A Study on Agreement in PICO Span Annotations

In evidence-based medicine, relevance of medical literature is determined by predefined relevance conditions. The conditions are defined based on PICO elements, namely, Patient, Intervention, Comparator, and Outcome. Hence, PICO annotations in medical literature are essential for automatic relevant document filtering. However, defining boundaries of text spans for PICO elements is not straightforward. In this paper, we study the agreement of PICO annotations made by multiple human annotators, including both experts and non-experts. Agreements are estimated by a standard span agreement (i.e., matching both labels and boundaries of text spans), and two types of relaxed span agreement (i.e., matching labels without guaranteeing matching boundaries of spans). Based on the analysis, we report two observations: (i) Boundaries of PICO span annotations by individual human annotators are very diverse. (ii) Despite the disagreement in span boundaries, general areas of the span annotations are broadly agreed by annotators. Our results suggest that applying a standard agreement alone may undermine the agreement of PICO spans, and adopting both a standard and a relaxed agreements is more suitable for PICO span evaluation.Comment: Accepted in SIGIR 2019 (Short paper

A Review of Jennifer Buck\u27s Reframing the House: Constructive Feminist Global Ecclesiology for the Western Evangelical Church (Pickwick Publications)

I want to thank the Quaker Theological Discussion Group and especially Carole Spencer for putting this session together and for inviting me to be part of this book review of Jennifer Buck’s book Reframing the House. Though I am not a Quaker, I do teach at a Quaker institution, Earlham School of Religion, so it is an honor to be part of this session and to review this fine book. Reframing the House is an interesting read on the global church and ecumenical theology which is a pertinent topic of our time. Our world is getting smaller and smaller and we are living in a global world where people are migrating and immigrating. We live in an inter-dependent and inter-reliant world. What happens in Asia affects us here in North America and what happens here in North America affects those in Africa

Exploring The Contribution of Innate Immune Cells to Breast Cancer Immunotherapy

Breast cancer is the leading type of cancer in women. About 10-15% of breast cancers are triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), a subtype with the worst prognosis. Due to the lack of estrogen, progesterone and HER2 receptor expression, chemotherapies have been the standard of care for decades. Immunotherapy has emerged as promising for TNBC treatment. In 2020, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted approval to pembrolizumab in combination with chemotherapy for patients with advanced triple-negative breast cancer. However, only a subgroup of advanced TNBC patients live longer whose tumors have a PD-L1 Combined Positive Score of at least 10 (CPS>=10). There is still an unmet medical need to provide alternative treatment for the rest of patients. Interestingly, a few of patients at UCSD Moores Cancer Center were found to have had excellent responses to pembrolizumab despite low CPS scores (termed Elite Responders). The hypothesis of this project is that there may be an alternative immune response mechanism and/or crosstalk happening between the innate and adaptive immune systems, especially in Natural Killer Cells and Macrophages, that contributed to this unexpected excellent response. Our procedure used ACDBio RNAscope Multiplex Fluorescence v2 method to spatially analyze innate immune cells (Natural Killer cells and macrophages) and adaptive immune cells (T-cells) in the Tumor Micro Environment. Our data demonstrated increased tumor infiltration of innate immune cells (macrophage and Natural Killer cells) in the Elite Responders. This conclusion indicated the joint effort of two immune systems (innate and adaptive) which eventually led to increased survival

Climate Change and the Personal Presence of God

Climate change is one of the most important social justice issues of our time that affects the survival of humanity and planet earth. Climate change alters our planet and creates havoc in many parts of the world as weather patterns change, causing changes in our environment and countless other ripple effects. Storms are getting more devastating, as structures are destroyed and more lives are being lost. The increase in carbon emissions is destroying our atmosphere, and the consequences are enormous for the future of our planet. During this climate crisis, how are we to divert the disruption and stop climate change? As people of faith, what is our role in preventing a climate catastrophe that will devastate people and the rest of creation on earth? The Scriptures state that the Spirit hovered over the earth during the creation of the world. The presence of the Spirit was always on the earth and the presence of the Spirit can still be felt today. It is the work of the Spirit that transforms us to work for cli- mate justice. We need to go into a deep analysis of climate change and its effect on this planet and humanity. As people of faith, we need to reimagine the world and God so that we can all work towards justice. This article will examine the effects of climate change and how the animals and the planet are affected. The earth and the animals are crying out in pain and unjust suffering. This article will explore how we can view God and the Spirit in a way that helps us live more sustainable and healthy lives for the sake of the future of humanity and the planet

For Courage While Confronting Gender Injustice

Kim writes a prayer asking for courage to address gender injustice and faith to continue to address it

Cancer Risk in Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus: Metabolic Links and Therapeutic Considerations

Type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM2) is increasing in incidence, creating worldwide public health concerns and impacting morbidity and mortality rates. An increasing number of studies have demonstrated shared associations between DM2 and malignancy, including key clinical, biochemical, and metabolic commonalities. This paper will attempt to explore the relationship between the various types of cancer and diabetes, the common metabolic pathways underlying cancer development, and the potential impact of various antidiabetes therapies on cancer risk