Pretreatment serum albumin as a predictor of cancer survival: A systematic review of the epidemiological literature

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>There are several methods of assessing nutritional status in cancer of which serum albumin is one of the most commonly used. In recent years, the role of malnutrition as a predictor of survival in cancer has received considerable attention. As a result, it is reasonable to investigate whether serum albumin has utility as a prognostic indicator of cancer survival in cancer. This review summarizes all available epidemiological literature on the association between pretreatment serum albumin levels and survival in different types of cancer.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A systematic search of the literature using the MEDLINE database (January 1995 through June 2010) to identify epidemiologic studies on the relationship between serum albumin and cancer survival. To be included in the review, a study must have: been published in English, reported on data collected in humans with any type of cancer, had serum albumin as <it>one of the </it>or <it>only </it>predicting factor, had survival as one of the outcome measures (primary or secondary) and had any of the following study designs (case-control, cohort, cross-sectional, case-series prospective, retrospective, nested case-control, ecologic, clinical trial, meta-analysis).</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Of the 29 studies reviewed on cancers of the gastrointestinal tract, all except three found higher serum albumin levels to be associated with better survival in multivariate analysis. Of the 10 studies reviewed on lung cancer, all excepting one found higher serum albumin levels to be associated with better survival. In 6 studies reviewed on female cancers and multiple cancers each, lower levels of serum albumin were associated with poor survival. Finally, in all 8 studies reviewed on patients with other cancer sites, lower levels of serum albumin were associated with poor survival.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Pretreatment serum albumin levels provide useful prognostic significance in cancer. Accordingly, serum albumin level could be used in clinical trials to better define the baseline risk in cancer patients. A critical gap for demonstrating causality, however, is the absence of clinical trials demonstrating that raising albumin levels by means of intravenous infusion or by hyperalimentation decreases the excess risk of mortality in cancer.</p

Behavior in behavioral strategy : capturing, measuring, analyzing

Measuring behavior requires research methods that can capture observed outcomes and expose underlying processes and mechanisms. In this chapter, we present a toolbox of instruments and techniques we designed experimental tasks to simulate decision environments and capture behavior. We deployed protocol analysis and text analysis to examine the underlying cognitive processes. In combination, these can simultaneously grasp antecedents, outcomes, processes, and mechanisms. We applied them to collect rich behavioral data on two key topics in strategic management: the exploration–exploitation trade-off and strategic risk-taking. This mix of methods is particularly useful in describing actual behavior as it is, not as it should be, replacing assumptions with data and offering a finer-grained perspective of strategic decision-making

On designing low pressure loss working spaces for a planar Stirling micromachine

International audienc

MISTIC - Micro Stirling Heat Engines for Thermal Energy Harvesting

Abstract This paper reports on the fabrication and validation of the piston assembly for a new micro heat engine based on the Stirling cycle, (MISTIC - MIcro STIrling Clusters), intended for electric power generation by harvesting low temperature waste heat (≥ 200° C). Here, we define the requirements, develop the fabrication processes and fabricate piston assemblies to show the feasibility. Static and dynamic response of the pistons show that high quality factors (Q>100) are achievable with the polymer structures and the natural frequencies of adjacent pistons can be matched (within 4 percent), two characteristics required to allow start-up of the engine. We also demonstrate an electromagnetic actuator that is capable of individually exciting the pistons to further facilitate start-up

Spartacus, Scientific Robot Reporter

Spartacus, our 2005 AAAI Mobile Robot Challenge entry, integrated planning and scheduling, sound source localization, tracking and separation, message reading, speech recognition and generation, and autonomous navigation capabilities onboard a custom-made interactive robot. Integration of such a high number of capabilities revealed interesting new issues such as coordinating audio/visual/graphical capabilities, monitoring the impacts of the capabilities in usage by the robot, and inferring the robot’s intentions and goals. Our 2006 entry addresses these issues, adding new capabilities to the robot and improving our software and computational architectures, with the objective of increasing and evaluating our understanding of human-robot interaction and integration with an autonomous mobile platform. More specifically, Spartacus is designed to be a scientific robot reporter, in the sense of a human-robot interaction research assistant. The objective is to have Spartacus provide understandable and configurable interaction, intention and information in unconstrained environmental conditions, reporting its experiences for scientific data analysis