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N.A. Doss studied mathematics at UC Davis, CSUMB, and Washington State, and is now a faculty member at CSUMB. Aside from mathematics, Doss studies abstract art, poetry, baduk, and music

Dysphagia affecting quality of life in cerebellar ataxia - a large survey

Dysphagia is a common symptom in neurodegenerative disorders and is generally associated with increased mortality. In the clinical care setting of ataxia patients, no systematical and standardized assessment of dysphagia is employed. Its impact on patients' health-related quality of life is not well understood. To assess the impact of dysphagia in ataxia patients on diet, body weight, and health-related quality of life. We conducted a large survey using self-reported questionnaires for swallowing-related quality of life (Swal-QOL) and a food frequency list in combination with retrospective clinical data of 119 patients with cerebellar ataxia treated in the neurological outpatient clinic of a large German university hospital. Seventeen percent of ataxia patients suffered from dysphagia based on the Swal-QOL score. Less than 1% of all patients reported dysphagia as one of their most disabling symptoms. Dysphagia was associated with unintentional weight loss (p = 0.02) and reduced health-related quality of life (p = 0.01) but did not affect individual nutritional habits (p > 0.05; Chi-squared test). Dysphagia is a relevant symptom in cerebellar ataxia. A systematic screening for dysphagia in patients with cerebellar ataxia would be desirable to enable early diagnosis and treatment

Fitting birth-death processes to panel data with applications to bacterial DNA fingerprinting

Continuous-time linear birth-death-immigration (BDI) processes are frequently used in ecology and epidemiology to model stochastic dynamics of the population of interest. In clinical settings, multiple birth-death processes can describe disease trajectories of individual patients, allowing for estimation of the effects of individual covariates on the birth and death rates of the process. Such estimation is usually accomplished by analyzing patient data collected at unevenly spaced time points, referred to as panel data in the biostatistics literature. Fitting linear BDI processes to panel data is a nontrivial optimization problem because birth and death rates can be functions of many parameters related to the covariates of interest. We propose a novel expectation--maximization (EM) algorithm for fitting linear BDI models with covariates to panel data. We derive a closed-form expression for the joint generating function of some of the BDI process statistics and use this generating function to reduce the E-step of the EM algorithm, as well as calculation of the Fisher information, to one-dimensional integration. This analytical technique yields a computationally efficient and robust optimization algorithm that we implemented in an open-source R package. We apply our method to DNA fingerprinting of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the causative agent of tuberculosis, to study intrapatient time evolution of IS6110 copy number, a genetic marker frequently used during estimation of epidemiological clusters of Mycobacterium tuberculosis infections. Our analysis reveals previously undocumented differences in IS6110 birth-death rates among three major lineages of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which has important implications for epidemiologists that use IS6110 for DNA fingerprinting of Mycobacterium tuberculosis.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/13-AOAS673 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Microscopic calculations of stopping and flow from 160AMeV to 160AGeV

The behavior of hadronic matter at high baryon densities is studied within Ultrarelativistic Quantum Molecular Dynamics (URQMD). Baryonic stopping is observed for Au+Au collisions from SIS up to SPS energies. The excitation function of flow shows strong sensitivities to the underlying equation of state (EOS), allowing for systematic studies of the EOS. Effects of a density dependent pole of the $\rho$-meson propagator on dilepton spectra are studied for different systems and centralities at CERN energies.Comment: Proceedings of the Quark Matter '96 Conference, Heidelberg, German

Seleção de clones de mandioquinha-salsa em áreas naturalmente infestadas pelo nematoide-das-galhas por meio de escala de notas.

Realizou-se este trabalho com o objetivo de avaliar clones de mandioquinha-salsa quanto à reação a Meloidogyne spp. por meio da elaboração de uma escala de notas.bitstream/item/85035/1/bpd-93.pd

Coexistence of pyoderma gangrenosum and sweet’s syndrome in a patient with ulcerative colitis

Pyoderma gangrenosum (PG) and Sweet's Syndrome (SS) are inflammatory skin diseases caused by the accumulation of neutrophils in the skin and, rarely, in internal organs. These neutrophilic dermatosis (NDs) are distinguished by the existence of forms of transition or overlap. They are frequently associated to systemic diseases especially hematologic and gastrointestinal ones. We report a case of a patient with ulcerative colitis (UC) who successively developed two types of NDs: PG then SS. A 66 years old patient with a history of UC consulted in July 2012 for an erythematous swelling of the back of the right hand treated with antibiotics without improvement. At that time, bacteriological samples were negative. In October 2012, he was hospitalized for polyarthralgia and impaired general condition. In physical examination, he had vesiculobullous plaque of 10 cm long of the right hand and wrist, infiltrated erythematous plaque on the right leg and another topped with a large pustule at the left ankle. Skin biopsy showed at the back of the right hand an aspect of PG and at the infiltrated plaques of the ankle an aspect of SS. Prednisone was started with improvement of the skin lesions and a recovery condition. The combination of PG and SS has already been described in cases of hematologic malignancy and rarely in UC. There is also the notion of passage from a neutrophilic dermatosis to another. Indeed, a typical lesion initially of SS can evolve to a future PG. This case demonstrates that neutrophilic dermatoses form a continous spectrum of entities that may occur in UC

Flow angle from intermediate mass fragment measurements

Directed sideward flow of light charged particles and intermediate mass fragments was measured in different symmetric reactions at bombarding energies from 90 to 800 AMeV. The flow parameter is found to increase with the charge of the detected fragment up to Z = 3-4 and then turns into saturation for heavier fragments. Guided by simple simulations of an anisotropic expanding thermal source, we show that the value at saturation can provide a good estimate of the flow angle, $\Theta_{flow}$, in the participant region. It is found that $\Theta_{flow}$ depends strongly on the impact parameter. The excitation function of $\Theta_{flow}$ reveals striking deviations from the ideal hydrodynamical scaling. The data exhibit a steep rise of \Theta_{\flow} to a maximum at around 250-400 AMeV, followed by a moderate decrease as the bombarding energy increases further.Comment: 28 pages Revtex, 6 figures (ps files), to appear in Nucl.Phys.

Wong-Zakai approximation of solutions to reflecting stochastic differential equations on domains in Euclidean spaces II

The strong convergence of Wong-Zakai approximations of the solution to the reflecting stochastic differential equations was studied in [2]. We continue the study and prove the strong convergence under weaker assumptions on the domain.Comment: To appear in "Stochastic Analysis and Applications 2014-In Honour of Terry Lyons", Springer Proceedings in Mathematics and Statistic

New method for measuring azimuthal distributions in nucleus-nucleus collisions

The methods currently used to measure azimuthal distributions of particles in heavy ion collisions assume that all azimuthal correlations between particles result from their correlation with the reaction plane. However, other correlations exist, and it is safe to neglect them only if azimuthal anisotropies are much larger than 1/sqrt(N), with N the total number of particles emitted in the collision. This condition is not satisfied at ultrarelativistic energies. We propose a new method, based on a cumulant expansion of multiparticle azimuthal correlations, which allows to measure much smaller values of azimuthal anisotropies, down to 1/N. It is simple to implement and can be used to measure both integrated and differential flow. Furthermore, this method automatically eliminates the major systematic errors, which are due to azimuthal asymmetries in the detector acceptance.Comment: final version (misprints corrected), to be published in Phys.Rev.