5,999 research outputs found
Between barriers and inclusion. Multidisciplinary reflections on gender and disability
The European project RISEWISE offered a possible model for a multidisciplinary collaboration. During the four years, innovative goals were pursued for breaking down barriers ranging from creating spaces for dialogue and communication, to exchanging knowledge and experience between disciplines by bringing together academics and associations
Comparison of Leishmania typing results obtained from 16 European clinical laboratories in 2014
Leishmaniasis is a vector-borne disease which is endemic in 98 countries
worldwide [1]. It is caused by protozoan parasites of the genus Leishmania,
which are transmitted by female sand flies of the genera Lutzomyia and
Phlebotomus. Many infected individuals never develop symptoms, but those who
do can exhibit various disease manifestations [2]. Visceral leishmaniasis (VL)
or kala-azar is the severe form, whereby parasites infect internal organs and
the bone marrow, a lethal condition if left untreated. Other disease types are
restricted to the skin (cutaneous leishmaniasis, CL) or the mucosae of the
nose and mouth (mucosal leishmaniasis, ML). Finally, a particular cutaneous
disease sometimes develops in cured VL patients: post kala-azar dermal
leishmaniasis (PKDL). Typically, VL is caused by two species: Leishmania
donovani and Leishmania infantum. The latter can also cause CL, as can all
other pathogenic species. Some particular species (e.g. L. braziliensis and L.
aethiopica) can lead to overt ML. As many as 20 different Leishmania species
are able to infect humans, and globally there are over 1 million new disease
cases per annum [1,3]. Leishmaniasis is endemic in southern Europe, and in
other European countries cases are diagnosed in travellers who have visited
affected areas both within the continent and beyond. Although treatment in
practice is often guided only by clinical presentation and patient history, in
some cases determination of the aetiological subgenus, species complex or
species is recommended for providing optimal treatment [2,4,5]. For example, a
patient returning from South America with CL might be infected with Leishmania
braziliensis, which necessitates systemic drug therapy and counselling about
the risk of developing mucosal leishmaniasis in the future. The same patient
could also be infected with Leishmania mexicana, which is managed by less
intensive treatment and which is not associated with mucosal disease [6].
Determining the infecting species and its probable source permits selection of
the correct drug, route of administration (intralesional, oral systemic, or
parenteral) and duration [7]. Unfortunately, for CL it is impossible to
predict the species responsible for an ulcerating lesion clinically, and the
morphology of amastigotes does not differ between species. When the
geographical origin of infection is known, for instance when a patient in an
endemic region is treated at a local hospital, the species can be guessed
often from the known local epidemiology, as species distribution follows a
geographical pattern [8]. However, especially in infectious disease clinics
that treat patients who have stayed in various endemic countries, the
geographic origin of infections may be unknown. For instance, people residing
in Europe who have travelled outside Europe may come from, or have also
visited, Leishmania-endemic areas within Europe, especially the Mediterranean
basin. Even when the location of infection is known, several species can co-
circulate in a given endemic area, in which case the species can only be
determined by laboratory tests. Culture and subsequent isoenzyme analysis is
time consuming and available in very few specialised centres, so it is
impractical as a front-line diagnostic test in clinical laboratories. Hence,
well-performed reliable molecular methods are necessary for species
identification. Several Leishmania typing methods have been published
(reviewed in [9]), and as a result each laboratory uses its own preferred
assay. The most popular assays nowadays are those that can be applied directly
to clinical samples, thereby circumventing the need for parasite isolation and
culture. However, few tests have been standardised, and no commercial kits are
currently available. As a result, clinical and epidemiological studies make
use of various techniques, and in patient management other methods are often
deployed. In this study we compare the typing performance in 16 clinical
laboratories across Europe, which use a variety of methods for species
discrimination
Real-world practice level data analysis confirms link between variability within Blood Glucose Monitoring Strip (BGMS) and glycosylated haemoglobin (HbA1c) in Type 1 Diabetes.
AIMS/HYPOTHESIS: Our aim was to quantify the impact of Blood Glucose Monitoring Strips variability (BGMSV) at GP practice level on the variability of reported glycated haemoglobin (HbA1cV) levels. METHODS: Overall GP Practice BGMSV and HbA1cV were calculated from the quantity of main types of BGMS being prescribed combined with the published accuracy, as % results within ±% bands from reference value for the selected strip type. The regression coefficient between the BGMSV and HbA1cV was calculated. To allow for the aggregation of estimated three tests/day over 13 weeks (ie, 300 samples) of actual Blood Glucose (BG) values up to the HbA1c, we multiplied HbA1cV coefficient by √300 to estimate an empirical value for impact of BGMSV on BGV. RESULTS: Four thousand five hundred and twenty-four practice years with 159 700 T1DM patient years where accuracy data were available for more than 80% of strips prescribed were included, with overall BGMSV 6.5% and HbA1c mean of 66.9 mmol/mol (8.3%) with variability of 13 mmol/mol equal to 19% of the mean. At a GP practice level, BGMSV and HbA1cV as % of mean HbA1c (in other words, the spread of HbA1c) were closely related with a regression coefficient of 0.176, P ±4.5 mmol/L from target, compared with the best performing BGMS with BG >±2.2 mmol/L from reference on 1/20 occasions. CONCLUSION: Use of more variable/less accurate BGMS is associated both theoretically and in practice with a larger variability in measured BG and HbA1c, with implications for patient confidence in their day-to-day monitoring experience
Anyon in External Electromagnetic Field: Hamiltonian and Lagrangian Formulations
We propose a simple model for a free relativistic particle of fractional spin
in 2+1 dimensions which satisfies all the necessary conditions. The canonical
quantization of the system leads to the description of one- particle states of
the Poincare group with arbitrary spin. Using the Hamil- tonian formulation
with the set of constraints, we introduce the electro- magnetic interaction of
a charged anyon and obtain the Lagrangian. The Casimir operator of the extended
algebra, which is the first-class constraint, is obtained and gives the
equation of motion of the anyon. In particular, from the latter it follows that
the gyromagnetic ratio for a charged anyon is two due to the parallelness of
spin and momentum of the particle in 2+1 dimensions. The canonical quantization
is also considered in this case.Comment: 9 pages, Latex, HU-SEFT R 1993-1
Statistical Mechanics of Soft Margin Classifiers
We study the typical learning properties of the recently introduced Soft
Margin Classifiers (SMCs), learning realizable and unrealizable tasks, with the
tools of Statistical Mechanics. We derive analytically the behaviour of the
learning curves in the regime of very large training sets. We obtain
exponential and power laws for the decay of the generalization error towards
the asymptotic value, depending on the task and on general characteristics of
the distribution of stabilities of the patterns to be learned. The optimal
learning curves of the SMCs, which give the minimal generalization error, are
obtained by tuning the coefficient controlling the trade-off between the error
and the regularization terms in the cost function. If the task is realizable by
the SMC, the optimal performance is better than that of a hard margin Support
Vector Machine and is very close to that of a Bayesian classifier.Comment: 26 pages, 12 figures, submitted to Physical Review
High-Dimensional Feature Selection by Feature-Wise Kernelized Lasso
The goal of supervised feature selection is to find a subset of input
features that are responsible for predicting output values. The least absolute
shrinkage and selection operator (Lasso) allows computationally efficient
feature selection based on linear dependency between input features and output
values. In this paper, we consider a feature-wise kernelized Lasso for
capturing non-linear input-output dependency. We first show that, with
particular choices of kernel functions, non-redundant features with strong
statistical dependence on output values can be found in terms of kernel-based
independence measures. We then show that the globally optimal solution can be
efficiently computed; this makes the approach scalable to high-dimensional
problems. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through
feature selection experiments with thousands of features.Comment: 18 page
A preliminary approach to the multilabel classification problem of Portuguese juridical documents
Portuguese juridical documents from Supreme Courts and the Attorney General’s Office are manually classified by juridical experts into a set of classes belonging to a taxonomy of concepts. In this paper, a preliminary approach to develop techniques to automat- ically classify these juridical documents, is proposed. As basic strategy, the integration of natural language processing techniques with machine learning ones is used. Support Vector Machines (SVM) are used as learn- ing algorithm and the obtained results are presented and compared with other approaches, such as C4.5 and Naive Bayes
Semi-leptonic B decays into higher charmed resonances
We apply HQET to semi-leptonic meson decays into a variety of excited
charm states. Using three realistic meson models with fermionic light degrees
of freedom, we examine the extent that the sum of exclusive single charmed
states account for the inclusive semi-leptonic decay rate. The consistency
of form factors with the Bjorken and Voloshin sum rules is also investigated.Comment: Latex, 27 pages. A few references and errors corrected, to appear in
Phys. Rev.
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