Aplicación de la técnica de árboles de clasificación y regresión en la valoración ecográfica de los nódulos tiroideos

Objetivo Evaluar la capacidad de los árboles de clasificación y regresión (CART) en la valoración ecográfica de los nódulos tiroideos malignos. Materiales y métodos Se realizaron 404 punciones aspiración con aguja fina (PAAF) a 384 pacientes. De los nódulos analizados, se registraron las características ecográficas (localización, tamaño, morfología, contorno, consistencia, ecoestructura, ecogenicidad, calcificaciones y vascularización) y los resultados de la elastografía. Se aplicó el CART para investigar la relación entre los hallazgos ecográficos, la elastografía y el cáncer de tiroides. Resultados El análisis CART determinó que la realización de una elastografía no aporta datos relevantes y que las zonas homogéneas pueden clasificar a los nódulos tiroideos en: 1.a zona) caracterizada por ausencia de áreas de degeneración coloide e hipoecogenicidad asociada a malignidad; 2.a zona) diferenciada por presencia de áreas de degeneración coloide combinada con ausencia de microcalcificaciones, constituyendo un indicador fiable de benignidad de los nódulos tiroideos; y 3.a zona) la ausencia de hipoecogenicidad y una lesión menos alta que ancha deparan un indicador fiable de benignidad. El árbol de clasificación alcanzó una sensibilidad del 87, 5% y un valor predictivo negativo del 98, 8%. Discusión El CART muestra una elevada capacidad de predicción de los nódulos malignos frente a otras técnicas lineales. Conclusión La utilización de los árboles de clasificación provee una herramienta simple para la toma de decisión clínica con el objeto de reducir las PAAF innecesarias, con una elevada sensibilidad. Objective To evaluate the use of Classification and Regression Trees (CART) in the ultrasound evaluation of malignant thyroid nodules. Materials and methods A study was performed on 404 fine needle aspirates (FNA), with biopsies being performed on 384. The information collected about the thyroid nodules was: ultrasound features (location, size, morphology, contour, consistency, echo-structure, echogenicity, calcification, and vascularisation) and elastography results. The CART technique was used to investigate the relationship between ultrasound findings and the thyroid cancer. Results The CART analysis showed that elastography does not provide any relevant data, and that the homogeneous areas could classified the thyroid nodules into: 1st area) characterised by the absence of colloid degeneration areas and a hypo-echogenicity associated with malignancy; 2nd area) differentiated by the presence of colloid degeneration areas combined with absence of microcalcifications, constituting a reliable indicator of benign thyroid nodules; and a 3rd area) the absence of hypo-echogenicity and a lesion wider than it is long that provides a reliable indicator of being benign. The optimum tree produced a sensitivity of 87.5% and negative predictive value of 98.8%. Discussion The CART technique demonstrated a high predictive capacity for malignant nodules compared to other linear techniques. Conclusion The use of classification trees provides us with a simple tool for clinical decision making, in order to reduce unnecessary FNA biopsies, as well as achieving a high sensitivity

Social inequalities in young children's meal skipping behaviors: The Generation R Study

Background: Regular meal consumption is considered an important aspect of a healthy diet. While ample evidence shows social inequalities in breakfast skipping among adolescents, little is known about social inequalities in breakfast skipping and skipping of other meals among young school-aged children. Such information is crucial in targeting interventions aimed to promote a healthy diet in children. Methods: We examined data from 4704 ethnically diverse children participating in the Generation R Study, a population-based prospective cohort study in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Information on family socioeconomic position (SEP), ethnic background, and meal skipping behaviors was assessed by parent-reported questionnaire when the child was 6 years old. Multiple logistic regression analyses were performed to assess the associations of family SEP (educational level, household income, employment status, family composition) and ethnic backgr

Meal-Skipping Behaviors and Body Fat in 6-Year-Old Children

Objective To assess the prospective associations of breakfast, lunch, and dinner skipping at age 4 years with body fat (ie, percent fat mass, body mass index [BMI], and weight status) at age 6 years. Study design Data were analyzed from 5913 children participating in the Generation R Study, a population-based prospective cohort study in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Meal-skipping behaviors were assessed through parent-report questionnaires. Children's weight and height were objectively measured and converted to BMI SDSs. Weight status (ie, overweight or normal weight) was defined according to age- and sex-specific cutoff points. At age 6 years, percent fat mass was assessed by dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry. Linear and logistic regression analyses were performed, adjusting for covariates and BMI at age 4 years. Results Breakfast skipping at age 4 years was associated with a higher percent fa

Utilidad de la ecografía en la evaluación de los nódulos tiroideos

Objetivo Evaluar la capacidad diagnóstica de la ecografía para diferenciar nódulos tiroideos benignos y malignos, y su utilidad para evitar procedimientos invasivos innecesarios. Pacientes y métodos De enero de 2012 a diciembre de 2014 se realizaron 321 procedimientos de punción-aspiración con aguja fina (PAAF) a 302 pacientes remitidos por el Servicio de Endocrinología del Centro Medico de Especialidades, seleccionados bajo los criterios de la Guía de la Asociación Americana de Endocrinología Clínica y de la Guía de la Asociación Americana del Tiroides. Se analizaron las siguientes características ecográficas: localización, tamaño, morfología, contorno, consistencia, ecoestructura, ecogenicidad, calcificaciones y vascularización. Se realizó un análisis univariante y multivariante para investigar la relación entre los hallazgos ecográficos y el cáncer de tiroides. Resultados La prevalencia de malignidad en nuestra población de estudio es del 5,92%. Los hallazgos ecográficos que son estadísticamente significativos y están asociados a una mayor probabilidad de malignidad son la presencia de microcalcificaciones, la vascularización central y la hipoecogenicidad. Los hallazgos asociados a un menor riesgo son la presencia de halo, la existencia de áreas de degeneración coloide y la heterogeneidad de los nódulos. Conclusión Según nuestro estudio, la indicación de realizar PAAF no debería basarse en el tamaño del nódulo, sino en la presencia de hallazgos ecográficos sospechosos de malignidad de acuerdo con las estimaciones de nuestro modelo estadístico. De esta forma sugerimos evitar realizar PAAF innecesarias en nódulos que no presenten dichas características. Objective To evaluate the diagnostic capacity of ultrasonography (US) for differentiating between malignant and benign thyroid nodules and its usefulness in obviating unnecessary invasive procedures. Patients and methods From January 2012 through December 2014, a total of 321 fine-needle aspiration biopsy (FNAB) procedures were done in 302 patients selected according to the criteria recommended by the American Association of Clinical Endocrinology guidelines and the American Thyroid Association guidelines. We analyzed the following characteristics on US: location, size, morphology, contour, consistency, echostructure, echogenicity, calcifications, and vascularization. We used univariate and multivariate analyses to investigate the relationship between the US findings and thyroid cancer. Results The prevalence of malignancy in our study population was 5.92%. The US findings that were significantly associated with a greater probability of malignancy were microcalcifications, central vascularization, and hypoechogenicity. The US findings that were associated with a lower risk of malignancy were areas of colloid degeneration and nodule heterogeneity. Conclusion Our results suggest that decisions about whether to perform FNAB should be based on the presence of suspicious US findings found with our statistic model rather than on the size of the nodule. Thus, unnecessary FNAB procedures on nodules without suspicious US characteristics can be avoided

Knowledge Graphs as Context Models: Improving the Detection of Cross-Language Plagiarism with Paraphrasing

Cross-language plagiarism detection attempts to identify and extract automatically plagiarism among documents in different languages. Plagiarized fragments can be translated verbatim copies or may alter their structure to hide the copying, which is known as paraphrasing and is more difficult to detect. In order to improve the paraphrasing detection, we use a knowledge graph-based approach to obtain and compare context models of document fragments in different languages. Experimental results in German-English and Spanish-English cross-language plagiarism detection indicate that our knowledge graph-based approach offers a better performance compared to other state-of-the-art models.The research has been carried out in the framework of the European Commission WIQ-EIIRSES (no. 269180) and DIANA-APPLICATIONS - Finding Hidden Knowledge in Texts:Applications (TIN2012-38603-C02-01) projects as well as the VLC/CAMPUS Microcluster on Multimodal Interaction in Intelligent Systems.Franco-Salvador, M.; Gupta, P.; Rosso, P. (2013). Knowledge Graphs as Context Models: Improving the Detection of Cross-Language Plagiarism with Paraphrasing. En Bridging Between Information Retrieval and Databases: PROMISE Winter School 2013, Bressanone, Italy, February 4-8, 2013. Revised Tutorial Lectures. Springer Verlag (Germany). 227-236. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54798-0_12S227236Barrón-Cedeño, A., Vila, M., Martí, M., Rosso, P.: Plagiarism meets paraphrasing: insights for the next generation in automatic plagiarism detection. Computational Linguistics 39(4) (2013)Barrón-Cedeño, A.: On the mono- and cross-language detection of text re-use and plagiarism. Ph.D. thesis, Universitat Politènica de València (2012)Barrón-Cedeño, A., Rosso, P., Pinto, D., Juan, A.: On cross-lingual plagiarism analysis using a statistical model. In: Proc. of the ECAI 2008 Workshop on Uncovering Plagiarism, Authorship and Social Software Misuse, PAN 2008 (2008)Franco-Salvador, M., Gupta, P., Rosso, P.: Cross-language plagiarism detection using BabelNet’s statistical dictionary. Computación y Sistemas, Revista Iberoamericana de Computación 16(4), 383–390 (2012)Franco-Salvador, M., Gupta, P., Rosso, P.: Cross-language plagiarism detection using a multilingual semantic network. 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Springer, Heidelberg (2012)Mcnamee, P., Mayfield, J.: Character n-gram tokenization for European language text retrieval. Information Retrieval 7(1), 73–97 (2004)Miller, G.A., Leacock, C., Tengi, R., Bunker, R.T.: A semantic concordance. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Human Language Technology, HLT 1993, pp. 303–308. Association for Computational Linguistics, Stroudsburg (1993)Navigli, R., Ponzetto, S.P.: BabelNet: The automatic construction, evaluation and application of a wide-coverage multilingual semantic network. Artificial Intelligence 193, 217–250 (2012)Och, F.J., Ney, H.: A systematic comparison of various statistical alignment models. Computational Linguistics 29(1), 19–51 (2003)Potthast, M., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Stein, B., Rosso, P.: An evaluation framework for plagiarism detection. In: Proc. of the 23rd Int. Conf. on Computational Linguistics, COLING 2010, Beijing, China, pp. 997–1005 (2010)Potthast, M., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Stein, B., Rosso, P.: Cross-language plagiarism detection. Language Resources and Evaluation, Special Issue on Plagiarism and Authorship Analysis 45(1), 45–62 (2011)Potthast, M., Eiselt, A., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Stein, B., Rosso, P.: Overview of the 3rd int. competition on plagiarism detection. In: CLEF (Notebook Papers/Labs/Workshop) (2011)Potthast, M., Gollub, T., Hagen, M., Kiesel, J., Michel, M., Oberländer, A., Tippmann, M., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Gupta, P., Rosso, P., et al.: Overview of the 4th international competition on plagiarism detection. In: CLEF (Online Working Notes/Labs/Workshop) (2012)Pouliquen, B., Steinberger, R., Ignat, C.: Automatic linking of similar texts across languages. In: Proc. Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing III, RANLP 2003, pp. 307–316 (2003)Schmid, H.: Probabilistic part-of-speech tagging using decision trees. In: Proc. Int. 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Maternal imprinting on cognition markers of wild type and transgenic Alzheimer's disease model mice

The risk of suffering from Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is higher in individuals from AD-affected mothers. The purpose of this investigation was to study whether maternal transmission might produce AD-related alterations in progenies of mice that do not have any genotypic alteration. We used cognitively-intact mothers harbouring in heterozygosity the transgene for overexpressing the Swedish double mutant version of the human amyloid precursor protein (hAβPPswe). The phenotype of the offspring with or without the transgene resulting from crossing young Tg2576 females with wild-type males were compared with those of the offspring resulting from crossing wild-type females with Tg2576 males. The hAβPPswe-bearing offspring from Tg2576 mothers showed an aggravated AD-like phenotype. Remarkably, cognitive, immunohistochemical and some biochemical features displayed by Tg2576 heterozygous mice were also found in wild-type animals generated from Tg2576 females. This suggests the existence of a maternal imprinting in the wild-type offspring that confers a greater facility to launch an AD-like neurodegenerative cascade. Such progeny, lacking any mutant amyloid precursor protein, constitutes a novel model to study maternal transmission of AD and, even more important, to discover early risk markers that predispose to the development of AD

Satisfacción de los internos de centros penitenciarios con el programa deportivo educativo de baloncesto desarrollado por la Fundación Real Madrid

El deporte y la actividad física tienen, cada vez más, un papel muy importante en la vida de los centros penitenciarios, siendo usados, normalmente, con el fin de favorecer el proceso de reinserción de los reclusos. En este sentido, los objetivos de este trabajo fueron: analizar el grado de satisfacción de los internos de los centros penitenciarios con el programa deportivo educativo de baloncesto llevado a cabo por la Fundación Real Madrid, y destacar los resultados más relevantes de la aplicación del mismo. Con este n, se administró un cuestionario a 267 reclusos de un total de 21 centros penitenciarios de España. Entre los resultados más destacados, sobresale el hecho de que, en general, los encuestados estaban muy satisfechos con el programa deportivo educativo llevado a cabo. Además, los datos hallados manifestaron que la gran mayoría de los internos consideraban que habían aprendido mucho en relación con la actividad deportiva desarrollada (baloncesto) y con los valores educativos trabajados.