1,177 research outputs found
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An Association between Head Circumference and Alzheimer's Disease in a Population-Based Study of Aging and Dementia
We investigated the association between head circumference (HC) and Alzheimer's disease (AD) in a cross-sectional population-based study of aging in North Manhattan. Six hundred forty-nine subjects underwent neurologic, neuropsychological, and anthropometric evaluations; apolipoprotein E (apoE) genotype was available for a subsample of 300 individuals. Logistic regression analyses were performed with AD the outcome of interest to evaluate any association between HC and AD. In these analyses, HC evaluated as a continuous variable was associated with AD (OR 0.8, 95% CI 0.7-0.9) after adjusting for age, education, and ethnicity, gender, and height. Analyses suggested that increased risk resided mainly in those with smallest HC. Thus, women whose HC was within the lowest quintile of HC for women were 2.9 (95% CI 1.4-6.1) times more likely to have AD, after adjusting for age, education, and ethnicity; and men in the lowest quintile of HC (for men) were 2.3 times more likely to have AD (95% CI 0.6-9.8). There was no confounding by height, weight, or apoE genotype. The results are consistent with previous studies that suggest that premorbid brain size may influence the age-specific risk for AD. Future epidemiologic studies seeking environmental risk factors for AD may benefit by making HC measurements on all subjects to decrease the variance associated with other potential risk factors
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Primary Care Expenditures before the Onset of Alzheimer's Disease
Objective: To investigate primary care expenditures in the period before diagnosis of AD. Methods: In a population-based sample of Medicare enrollees in New York City, person-level 1996 Medicare claims, summed over primary care encounters, were examined for people who developed AD in 1997 to 1998 and those who did not. Results: People who developed AD were more likely to use Medicare outpatient and ambulatory care 1 to 2 years before diagnosis. Compared with respondents who did not develop AD, the excess cost for men was 239 (26% higher). Among elderly people ≥75 years in the United States, the prodromal period of AD was associated with an excess Medicare-based primary care cost of 194.7 million. Conclusion: In addition to huge costs associated with AD after diagnosis, prediagnosis costs are an unrecognized source of expenditures related to the disease
Skin Lesion Analyser: An Efficient Seven-Way Multi-Class Skin Cancer Classification Using MobileNet
Skin cancer, a major form of cancer, is a critical public health problem with
123,000 newly diagnosed melanoma cases and between 2 and 3 million non-melanoma
cases worldwide each year. The leading cause of skin cancer is high exposure of
skin cells to UV radiation, which can damage the DNA inside skin cells leading
to uncontrolled growth of skin cells. Skin cancer is primarily diagnosed
visually employing clinical screening, a biopsy, dermoscopic analysis, and
histopathological examination. It has been demonstrated that the dermoscopic
analysis in the hands of inexperienced dermatologists may cause a reduction in
diagnostic accuracy. Early detection and screening of skin cancer have the
potential to reduce mortality and morbidity. Previous studies have shown Deep
Learning ability to perform better than human experts in several visual
recognition tasks. In this paper, we propose an efficient seven-way automated
multi-class skin cancer classification system having performance comparable
with expert dermatologists. We used a pretrained MobileNet model to train over
HAM10000 dataset using transfer learning. The model classifies skin lesion
image with a categorical accuracy of 83.1 percent, top2 accuracy of 91.36
percent and top3 accuracy of 95.34 percent. The weighted average of precision,
recall, and f1-score were found to be 0.89, 0.83, and 0.83 respectively. The
model has been deployed as a web application for public use at
(https://saketchaturvedi.github.io). This fast, expansible method holds the
potential for substantial clinical impact, including broadening the scope of
primary care practice and augmenting clinical decision-making for dermatology
specialists.Comment: This is a pre-copyedited version of a contribution published in
Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, Hassanien A., Bhatnagar R.,
Darwish A. (eds) published by Chaturvedi S.S., Gupta K., Prasad P.S. The
definitive authentication version is available online via
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3383-9_1
Structure and Dynamics of the Sun's Open Magnetic Field
The solar magnetic field is the primary agent that drives solar activity and
couples the Sun to the Heliosphere. Although the details of this coupling
depend on the quantitative properties of the field, many important aspects of
the corona - solar wind connection can be understood by considering only the
general topological properties of those regions on the Sun where the field
extends from the photosphere out to interplanetary space, the so-called open
field regions that are usually observed as coronal holes. From the simple
assumptions that underlie the standard quasi-steady corona-wind theoretical
models, and that are likely to hold for the Sun, as well, we derive two
conjectures on the possible structure and dynamics of coronal holes: (1)
Coronal holes are unique in that every unipolar region on the photosphere can
contain at most one coronal hole. (2) Coronal holes of nested polarity regions
must themselves be nested. Magnetic reconnection plays the central role in
enforcing these constraints on the field topology. From these conjectures we
derive additional properties for the topology of open field regions, and
propose several observational predictions for both the slowly varying and
transient corona/solar wind.Comment: 26 pages, 6 figure
Physics, Topology, Logic and Computation: A Rosetta Stone
In physics, Feynman diagrams are used to reason about quantum processes. In
the 1980s, it became clear that underlying these diagrams is a powerful analogy
between quantum physics and topology: namely, a linear operator behaves very
much like a "cobordism". Similar diagrams can be used to reason about logic,
where they represent proofs, and computation, where they represent programs.
With the rise of interest in quantum cryptography and quantum computation, it
became clear that there is extensive network of analogies between physics,
topology, logic and computation. In this expository paper, we make some of
these analogies precise using the concept of "closed symmetric monoidal
category". We assume no prior knowledge of category theory, proof theory or
computer science.Comment: 73 pages, 8 encapsulated postscript figure
Global Development and Climate Change: A Game Theory Approach
The increasing concern with climate change is one of the main issues of our time, and thus we aim to theoretically and mathematically analyse its causes. However our approach follows a different stream of thought, presenting the reasoning and decision-making processes between technical and moral solutions. We have resorted to game theory models in order to demonstrate cooperative and non-cooperative scenarios, ranging from the traditional to the evolutionary within game theory. In doing so we are able to glimpse the development of modern society and a paradigm shift regarding human control over nature and to what extent it is harmful to the sustainability of our environment and the survival of future generations. Merging different fields of knowledge, we present a theoretical-philosophical approach, combined with empirical-mathematical solutions taking into account the agent-based behaviour guided blindly by instrumental rationality
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