Cost Effectiveness Of Non-Laboratory Cvd Screening In Uzbekistan

Background-- Cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk scores that require laboratory testing (e.g., cholesterol testing) are often used to identify high- and low-risk individuals for primary CVD prevention interventions, such as statin treatment. However, laboratory testing can be expensive and difficult to conduct in resource-limited settings. The aim of this study was to compare CVD risk characterization and evaluate the cost-effectiveness of non-laboratory based and laboratory-based CVD risk scores for adults in Tashkent City, Uzbekistan. Methods--CVD risk for 853 adults (376 men, 477 women) from Tashkent City, Uzbekistan was assessed using laboratory-based and non-laboratory-based scores calculated from 2002 Uzbekistan Health Examination Survey (UHES) data. Non-laboratory-based risk predictions were compared to the six laboratory-based scores (SCORE for high-risk and low-risk countries, three versions of Framingham risk scores, and CUORE) using Spearman rank correlation. The agreement of risk characterization for men was also evaluated by calculating the proportion of the male population equivalently characterized as high or low risk using either type of score. Using the UHES data, model populations of 10,000 men and 10,000 women were generated and used for cost-effectiveness modeling. A micro-simulation model that projected lifetime CVD-associated costs and quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) was used to calculate incremental cost-effectiveness ratios (ICERs) for non-laboratory and SCORE (for high risk countries) risk screening approaches. Results - The Spearman rank correlation coefficients for the laboratory-based and non-laboratory-based CVD risk scores ranged from 0.872-0.984 for men and 0.937-0.980 for women. The ICERs for the non-laboratory-based strategies on the efficient frontier (nondominated strategies) ranged from $843 to$6,551 for men and $6,249 to$16,193 for women. Almost all SCORE strategies for both men and women were dominated (higher cost and lower QALYs); the only exception had an ICER of $91,799. Conclusions - For both men and women, there was a high correlation between the laboratory-based and nonlaboratory-based risk assessment methods. In men, there was also a high level of agreement in risk characterization between the laboratory-based and non-laboratory-based risk scores. It is cost-effective to use the non laboratory based risk score to assess and then treat the top 1.60$5,150/QALY). No CVD screening is cost-effective for women in Uzbekistan

Intelligent Modelling of the Environmental Behaviour of Chemicals

In view of the new European Union chemical policy REACH (Registration, Evaluation, and Authorization of Chemicals), interest in "non-animal" methods for assessing the risk potentials of chemicals towards human health and environment has increased. The incapability of classical modelling approaches in the complex and ill-defined modelling problems of chemicals' environmental behavior, together with an availability of large computing power in modern times raise an interest in applying computational models inspired by the approaches coming from the area of artificial intelligence. This thesis is devoted to promote the applications of neuro/fuzzy techniques in assessing the environmental behavior of chemicals. Some of the bottlenecks lying in the neuro/fuzzy modelling of chemicals' behavior towards environment have been identified and the solutions have been provided based on the techniques of computational intelligence.Diese Dissertation beinhaltet die Anwendung von neuronalen bzw. fuzzy Netzen, um das Umweltverhalten von Chemikalien beurteilen zu können. In dieser Arbeit werden die Probleme der Modellierung von Chemikalien gegenüber der Umwelt aufgezeigt und Lösungen angeboten. Die Lösungen basieren auf künstlichen Intelligenztechniken. Die Qualität der Modellierungstechniken hängt von mehreren Faktoren ab, z.B. der Eingabe, der Struktur und so weiter. In vielen Fällen werden keine geeigneten Resultate erhalten. So läuft es auf die Entwicklung eines Modells mit einer niedrigen Generalisierungsfähigkeit (Verallgemeinerungsfähigkeit)hinaus

Consumers' Behavioral Intentions Regarding Online Shopping

This study investigates the consumers' intention towards Internet shopping. The Theory of Planned Behavior is used to predict behavioral intention (BI), which is a function of attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control (PBC). The effects of demographic and personal variables on BI are also examined. Data analysis (n = 303) indicates that attitude, subjective norm, perceptions of behavioral controls, and previous purchases are significant predictors of behavioral intention. Product/Convenience, Customer Service (attitude factors), Purchase and Delivery, Promotional Offers, Product Attribute (factors of PBC), subjective norm, hours spent online, money spent online, and previous purchases discriminate respondents of high BI from low BI. Behavioral intention of shopping online is highest for Specialty Products followed by Personal, Information Intensive, and Household Products

Rehabilitation of Maxillary defect using Removable Maxillary Cast Partial Denture Hollow Prosthesis for managing Mucomycosis patient: A Clinical Case Report

  Introduction: Mucormycosis is the fungal infection which especially affects immunocompromised patients. Case Report: In this case report, prosthetic rehabilitation of maxillary defect due to past mucormycosis in an uncontrolled diabetic patient was discussed by means of lightweight prosthesis by attaching a hollow occlusal shim to cast partial denture framework as absence of alveolar ridge on the defect side tends to increase the weight of the prosthesis which would have compromised the retention of the prosthesis. Conclusion: This technique is simple, economical and less time-consuming

Studies on plant regeneration and transformation efficiency of Agrobacterium mediated transformation using neomycin phosphotransferase II (nptII) and glucuronidase (GUS) as a reporter gene

Plant transformation mediated by Agrobacterium tumefaciens, a soil plant pathogenic bacterium, is the most used method for the introduction of foreign genes into plant cells and the subsequent regeneration of transgenic plants. We have standardized the tissue culture media for the regeneration and transformation with the vector LBA 4404 (pCAMBIA 2301), so that in future, this system may be exploited for the expression of antibody fragment (single chain variable fragment) in plants (plantibody). The transformed green shoots tested positive for neomycin phosphotransferase II (nptII) gene and glucuronidase (GUS) were screened, rooted on MS medium and subsequently hardened to harvest seeds. The transformation frequency of Agrobacterium (LBA 4404) with the binary vector pCAMBIA 2301 on the basis of GUS resistance was found to be 2.9%.Key words: Agrobacterium, transformation, Nicotiana tabacum, tobacco, transformation frequency

Cryptanalytic Attacks on IDEA Block Cipher

International data encryption algorithm (IDEA) is a secret key or symmetric key block cipher. The purpose of IDEA was to replace data encryption standard (DES) cipher, which became practically insecure due to its small key size of 56 bits and increase in computational power of systems. IDEA cipher mainly to provide data confidentiality in variety of applications such as commercial and financial application e.g. pretty good privacy (PGP) protocol. Till 2015, no successful linear or algebraic weaknesses IDEA of have been reported. In this paper, author explained IDEA cipher, its application in PGP and did a systematic survey of various attacks attempted on IDEA cipher. The best cryptanalysis result which applied to all keys could break IDEA up to 6 rounds out of 8.5 rounds of the full IDEA cipher1. But the attack requires 264 known plaintexts and 2126.8 operations for reduced round version. This attack is practically not feasible due to above mention mammoth data and time requirements. So IDEA cipher is still completely secure for practical usage. PGP v2.0 uses IDEA cipher in place of BassOmatic which was found to be insecure for providing data confidentiality

Matching Disparate Image Pairs Using Shape-Aware ConvNets

An end-to-end trainable ConvNet architecture, that learns to harness the power of shape representation for matching disparate image pairs, is proposed. Disparate image pairs are deemed those that exhibit strong affine variations in scale, viewpoint and projection parameters accompanied by the presence of partial or complete occlusion of objects and extreme variations in ambient illumination. Under these challenging conditions, neither local nor global feature-based image matching methods, when used in isolation, have been observed to be effective. The proposed correspondence determination scheme for matching disparate images exploits high-level shape cues that are derived from low-level local feature descriptors, thus combining the best of both worlds. A graph-based representation for the disparate image pair is generated by constructing an affinity matrix that embeds the distances between feature points in two images, thus modeling the correspondence determination problem as one of graph matching. The eigenspectrum of the affinity matrix, i.e., the learned global shape representation, is then used to further regress the transformation or homography that defines the correspondence between the source image and target image. The proposed scheme is shown to yield state-of-the-art results for both, coarse-level shape matching as well as fine point-wise correspondence determination.Comment: First two authors contributed equally, to Appear in the IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) 201

Robust acoustic domain identification with its application to speaker diarization

International audienceWith the rise in multimedia content over the years, more variety is observed in the recording environments of audio. An audio processing system might benefit when it has a module to identify the acoustic domain at its front-end. In this paper, we demonstrate the idea of acoustic domain identification (ADI) for speaker diarization. For this, we first present a detailed study of the various domains of the third DIHARD challenge highlighting the factors that differentiated them from each other. Our main contribution is to develop a simple and efficient solution for ADI. In the present work, we explore speaker embeddings for this task. Next, we integrate the ADI module with the speaker diarization framework of the DIHARD III challenge. The performance substantially improved over that of the baseline when the thresholds for agglomerative hierarchical clustering were optimized according to the respective domains. We achieved a relative improvement of more than 5% and 8% in DER for core and full conditions, respectively, on Track 1 of the DIHARD III evaluation set

Domain-Dependent Speaker Diarization for the Third DIHARD Challenge

International audienceThis report presents the system developed by the ABSP Laboratory team for the third DIHARD speech diarization challenge. Our main contribution in this work is to develop a simple and efficient solution for acoustic domain dependent speech diarization. We explore speaker embeddings for acoustic domain identification (ADI) task. Our study reveals that i-vector based method achieves considerably better performance than xvector based approach in the third DIHARD challenge dataset. Next, we integrate the ADI module with the diarization framework. The performance substantially improved over that of the baseline when we optimized the thresholds for agglomerative hierarchical clustering and the parameters for dimensionality reduction during scoring for individual acoustic domains. We achieved a relative improvement of 9.63% and 10.64% in DER for core and full conditions, respectively, for Track 1 of the DIHARD III evaluation set