Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Delayed Workload Shifting in Many-server Systems

Motivated by the desire to shift workload during periods of overload, we extend established square-root capacity sizing rules for many-server systems in the Quality-and-Efficiency Driven (QED) regime. We propose Delayed Workload Shifting (DWS) which has two defining features: when there are n users in the system, newly arriving users are no longer admitted directly. Instead, these users will reattempt getting access after a stochastic delay until they are successful. The goal of DWS is to release pressure from the system during overloaded periods, and indeed we show that the performance gain can be substantial. We derive nontrivial corrections to classical QED approximations to account for DWS, and leverage these to control stationary and time-varying system behavior

Comparação entre as administrações tópica e sistêmica de oxitetraciclina no tratamento de vacas com dermatite digital papilomatosa Efficacy of topical and systemic treatments with oxytetracycline for papillomatous digital dermatitis in cows

Comparou-se a eficiência dos tratamentos tópico e sistêmico com oxitetraciclina em vacas com dermatite digital papilomatosa (DDP) e determinaram-se a presença de resíduos desse antimicrobiano no leite e sua concentração no líquido sinovial e no plasma. Utilizaram-se o tratamento tópico com oxitetraciclina em pó (grupo 1) e o sistêmico de longa ação (grupo 2) em 16 vacas holandesas em lactação, acometidas por DDP. Obtiveram-se amostras de plasma, líquido sinovial e leite nos momentos: M0, antes dos tratamentos; M1, seis horas após o tratamento e em intervalos de 12 horas até M23 (264 horas pós-tratamentos). Avaliaram-se o grau de claudicação, a extensão da lesão e a concentração da oxitetraciclina pela cromatografia líquida de alta eficiência. Nas vacas do grupo 1, ocorreu redução das lesões e da claudicação, quando comparadas com as do grupo 2. Nenhuma das amostras de leite, de líquido sinovial e de plasma nos animais do grupo 1 foi positiva para oxitetraciclina. As amostras de leite dos animais do grupo 2, entre M1 e M23, apresentaram valores acima do limite máximo residual permitido para esse antimicrobiano. O tratamento tópico foi eficiente no tratamento de DDP, sem produzir resíduos no leite ou concentrações no plasma e no líquido sinovial. O tratamento sistêmico foi ineficiente para DDP, resultando em resíduos no leite, durante a avaliação.<br>The efficacy of topical versus systemic treatment with oxytetracycline for papillomatous digital dermatitis (PDD) in dairy cows was compared. Antimicrobial residues in milk and their concentrations in synovial fluid and plasma were analysed. Sixteen lactating Holstein cows with PDD lesions were topically treated with oxytetracycline powder (group 1) or long-acting oxytetracycline (group 2). Plasma, synovial fluid, and milk samples were collected in the following moments: M0 (before treatments); at six hours after treatments (M1), and at 12-hour intervals until 264 hours after treatments (M23). Lameness score and lesion size were evaluated. Analysis of oxytetracycline concentration was performed by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). Cows in group 1 showed reduced lesion size and lameness score when compared to cows in group 2. None of the plasma, synovial fluid, or milk samples collected from cows in group 1 were positive to oxytetracycline. However, violative antimicrobial residues were detected in milk samples collected from cows in group 2, from M1 until M23. Topical application of oxytetracycline powder was an efficient treatment for PDD with no risk of violative antimicrobial residues in milk or increases its concentration in plasma or synovial fluid. The systemic administration of oxytetracycline was inefficient to treat PDD and caused violative residues in milk