a3 ß1 and a5 ß1 integrins. For the first time, this study examined the effect of VAMP3 knockdown on metastasis of melanoma in vivo using an experimental metastasis assay in nude mice. It seemed that melanoma cells can metastasize to the lung even when VAMP3 is depleted and we suggest more quantitative experiments to determine the effect of VAMP3 knockdown in melanoma pulmonary metastasis in vivo

Fuzzy Logic Based Clustering With Firefly Optimized Routing Protocol For Qos Aware Wireless Sensor Networks

Nowdays, Wireless sensor networks (WSN) becomes familiar due to its applicability in diverse areas of gathering and processing data from the physical environment. At the same time, the advanced applications and new multimedia sensors have raised the demand for highly sufficient management of their quality of service (QoS). The constraints and requirements for theQoS management entirely based on the application perspective. In this view, this paper presents a QoS aware cluster based routing (QoS-CR) technique for WSN. The proposed QoS-CR involves three main processes, namely clustering, routing and maintenance. At the earlier stage, fuzzy logic based clustering (FBC) technique gets executed to organize the nodes into clusters and selects cluster heads (CHs) effectively. Then, a firefly with a levy (FF-L) algorithm is employed for identifying the optimal paths between two CHs or CHs to BS. Finally, the maintenance process is invoked to balance the load and energy consumption throughout the network evenly. A detailed simulation analysis takes place to ensure the performance of the QoS-CR model, and the results are validated interms of several measures under a distinct number of nodes and simulation rounds. The outcome of the extensive simulation verified the superior characteristics of the proposed model over the compared methods

Human Translational Research in Psoriasis Using CLA+ T Cells

Focusing on the study of human memory CLA+ T cells to understand psoriasis pathology constitutes an innovative approach to explore the pathological mechanism of this chronic cutaneous inflammatory disease. CLA+ T cells can be considered peripheral cell biomarkers in the study of T-cell mediated human skin diseases. During the last few years, new evidences have been found that link streptococcal infection with IL-17 response in psoriasis by studying the interaction between Streptococcus pyogenes with CLA+ T cells and autologous epidermal cells. S. pyogenes constitutes the best clinically characterized trigger of psoriasis and by exploring its effect on CLA+ T cells and epidermal cells in psoriasis may allow understanding psoriasis by using patient’s clinical samples ex vivo

New Vistas in Chemical Product and Process Design

Design of chemicals-based products is broadly classified into those that are process centered and those that are product centered. In this article, the designs of both classes of products are reviewed from a process systems point of view; developments related to the design of the chemical product, its corresponding process, and its integration are highlighted. Although significant advances have been made in the development of systematic model-based techniques for process design (also for optimization, operation, and control), much work is needed to reach the same level for product design. Timeline diagrams illustrating key contributions in product design, process design, and integrated product-process design are presented. The search for novel, innovative, and sustainable solutions must be matched by consideration of issues related to the multidisciplinary nature of problems, the lack of data needed for model development, solution strategies that incorporate multiscale options, and reliability versus predictive power. The need for an integrated model-experiment-based design approach is discussed together with benefits of employing a systematic computer-aided framework with built-in design templates. </jats:p