Recurrent violent injury: magnitude, risk factors, and opportunities for intervention from a statewide analysis.

INTRODUCTION: Although preventing recurrent violent injury is an important component of a public health approach to interpersonal violence and a common focus of violence intervention programs, the true incidence of recurrent violent injury is unknown. Prior studies have reported recurrence rates from 0.8% to 44%, and risk factors for recurrence are not well established. METHODS: We used a statewide, all-payer database to perform a retrospective cohort study of emergency department visits for injury due to interpersonal violence in Florida, following up patients injured in 2010 for recurrence through 2012. We assessed risk factors for recurrence with multivariable logistic regression and estimated time to recurrence with the Kaplan-Meier method. We tabulated hospital charges and costs for index and recurrent visits. RESULTS: Of 53 908 patients presenting for violent injury in 2010, 11.1% had a recurrent violent injury during the study period. Trauma centers treated 31.8%, including 55.9% of severe injuries. Among recurrers, 58.9% went to a different hospital for their second injury. Low income, homelessness, Medicaid or uninsurance, and black race were associated with increased odds of recurrence. Patients with visits for mental and behavioral health and unintentional injury also had increased odds of recurrence. Index injuries accounted for $105 million in costs, and recurrent injuries accounted for another$25.3 million. CONCLUSIONS: Recurrent violent injury is a common and costly phenomenon, and effective violence prevention programs are needed. Prevention must include the nontrauma centers where many patients seek care

Gbrowse Moby: a Web-based browser for BioMoby Services

BACKGROUND: The BioMoby project aims to identify and deploy standards and conventions that aid in the discovery, execution, and pipelining of distributed bioinformatics Web Services. As of August, 2006, approximately 680 bioinformatics resources were available through the BioMoby interoperability platform. There are a variety of clients that can interact with BioMoby-style services. Here we describe a Web-based browser-style client – Gbrowse Moby – that allows users to discover and "surf" from one bioinformatics service to the next using a semantically-aided browsing interface. RESULTS: Gbrowse Moby is a low-throughput, exploratory tool specifically aimed at non-informaticians. It provides a straightforward, minimal interface that enables a researcher to query the BioMoby Central web service registry for data retrieval or analytical tools of interest, and then select and execute their chosen tool with a single mouse-click. The data is preserved at each step, thus allowing the researcher to manually "click" the data from one service to the next, with the Gbrowse Moby application managing all data formatting and interface interpretation on their behalf. The path of manual exploration is preserved and can be downloaded for import into automated, high-throughput tools such as Taverna. Gbrowse Moby also includes a robust data rendering system to ensure that all new data-types that appear in the BioMoby registry can be properly displayed in the Web interface. CONCLUSION: Gbrowse Moby is a robust, yet facile entry point for both newcomers to the BioMoby interoperability project who wish to manually explore what is known about their data of interest, as well as experienced users who wish to observe the functionality of their analytical workflows prior to running them in a high-throughput environment

Stage of Disease and Likelihood of Surgical Intervention in Colon Cancer Patients: An Exploratory Analysis of the SEER Database

Introduction/Objectives: Colorectal cancer (CRC) remains as the third-leading cause of cancer-related deaths amongst both men and women in the United States. However, the mortality rate from CRC continues to drop, which has been attributed to increased surgical polyp removal. This study explored the association between disease stage and the likelihood of surgical intervention as primary treatment for the disease. Methods: Retrospective cohort study analysis using de-identified patient data from the NCI’s Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database from 1998-2015. Inclusion criteria included patients with colon cancer, over 18 years of age, with known disease in either the proximal or distal colon. Patients with rectal cancer were excluded given that surgery is not indicated for lesions in that site. Results: Multivariate analysis results indicated that patients with regional disease are between 4-5 times as likely to receive primary surgical intervention in comparison to those with localized disease (OR=4.557, 95% CI=4.295, 4.835). Distant stage of disease was associated with a significantly decreased likelihood of receiving surgery in comparison to localized stage of disease (OR=0.118, CI=0.114, 0.122). Other factors significantly associated with an increased likelihood of surgical intervention (in descending order) included mucinous adenocarcinoma histology, papillary adenocarcinoma histology, having a partner, adenomatous polyps on histology, white ethnicity, female sex, and lesion location in the proximal colon. Conclusion: It was found that stage at diagnosis was far more predictive of surgical treatment than any of the other variables examined. This finding highlights the important for screening in order to identify operable disease

Factors Associated with Stage at Presentation Among Patients with Rare Pancreatic Tumors: An Exploratory Analysis of the SEER Database

Introduction: Rare pancreatic carcinomas (PC) account for roughly 15% of all pancreatic cancers and approximately 8,300 new cases within the US annually. Little research compares initial stage at diagnosis among rare vs. common pancreatic tumors. The aim of this study was to examine associations between tumor histology and initial stage at diagnosis among cases of rare pancreatic cancers. Methods: Retrospective cohort study, using the NCI’s Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) 1990-2015 database. We included patients diagnosed with pancreatic cancer aged 18+. Histology was classified into four categories (ductal, carcinoid, mucinous adenocarcinoma, and undetermined) and stage was dichotomized (locoregional versus distant). Multivariate logistic regression was used to describe the association between tumor histology with initial stage at diagnosis, controlling for patient and tumor characteristics. Results: 90,764 PC patients were analyzed: 9.60%(ductal carcinomas), 4.47%(carcinoid), 3.78%(mucinous), and 15.81%(undetermined); 54.74% of cases were distantly metastasized at diagnosis. In multivariate analysis, PC patients with mucinous histology had greater odds of presenting with late-stage disease compared to those with adenocarcinoma (OR=141%,CI=131,152%; carcinoid and undetermined neoplasm findings were not significant (OR=99.1%CI=92.3,106.5% and OR=101.3%Cl=97.3%,105.4% respectively). Other factors associated with distant PC included age 40-59, male sex, and African American background. Discussion: We observed that mucinous histology has a greater risk of late-stage diagnosis while carcinoid and undetermined neoplasms had a similar risk of late-stage diagnosis vs. adenocarcinoma

Spin dependent observable effect for free particles using the arrival time distribution

The mean arrival time of free particles is computed using the quantum probability current. This is uniquely determined in the non-relativistic limit of Dirac equation, although the Schroedinger probability current has an inherent non-uniqueness. Since the Dirac probability current involves a spin-dependent term, an arrival time distribution based on the probability current shows an observable spin-dependent effect, even for free particles. This arises essentially from relativistic quantum dynamics, but persists even in the non-relativistic regime.Comment: 5 Latex pages, 2.eps figures; discussions sharpened and references added; accepted for publication in Physical Review

ASVspoof 2017 Version 2.0: meta-data analysis and baseline enhancements

International audienceThe now-acknowledged vulnerabilities of automatic speaker verification (ASV) technology to spoofing attacks have spawned interests to develop so-called spoofing countermeasures. By providing common databases, protocols and metrics for their assessment, the ASVspoof initiative was born to spear-head research in this area. The first competitive ASVspoof challenge held in 2015 focused on the assessment of countermeasures to protect ASV technology from voice conversion and speech synthesis spoofing attacks. The second challenge switched focus to the consideration of replay spoofing attacks and countermeasures. This paper describes Version 2.0 of the ASVspoof 2017 database which was released to correct data anomalies detected post-evaluation. The paper contains as-yet unpublished meta-data which describes recording and playback devices and acoustic environments. These support the analysis of replay detection performance and limits. Also described are new results for the official ASVspoof baseline system which is based upon a constant Q cesptral coefficient frontend and a Gaussian mixture model backend. Reported are enhancements to the baseline system in the form of log-energy coefficients and cepstral mean and variance normalisation in addition to an alternative i-vector backend. The best results correspond to a 48% relative reduction in equal error rate when compared to the original baseline system

Integrated Presentation Attack Detection and Automatic Speaker Verification: Common Features and Gaussian Back-end Fusion

International audienceThe vulnerability of automatic speaker verification (ASV) systems to spoofing is widely acknowledged. Recent years have seen an intensification in research efforts to develop spoofing countermeasures, also known as presentation attack detection (PAD) systems. Much of this work has involved the exploration of features that discriminate reliably between bona fide and spoofed speech. While there are grounds to use different front-ends for ASV and PAD systems (they are different tasks) the use of a single front-end has obvious benefits, not least convenience and computational efficiency, especially when ASV and PAD are combined. This paper investigates the performance of a variety of different features used previously for both ASV and PAD and assesses their performance when combined for both tasks. The paper also presents a Gaussian back-end fusion approach to system combination. In contrast to cascaded architec-tures, it relies upon the modelling of the two-dimensional score distribution stemming from the combination of ASV and PAD in parallel. This approach to combination is shown to gener-alise particularly well across independent ASVspoof 2017 v2.0 development and evaluation datasets

Cattle manure compost and biochar supplementation improve growth of Onobrychis viciifolia in coal - mined spoils under water stress conditions

Surface mining is a critical anthropogenic activity that significantly alters the ecosystem, while the use of appropriate revegetation techniques can be considered an important and feasible strategy in the way to improve the ecosystem services of degraded land. In the present study, we carried out a pot experiment to investigate the effects of three different variables on morpho-physiological and biochemical parameters of Onobrychis viciifolia to assess the capability of this species to be used for restoration purposes. Specifically, the variables studied were: (a) water (W) regime, working at five values as regards field capacity (FC) (i.e., 80% FC = highest, 72% FC = high, 60% FC = moderate, 48% FC = low, and 40% FC = very-low dose); and (b) rates of cattle manure compost (CMC) and wood biochar (BC) (weight/weight ratio), working at five rates (i.e., 4.0% = highest, 3.2% = high, 2.0% = moderate, 0.8% = low, and 0% = either no-CMC or no-BC dose). In addition, soil physical-chemical properties and enzyme activities were also investigated at the end of the experimental period. It was found that morphological growth attributes such as plant height, maximum root length, and dry biomass significantly increased with W, CMC and BC applications. Compared to control, moderate-to-high W, CMC and BC doses (W80CMC2BC2) increased net photosynthesis rate (by 42%), stomatal conductance (by 50%), transpiration rate (by 29%), water use efficiency (by 10%), chlorophyll contents (by 73%), carotenoid content (by 81%), leaf relative water content (by 33%) and leaf membrane stability index (by 30%). Under low-W content, the application of CMC and BC enhanced osmotic adjustments by increasing the content of soluble sugar and the activities of superoxide dismutase, catalase, peroxidase and ascorbate peroxidase, decreasing the oxidative stress, as verified by low levels of hydrogen peroxide, superoxide anion, malondialdehyde and proline contents in leaf tissues. Moreover, application of W, CMC and BC significantly improved soil water holding capacity, available nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, urease and catalase activities, which facilitate plant growth. These results would aid in designing an appropriate strategy for achieving a successful revegetation of O. viciifolia, providing optimum doses of W (64% field capacity), CMC (2.4%) and BC (1.7%), with the final aim of reaching ecological restoration in arid degraded lands

t-DCF: a Detection Cost Function for the Tandem Assessment of Spoofing Countermeasures and Automatic Speaker Verification

International audienceThe ASVspoof challenge series was born to spearhead research in anti-spoofing for automatic speaker verification (ASV). The two challenge editions in 2015 and 2017 involved the assessment of spoofing countermeasures (CMs) in isolation from ASV using an equal error rate (EER) metric. While a strategic approach to assessment at the time, it has certain shortcomings. First, the CM EER is not necessarily a reliable predic-tor of performance when ASV and CMs are combined. Second, the EER operating point is ill-suited to user authentication applications , e.g. telephone banking, characterised by a high target user prior but a low spoofing attack prior. We aim to migrate from CM-to ASV-centric assessment with the aid of a new tandem detection cost function (t-DCF) metric. It extends the conventional DCF used in ASV research to scenarios involving spoofing attacks. The t-DCF metric has 6 parameters: (i) false alarm and miss costs for both systems, and (ii) prior probabilities of target and spoof trials (with an implied third, nontar-get prior). The study is intended to serve as a self-contained, tutorial-like presentation. We analyse with the t-DCF a selection of top-performing CM submissions to the 2015 and 2017 editions of ASVspoof, with a focus on the spoofing attack prior. Whereas there is little to choose between countermeasure systems for lower priors, system rankings derived with the EER and t-DCF show differences for higher priors. We observe some ranking changes. Findings support the adoption of the DCF-based metric into the roadmap for future ASVspoof challenges, and possibly for other biometric anti-spoofing evaluations