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Objective: To investigate the relationship between the quality of YouTube videos on penile enlargement surgery and the scholarly profiles of surgeons. Materials and Methods: A YouTube search was conducted using the keyword "penile enlargement surgery". Of the first 200 videos from the search results, 66 that met the study criteria were included in the analyses. Two urologists scored each video using the DISCERN score, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) score, and the global quality scale (GQS) in a double-blind manner. After the video quality scores were determined, the number of publications and h-indexes of surgeons were obtained from Google Scholar. Results: Of the videos, 31 (46.9%) were uploaded by plastic surgeons and 35 (53.1%) by urologists. The median duration of the videos was 4.1 min (interquartile range: 1-8.5) minutes. Eighteen (27.2%) videos had low quality, 9 (13.6%) had medium quality, and 39 (59.1%) had high quality. A statistically significant correlation was found between the h-index of surgeons and video quality scores (DISCERN, r=0.678; JAMA, r=0.646; GQS, r=0.689; p<0.0001). There was also a statistically significant correlation between the total publication counts of surgeons and the video quality scores (DISCERN, r=0.614; JAMA, r=0.569; GQS, r=0.607; p<0.0001). Lastly, a weak, statistically significant correlation was detected between the DISCERN scores of the videos and the number of likes (r=0.278, p=0.029). Conclusion: This study revealed a significant correlation between the quality of YouTube videos on penile enlargement surgery and the h-indexes and total publication counts of surgeons. This study was the first to analyze the relationship between the quality of YouTube videos on penile enlargement surgery and the scholarly profiles of surgeons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The general objective of this work was to evaluate the quality of medical prescriptions at the CHU Bocar SALL of Kati before the introduction of a therapeutic form. Methods: This was a crosssectional study with prospective collection covering one year (April 2021-March 2022). A simple random sampling was carried out from the prescriptions (n=1283) of the patients coming for outpatient consultations and the files (n=847) of the hospitalized patients. Results: Prescriptions were made mainly by medical specialists, including 468 prescriptions and 612 patient files. The average number of drugs per prescription was 2.66. As for hospitalized patients, they received an average of 5.75 drugs. The "Prescription quality score" obtained an average of 5.19 out of 8 points. A little more than half of the prescriptions were made on the basis of the national list of essential drugs with a rate of 53.31%.The treatments given to the patients were consistent with the diagnoses, with a score of 4.14 out of 5 points. Conclusion: Compliance with the rules of good practice for medical prescriptions not only guarantees the quality of care offered to users, but also allows good planning and control of the establishment's future public health actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A next-generation sequencing (NGS) study identified a very high viral load of Torquetenovirus (TTV) in KD patients. We aimed to evaluate the feasibility of a newly developed quantitative species-specific TTV-PCR (ssTTV-PCR) method to identify the etiology of KD. We applied ssTTV-PCR to samples collected from 11 KD patients and 22 matched control subjects who participated in our previous prospective study. We used the NGS dataset from the previous study to validate ssTTV-PCR. The TTV loads in whole blood and nasopharyngeal aspirates correlated highly (Spearman's R = 0.8931, p < 0.0001, n = 33), supporting the validity of ssTTV-PCR. The ssTTV-PCR and NGS results were largely consistent. However, inconsistencies occurred when ssTTV-PCR was more sensitive than NGS, when the PCR primer sequences mismatched the viral sequences in the participants, and when the NGS quality score was low. Interpretation of NGS requires complex procedures. ssTTV-PCR is more sensitive than NGS but may fail to detect a fast-evolving TTV species. It would be prudent to update primer sets using NGS data. With this precaution, ssTTV-PCR can be used reliably in a future large-scale etiological study for KD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies over the last 30 years have shown the effects of farming practices on milk compounds. Combinations of practices may have antagonistic or synergistic effects on milk compounds, but these combination effects remain underinvestigated. Research needs to focus on overall intrinsic milk quality (including sensory, technological, health, and nutritional dimensions) and identify the combinations that can optimize it. The aim of this study was to identify which combinations of farming practices achieved the best scores for sensory, technological, health, and nutritional dimensions and for overall intrinsic milk quality. Ninety-nine private farms were visited once each to sample their bulk tank milk and survey their farming practices. The surveyed practices concerned herd characteristics, feeding management, housing conditions, and milking and milk storage conditions on the day of test. Analyses of bulk tank milk were designed to evaluate the overall intrinsic quality of the milk for 2 target products: raw milk cheese and semi-skimmed UHT milk. Regression trees were then used to identify the combinations of farming practices that achieved the best scores on each dimension and on overall intrinsic quality of the milk. Breed and diet (type of forage) were the most influential factors for sensory and health dimensions and for technological and nutritional dimension scores, respectively, in the cheese assessment. Overall cheese quality was highly positively correlated with these 4 dimension scores. Therefore, breed and diet emerged as the most influential practices in the regression tree for overall cheese quality. However, the combinations of practices that resulted in the best quality scores differed according to dimension studied and product targeted. This suggests that advice on farming practices to improve intrinsic milk quality needs to be adapted according to the end-purpose of the collected milk. This innovative approach combining on-farm data and regression trees provides farm managers with a valuable and practical tool to prioritize practices in terms of their role in shaping milk quality, and to identify the combinations of practices that promote good milk quality and practice thresholds or modalities needed to achieve it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Latent fingermark ridge patterns result from imprinting sweat secretions onto receiving surfaces. However, little is known about the loss of skin moisture between immediate consecutive depositions and its effects on the visual quality of ridges and their degradation over time. In practice, it is recurrently assumed that the first touch should contain the most residue and, therefore, display the highest ridge quality. Also, it is expected to observe a gradual decrease in the quantity of residue deposited and, in turn, in the clarity of ridges. In this study, a total of 480 fingermarks were obtained from 20 donors, 10 males and 10 females, to assess the pattern loss of ridge quality across six successive impressions in a depletion series. Black magnetic powder (BMP) was utilized to visualize and photograph fingermarks on glass microscope slides. After image standardization, Quality Scores (QS) as well as metrics on ridge clarity were obtained from the FBI's Universal Latent Workstation (ULW). Data analyses revealed a significant drop in ridge quality over the six consecutive depositions, but notably after deposition four. No differences in ridge clarity between sexes were detected within the first three depositions although an effect was noted beyond this point. ULW proved to be an excellent and sensitive tool in detecting minute changes in ridge quality across the depletion series. These results may contribute in determining the chronological order of events and support further research in estimating time‐since‐deposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Over the past few decades, the emergence and maturation of new technologies have substantially reduced the cost of genome sequencing. As a result, the amount of genomic data that needs to be stored and transmitted has grown exponentially. For the standard sequencing data format, FASTQ, compression of the quality score is a key and difficult aspect of FASTQ file compression. Throughout the literature, we found that the majority of the current quality score compression methods do not support random access. Based on the above consideration, it is reasonable to investigate a lossless quality score compressor with a high compression rate, a fast compression and decompression speed, and support for random access. Results: In this paper, we propose CMIC, an adaptive and random access supported compressor for lossless compression of quality score sequences. CMIC is an acronym of the four steps (classification, mapping, indexing and compression) in the paper. Its framework consists of the following four parts: classification, mapping, indexing, and compression. The experimental results show that our compressor has good performance in terms of compression rates on all the tested datasets. The file sizes are reduced by up to 21.91% when compared with LCQS. In terms of compression speed, CMIC is better than all other compressors on most of the tested cases. In terms of random access speed, the CMIC is faster than the LCQS, which provides a random access function for compressed quality scores. Conclusions: CMIC is a compressor that is especially designed for quality score sequences, which has good performance in terms of compression rate, compression speed, decompression speed, and random access speed. The CMIC can be obtained in the following way: https://github.com/Humonex/Cmic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Head and neck cancer (HNC) is one of the most prevalent cancers of upper aerodigestive tract, with squamous cell carcinomas accounting for the majority of cases. Vitamin B such as folate has been associated with carcinogenesis. Folate is essential for one carbon metabolism, which involves the transfer of one carbon units for Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) and Ribonucleic Acid (RNA) production, amino acid metabolism and methylation. Aim: To evaluate the association of folate mediated One carbon metabolism with Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma (HNSCC). Materials and Methods: For this systematic review, Electronic bibliographic databases search of PubMed, Google Scholar and Scopus was done. The electronic search was performed between November 15th to November 30th, 2020 by two researchers independently. All original research, observational studies, full text articles, in which blood samples or questionnaires or both, focused on the assessment of folate mediated one carbon metabolism in HNSCC, published upto November 2020 were reviewed. Four studies published from 2005 to 2019 were included in which three studies were case-control and one study was a comparative cross-sectional study. This systematic review was carried out by two reviewers, using Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta Analyses (PRISMA) checklist and the New Castle Ottawa Scale (NOS) for quality assessment. Results: In this systematic review, total of four studies included, had 1504 HNSCC patients and 2970 Controls. One study was reported from Nigeria, one from the European countries, one from Japan, and one from the United States of America (USA). One study had a quality score of 8 whereas 3 studies had 7, considering all the four studies included are of good quality. Conclusion: Significant low levels of serum folate was present in HNSCC when compared to controls. Serum folate levels can differ due to tumor growth and subsequent metabolic changes, or they may precede and accelerate tumor progression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Magnetic resonance elastography (MRE) has been used to successfully characterize the mechanical behavior of healthy and diseased muscles, but no study has been performed to investigate the reliability of MRE on lumbar muscles. The objective of this work was to determine the reliability of MRE techniques on lumbar muscles in both ex vivo phantom and in vivo human studies. In this study, fresh porcine leg muscles were used in the phantom study, and 80 healthy adults (38.6 ± 11.2 years, 40 women) were recruited in the human study. Five repeated stiffness maps were obtained from both the phantom and human muscles by using a gradient-echo MRE sequence with a pneumatic vibration on a 1.5 T MR scanner. The technical failure rate, coefficient of variation (CV), and quality score were assessed to evaluate the reliability of MRE, respectively. Analysis of variance was performed to compare the stiffness between different lumbar muscles, and the difference was significant if p < 0.05 after Bonferroni correction. The results showed that the MRE achieved a zero technical failure rate and a low CV of stiffness (6.24 ± 1.41%) in the phantom muscles. However, in the human study, the MRE exhibited high CVs of stiffness (21.57%–25.24%) in the lumbar muscles, and the technical failure rate was higher in psoas muscles (60.0–66.3% in) than in paraspinal muscles (0.0–2.5%). Further, higher quality scores were noticed in paraspinal muscles (7.31–7.71) than those in psoas muscles (1.83–2.06). In conclusion, the MRE was a reliable technique to investigate the mechanical property of lumbar muscles, but it was less reliable to assess stiffness in psoas muscles than paraspinal muscles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Advances in sequencing technology have drastically reduced sequencing costs. As a result, the amount of sequencing data increases explosively. Since FASTQ files (standard sequencing data formats) are huge, there is a need for efficient compression of FASTQ files, especially quality scores. Several quality scores compression algorithms are recently proposed, mainly focused on lossy compression to boost the compression rate further. However, for clinical applications and archiving purposes, lossy compression cannot replace lossless compression. One of the main challenges for lossless compression is time complexity, where it takes thousands of seconds to compress a 1 GB file. Also, there are desired features for compression algorithms, such as random access. Therefore, there is a need for a fast lossless compressor with a reasonable compression rate and random access functionality. Results: This paper proposes a Fast and Concurrent Lossless Quality scores Compressor (FCLQC) that supports random access and achieves a lower running time based on concurrent programming. Experimental results reveal that FCLQC is significantly faster than the baseline compressors on compression and decompression at the expense of compression ratio. Compared to LCQS (baseline quality score compression algorithm), FCLQC shows at least 31x compression speed improvement in all settings, where a performance degradation in compression ratio is up to 13.58% (8.26% on average). Compared to general-purpose compressors (such as 7-zip), FCLQC shows 3x faster compression speed while having better compression ratios, at least 2.08% (4.69% on average). Moreover, the speed of random access decompression also outperforms the others. The concurrency of FCLQC is implemented using Rust; the performance gain increases near-linearly with the number of threads. Conclusion: The superiority of compression and decompression speed makes FCLQC a practical lossless quality score compressor candidate for speed-sensitive applications of DNA sequencing data. FCLQC is available at https://github.com/Minhyeok01/FCLQC and is freely available for non-commercial usage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pharmacokinetics (PK) – absorption, distribution, metabolism, and elimination – and pharmacodynamics (PD) of hypertension medications can be significantly affected by circadian rhythms. As a consequence, the time when blood pressure (BP) lowering medications are ingested, with reference to the staging of all involved circadian rhythms modulating PK and PD, can affect their duration of action, magnitude of effect on features of the 24 h BP profile, and safety. We conducted a systematic and comprehensive review of published prospective human trials that investigated individual hypertension medications of all classes and their combinations for ingestion-time differences in BP-lowering, safety, patient adherence, and markers of hypertension-associated target organ pathology of the kidney and heart. The systematic review yielded 155 trials published between 1976 and 2020 – totaling 23,972 hypertensive individuals – that evaluated 37 different single and 14 dual-combination therapies. The vast (83.9%) majority of them reported clinically and statistically significant benefits – including enhanced reduction of asleep BP mean without induced sleep-time hypotension, reduced prevalence of the higher cardiovascular risk non-dipper 24 h BP profile, decreased incidence of adverse effects, improved kidney function, and reduced cardiac pathology – when hypertension medications are ingested at-bedtime/evening rather than upon-waking/morning. Nonetheless, the findings and conclusions of some past conducted trials are inconsistent, often due to disparities and deficiencies of the investigative protocols. Accordingly, we developed a quality assessment method based upon the eight items identified as crucial according to the recently published guidelines of the International Society for Chronobiology and the American Association for Medical Chronobiology and Chronotherapeutics for the design and conduct of human clinical trials on ingestion-time differences of hypertension medications. Among the most frequent deficiencies are: absence or miscalculation of minimum required sample size (83.2%), incorrect choice of primary BP endpoint (53.6%), and inappropriate arbitrary and unrepresentative clock hours chosen for tested treatment times (53.6%). The inability of the very small proportion (16.1%) of trials to verify the advantages of the at-bedtime/evening treatment strategy is likely explained by deficiencies of their study design and conduct. Nonetheless, regardless of the quality score of the 155 trials retrieved by our systematic review, it is most noteworthy that no single published prospective randomized trial reported significantly enhanced BP-lowering, safety, compliance, or other benefits of the unjustified by medical evidence, yet still most recommended, upon-waking/morning hypertension treatment-time scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Next-generation sequencing (NGS) enables massively parallel acquisition of large-scale omics data; however, objective data quality filtering parameters are lacking. Although a useful metric, evidence reveals that platform-generated Phred values overestimate per-base quality scores. We have developed novel and empirically based algorithms that streamline NGS data quality filtering. The pipeline leverages known sequence motifs to enable empirical estimation of error rates, detection of erroneous base calls and removal of contaminating adapter sequence. The performance of motif-based error detection and quality filtering were further validated with read compression rates as an unbiased metric. Elevated error rates at read ends, where known motifs lie, tracked with propagation of erroneous base calls. Barcode swapping, an inherent problem with pooled libraries, was also effectively mitigated. The ngsComposer pipeline is suitable for various NGS protocols and platforms due to the universal concepts on which the algorithms are based. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Depth-image-based rendering (DIBR), as the most popular view synthesis method, is commonly used in the application of multi-view and free-viewpoint videos. However, the quality evaluation of DIBR-synthesised videos remains largely unexplored, which may hinder the development of more advanced view synthesis technology. With this motivation, this Letter presents a new quality metric for DIBR-synthesised videos. Specifically, the disoccluded regions are first detected based on an adaptive threshold to quantify geometric distortions. An energy-based sequence mapping strategy is proposed to portray spatiotemporal inconsistency by calculating first-order and second-order similarities in the gradient magnitude domain and the Laplace-of-Gaussian domain, respectively. Finally, the overall quality score is generated by pooling the scores of geometric distortion and spatiotemporal inconsistency. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed metric outperforms the state-of-the-art metrics dedicated to DIBR-synthesised images and videos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Advanced sequencing machines dramatically speed up the generation of genomic data, which makes the demand of efficient compression of sequencing data extremely urgent and significant. As the most difficult part of the standard sequencing data format FASTQ, compression of the quality score has become a conundrum in the development of FASTQ compression. Existing lossless compressors of quality scores mainly utilize specific patterns generated by specific sequencer and complex context modeling techniques to solve the problem of low compression ratio. However, the main drawbacks of these compressors are the problem of weak robustness which means unstable or even unavailable results of sequencing files and the problem of slow compression speed. Meanwhile, some compressors attempt to construct a fine-grained index structure to solve the problem of slow random access decompression speed. However, they solve the problem at the sacrifice of compression speed and at the expense of large index files, which makes them inefficient and impractical. Therefore, an efficient lossless compressor of quality scores with strong robustness, high compression ratio, fast compression and random access decompression speed is urgently needed and of great significance. Results: In this paper, based on the idea of maximizing the use of hardware resources, LCQS, a lossless compression tool specialized for quality scores, was proposed. It consists of four sequential processing steps: partitioning, indexing, packing and parallelizing. Experimental results reveal that LCQS outperforms all the other state-of-the-art compressors on all criteria except for the compression speed on the dataset SRR1284073. Furthermore, LCQS presents strong robustness on all the test datasets, with its acceleration ratios of compression speed increasing by up to 29.1x, its file size reducing by up to 28.78%, and its random access decompression speed increasing by up to 2.1x. Additionally, LCQS also exhibits strong scalability. That is, the compression speed increases almost linearly as the size of input dataset increases. Conclusion: The ability to handle all different kinds of quality scores and superiority in compression ratio and compression speed make LCQS a high-efficient and advanced lossless quality score compressor, along with its strength of fast random access decompression. Our tool LCQS can be downloaded from https://github.com/SCUT-CCNL/LCQSand freely available for non-commercial usage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many bioinformatics tools heavily rely on k -mer dictionaries to describe the composition of sequences and allow for faster reference-free algorithms or look-ups. Unfortunately, naive k -mer dictionaries are very memory-inefficient, requiring very large amount of storage space to save each k -mer. This problem is generally worsened by the necessity of an index for fast queries. In this work, we discuss how to build an indexed linear reference containing a set of input k -mers and its application to the compression of quality scores in FASTQ files. Most of the entropies of sequencing data lie in the quality scores, and thus they are difficult to compress. Here, we present an application to improve the compressibility of quality values while preserving the information for SNP calling. We show how a dictionary of significant k -mers, obtained from SNP databases and multiple genomes, can be indexed in linear space and used to improve the compression of quality value. Availability: The software is freely available at https://github.com/yhhshb/yalff. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Methodological flaws, limitations, and inadequate practices in research are well known and pose threats to the internal validity of any research study. However, there are ways of safeguarding research conduct to reduce the chance of research producing distorted results. Numerous tools now exist to assess the incorporation of such safeguards into primary research studies (also known as quality and/or risk-of-bias assessment). These tools typically include a variety of items that are then checked against those implemented in the study. Despite a lot of research in this area, no comprehensive generic classification of safeguards across study designs exist, although attempts have been made to clarify aspects of this. We review the developments in this area as well as use preliminary data from 100 methodological studies to illustrate our proposed approach. We conclude by proposing a new framework for identifying research studies at risk of being biased and the information in this article will promote a unification of the diverse approaches to facilitating bias assessment in clinical research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by the facts that visual saliency captures more attention and spectral residual (SR) can indicate the saliency of the image, a novel reduced‐reference image quality assessment metric is proposed based on the regularity of the SR. The orientation and frequency components of an image are first extracted in wavelet domain. Then SR is obtained to represent the saliency of the component. Next fractal dimension is adopted to encode SR and concatenated as the image features. Finally, the feature differences between reference image and distorted one are pooled as the quality score. The proposed metric is evaluated on four largest image databases (TID2013, TID2008, CSIQ, and LIVE databases), and experimental results confirm that the proposed metric has a good performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Phred quality scores are essential for downstream DNA analysis such as SNP detection and DNA assembly. Thus a valid model to define them is indispensable for any base-calling software. Recently, we developed the base-caller 3Dec for Illumina sequencing platforms, which reduces base-calling errors by 44-69% compared to the existing ones. However, the model to predict its quality scores has not been fully investigated yet. Results: In this study, we used logistic regression models to evaluate quality scores from predictive features, which include different aspects of the sequencing signals as well as local DNA contents. Sparse models were further obtained by three methods: the backward deletion with either AIC or BIC and the L1 regularization learning method. The L1-regularized one was then compared with the Illumina scoring method. Conclusions: The L1-regularized logistic regression improves the empirical discrimination power by as large as 14 and 25% respectively for two kinds of preprocessed sequencing signals, compared to the Illumina scoring method. Namely, the L1 method identifies more base calls of high fidelity. Computationally, the L1 method can handle large dataset and is efficient enough for daily sequencing. Meanwhile, the logistic model resulted from BIC is more interpretable. The modeling suggested that the most prominent quenching pattern in the current chemistry of Illumina occurred at the dinucleotide "GT". Besides, nucleotides were more likely to be miscalled as the previous bases if the preceding ones were not "G". It suggested that the phasing effect of bases after "G" was somewhat different from those after other nucleotide types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nearly 22,000 sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) that were caught by gillnetters and delivered to tenders anchored on the fishing grounds were tagged in Alaska during the summers of 2010 and 2011. The fish were chilled in refrigerated seawater and transported, usually within 24 h, to one shore-based processing plant, where they were graded visually. Handling practices, weather conditions, and distance from the fishing grounds to the plant were documented. The closer to the shore plant the fish were caught, the better was the salmon quality. Time, distance, and foul weather had significantly negative impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper proposes an effectual sample entropy (SampEn) based complexity sorting pre-processing technique for two dimensional electrocardiogram (ECG) data compression. The novelty of the approach lies in its ability to compress the quasi-periodic ECG signal by exploiting the intra and inter-beat correlations. The proposed method comprises the following steps: (1) QRS detection, (2) Length normalization, (3) Dc equalization, (4) SampEn based nonlinear complexity sorting and (5) Compression using JPEG2000 Codec. The performance has been evaluated over 48 records from the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database. The average quality score (QS) measurements at different residual errors were 42.25, 4.73, and 2.75 for percentage root mean square difference (PRD), PRD1024, and PRD Normalized respectively. The work also reports extensive experimentations on the compressor for various durations of the ECG records (5–30 min, with 5-min increment). The proposed algorithm demonstrates significantly better performance in comparison to the contemporary state-of-the-art works present in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The traditional image quality assessment (IQA) methods are usually based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). For these IQA methods using CNNs, limited by the feature size of the fully connected layer, the input image needs be tailored to a pre-defined size, which usually results in destroying the original structure and content of the input image and thus reduces the accuracy of the quality assessment. In this paper, a blind image quality assessment method (named CSPP-IQA), which is based on multi-scale spatial pyramid pooling, is proposed. CSPP-IQA allows inputting the original image when assessing the image quality without any image adjustment. Moreover, by facilitating the convolutional block attention module and image understanding module, CSPP-IQA achieved better accuracy, generalization and efficiency than traditional IQA methods. The result of experiments running on real-scene IQA datasets in this study verified the effectiveness and efficiency of CSPP-IQA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim of study was to evaluate influence of cut and thermal treatment on consumer's perception of beef, measured according to MQ4 scheme, in Polish trials conducted for 13 cuts and 3 methods of thermal treatment. 30 carcasses, representing various genders and types of production, were chosen. 540 samples were cooked using three cooking methods (180 samples for grill, roast and slow cook). Consumers rated the tenderness, juiciness, flavor, overall acceptability (in 100-mm scale), and satisfaction (from 2 to 5), according to the MSA protocol. The MQ4 score was calculated using linear discriminant analysis. Quality of Polish beef meat from cross breeding depends on cut and thermal treatment, as well as both factors combined. Cut being perceived by Polish consumers as the best one is tenderloin, characterized by only juiciness comparable with other cuts (oyster blade, rump). Tenderness of Polish beef, being important for consumers is simultaneously not sufficient and lower than in other countries that results in low general quality of beef. General quality of beef meat may be improved by proper choice of thermal treatment – being especially important in the case of juiciness of striploin, outside flat and topside, as well as tenderness and flavor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the study was to analyze the factors creating consumer attributes of roasted beef steaks of various animals. Eight cuts from 30 carcasses (characterized by various types of animal, conformation and fat class, rib fat thickness, ossification score) were selected. Samples were prepared using the roasting method and consumers rated the tenderness, juiciness, flavor, overall acceptability (rated in a 100-point scale), and satisfaction (rated from 2 to 5) for analyzed samples. No influence of type of animal, fat class, conformation class or ossification score on the results of consumer analysis was observed. For all analyzed factors, the influence of cut on consumer analysis was observed (the highest values of all consumer attributes were observed for tenderloin - for juiciness significantly higher than for other cuts, for tenderness, flavor and MQ4 comparable only with rump ( RMP231), while for overall acceptability and satisfaction - with both rump cuts). For rib fat thickness consumer attributes of roasted beef meat were not linear, but the influence was observed - the highest values of consumer attributes were observed for 13 mm rib fat thickness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extremely high error rates reported by Keegan et al. in ‘A platform-independent method for detecting errors in metagenomic sequencing data: DRISEE’ (PLoS Comput Biol 2012;8:e1002541) for many next-generation sequencing datasets prompted us to re-examine their results. Our analysis reveals that the presence of conserved artificial sequences, e.g. Illumina adapters, and other naturally occurring sequence motifs accounts for most of the reported errors. We conclude that DRISEE reports inflated levels of sequencing error, particularly for Illumina data. Tools offered for evaluating large datasets need scrupulous review before they are implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The wind retrieval performance of a fixed fan-beam scatterometer operating at C-band in VV polarization [Advanced SCATterometer (ASCAT) type] is well established in the range of 0-25 m/s. This work evaluates prospective extensions with HH- and VH-polarized beams aimed at improving retrievals at extreme wind speeds, from 25 to 65 m/s. The geophysical model functions for C-band VV-, HH-, and VH-polarized backscatter used in the wind retrieval simulations are defined, along with an objective assessment of the quality scores ascribed to the optional beam configurations. Our study finds that the introduction of a VH capability in the midbeam improves the determination of wind speed over the entire scatterometer swath, with wind speed root-mean-square (rms) errors of about 0.5 m/s. The introduction of HH beams in the fore/aft antennas improves the determination of the ocean surface wind vector (wind speed and direction) but over a more limited portion of the outer swath, with wind vector rms errors as low as 6 m/s, but conditioned to a priori information to resolve the directional ambiguity. If the determination of wind speed primes over the determination of wind vectors at high wind speeds, then the introduction of a single VH capability in the midbeam antenna comes forth as the most simple and cost-effective manner to extend the wind retrieval capabilities of an ASCAT-type scatterometer into the domain of extreme winds. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Highlights: [•] Sequences analyzed by next-generation sequencing contain many errors. [•] We proposed a method of error correction of heterogeneous sequences. [•] We performed a computer experiment of error correction. [•] We confirmed the effectiveness of our method. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Aims and objectives To compare the efficacy of chronic heart failure management programmes ( CHF- MPs) according to a scoring algorithm used to quantify the level of applied interventions-the Heart Failure Intervention Score ( HF- IS). Background The overall efficacy of heart failure programmes has been proven in several meta-analyses. However, the debate continues as to which components are essential in a heart failure programme to improve patient outcomes. Design Prospective cohort study of patients participating in heart failure programmes. Method Forty-eight of 62 (77%) programmes in Australia participating in a national register of CHF- MPs were evaluated using the HF- IS: derived from a summed and weighted score of each intervention applied by the CHF- MP (27 interventions overall). The CHF- MPs were prospectively categorised as relatively low ( HF- IS < 190 - n = 39 programmes & 407 patients) or high ( HF- IS ≥ 190 - n = 9 programmes & 166 patients) in complexity. Six-month morbidity and mortality rates in 573 consecutively recruited patients with systolic dysfunction and in New York Heart Association Class II- IV were prospectively examined. Results Patients exposed to CHF- MPs with a high HF- IS had a lower rate of unplanned, all-cause hospitalisation ( n = 24, 14% vs. n = 102, 25%) compared with CHF- MPs with a low HF- IS within six months. On an adjusted basis, CHF- MPs with a high HF- IS were associated with a reduced risk of unplanned hospitalisation and/or death within six months and remained event-free longer. Conclusion High complexity CHF- MPs applying more evidence-based interventions are associated with a higher event-free survival over six months. Relevance to clinical practice The HF- IS is an easy-to-use evidence-based tool to assist programme coordinators to improve the quality of their heart failure programme which may also improve patient outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) has become an important diagnostic imaging modality in cardiovascular medicine. However, insufficient image quality may compromise its diagnostic accuracy. We aimed to describe and validate standardized criteria to evaluate a) cine steady-state free precession (SSFP), b) late gadolinium enhancement (LGE), and c) stress first-pass perfusion images. These criteria will serve for quality assessment in the setting of the Euro-CMR registry. Methods: Thirty-five qualitative criteria were defined (scores 0-3) with lower scores indicating better image quality. In addition, quantitative parameters were measured yielding 2 additional quality criteria, i.e. signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of non-infarcted myocardium (as a measure of correct signal nulling of healthy myocardium) for LGE and % signal increase during contrast medium first-pass for perfusion images. These qualitative and quantitative criteria were assessed in a total of 90 patients (60 patients scanned at our own institution at 1.5T (n=30) and 3T (n=30) and in 30 patients randomly chosen from the Euro-CMR registry examined at 1.5T). Analyses were performed by 2 SCMR level-3 experts, 1 trained study nurse, and 1 trained medical student. Results: The global quality score was 6.7±4.6 (n=90, mean of 4 observers, maximum possible score 64), range 6.4-6.9 (p=0.76 between observers). It ranged from 4.0-4.3 for 1.5T (p=0.96 between observers), from 5.9-6.9 for 3T (p=0.33 between observers), and from 8.6-10.3 for the Euro-CMR cases (p=0.40 between observers). The inter- (n=4) and intra-observer (n=2) agreement for the global quality score, i.e. the percentage of assignments to the same quality tertile ranged from 80% to 88% and from 90% to 98%, respectively. The agreement for the quantitative assessment for LGE images (scores 0-2 for SNR <2, 2-5, >5, respectively) ranged from 78-84% for the entire population, and 70-93% at 1.5T, 64-88% at 3T, and 72-90% for the Euro-CMR cases. The agreement for perfusion images (scores 0-2 for %SI increase >200%, 100%-200%,<100%, respectively) ranged from 81-91% for the entire population, and 76-100% at 1.5T, 67-96% at 3T, and 62-90% for the Euro-CMR registry cases. The intra-class correlation coefficient for the global quality score was 0.83. Conclusions: The described criteria for the assessment of CMR image quality are robust with a good inter- and intra-observer agreement. Further research is needed to define the impact of image quality on the diagnostic and prognostic yield of CMR studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents FPGA design of ECG compression by using the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and one lossless encoding method. Unlike the classical works" based on off-line mode, the current work allows the real-time processing of the ECG signal to reduce the redundant information. A model is developed for a fixed-point convolution scheme which has a good performance in relation to the throughput, the latency, the maximum frequency of operation and the quality of the compressed signal. The quantization of the coefficients of the filters and the selected fixed-threshold give a low error in relation to clinical applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a model to assess the quality of infrastructure projects at the conceptual cost estimating stage based on the extent to which a project exhibits the ideal relationships between the quantities and costs of each of its components, compared to an ideal project that meets the requirements of an organization. The output of the model is a quality score that can be used to compare a project against others in an organization. The model is intended for use by organizations in the project planning phase to help identify potential scope and (or) design deficiencies. A fuzzy expert system is used to model the relationships between the physical characteristics of a project and the expected quality using a cost ratio comparison between an ideal project (i.e., a cost model) and the project being compared. The fuzzy expert system provides the advantage of allowing assessments to be made in linguistic terms, which suits the way in which experts express themselves and captures heuristic knowledge of the experts in assessing the quality of a project at the conceptual cost estimating stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background There is inconclusive evidence from observational studies that disinfection by-products (DBPs) in drinking water are associated with colorectal cancer. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper proposes an intelligent 2ν-support vector machine based match score fusion algorithm to improve the performance of face and iris recognition by integrating the quality of images. The proposed algorithm applies redundant discrete wavelet transform to evaluate the underlying linear and non-linear features present in the image. A composite quality score is computed to determine the extent of smoothness, sharpness, noise, and other pertinent features present in each subband of the image. The match score and the corresponding quality score of an image are fused using 2ν-support vector machine to improve the verification performance. The proposed algorithm is experimentally validated using the FERET face database and the CASIA iris database. The verification performance and statistical evaluation show that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing fusion algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We studied the quality of web sites containing information on gastrointestinal cancer, focusing on the way these web sites dealt with the special concerns of these patients. Searching the Internet for German-language gastroenterological cancer web sites, we collected 9,947 web pages from 14 search engines. Evaluation was done with a 36-item questionnaire. Information quality, availability of the web sites, and web site attributes considering patients’ concerns and potential embarrassment were analyzed using a scoring system. Belonging to 165 web sites, 1,763 of 9,947 (17.7%) web pages found by search engines provided relevant information. Five hundred forty-seven (5.5%) hits were partly relevant, and 7,637 (76.8%) were irrelevant or not available. Most web sites reported about surgery (92.1%), chemotherapy (88.5%), and radiotherapy (73.9%). Of the web sites, 46.7% ( n=77), 34.6% ( n=57), and 21.8% ( n=36) gave information about the author(s) itself, their qualifications, and references of their information, respectively. Search engines ranked web sites giving no information on evidence-based medicine higher than other web sites, whereas web sites providing this information accurately showed higher link popularities. Patients’ concerns and potential embarrassment were best addressed by gastrointestinal web sites initiated by private individuals or web sites directed to both a patient and physician audience. With regard to gastrointestinal cancer web sites, many search engines may be ineffective, and patient emotional needs and concerns are often disregarded. Also, physicians should guide their patients through the Internet to find high-quality information and use link-popularity-based search strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background. There is an accumulating body of research showing that smoking causes hearing loss; however, the results of these studies have been inconsistent.Methods. Original English articles were retrieved by MEDLINE search using key words “smoking” and “hearing” (1966–2003). Of 166 relevant studies, those that investigated the risk for hearing loss in smokers identified by pure-tone average were selected for review. Studies with an occupational noise-exposed population were excluded. Methodological quality was assessed by a standardized checklist, and then a meta-analysis was performed on studies with discrete numbers of hearing loss among smokers and nonsmokers.Results. A total of 15 (10 cross-sectional, 4 cohort, and one case-control) observational studies were identified; the quality scores of the 9 studies with positive associations between smoking and hearing loss were comparable to those of the remaining 6 studies with insignificant associations. Concerning eight analyzable studies, risk ratios (95% confidence intervals) for hearing loss in smokers were 1.33 (1.24, 1.44) for cross-sectional studies, 1.97 (1.44, 2.70) for cohort studies, and 2.89 (2.26, 3.70) for case-control studies, respectively.Conclusions. The evidence was suggestive of a positive association between smoking and hearing loss. It is possible that smoking cessation may be a useful strategy for maintaining hearing acuity. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Image classification plays an important role in computer vision and its applications, such as scene categorization, image retrieval. Convolutional neural network based methods have shown competitive performance in image classification, which aims to exploit deep feature of training images. In this paper, based on CNN methods and image quality assessment (IQA) algorithms, we propose a novel method for medical application, that is breast cancer classification. First, we leverage CNN architecture to calculate the number of pixels in the lesions, where maximum pooling layers are used. Then, large density of pixel regions will be assigned with large quality scores, which reflect more texture and grayscale features. Finally, we construct a multi-SVM based image kernel using obtained quality scores to achieve breast cancer classification. Experimental results show our proposed method outperforms single recognition based image classification methods such as pixel grayscale or gradient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A quality prediction method for stereoscopic images is proposed based on joint structure–texture sparse coding. The goal is to predict the perceptual quality of a stereoscopic image by solving the joint structure–texture sparse coding problem. First, structure and texture dictionaries from a training database are learnt. Then, the quality score for a testing stereoscopic image is predicted by computing left and right sparse feature similarity indexes, respectively, and combining them together. Experimental results on two 3D image‐quality assessment databases demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve high consistent alignment with subjective assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Objective: To find if a particular quality score was better than others at validly scoring the quality of randomized controlled trials, both by examining the consistency of dividing studies into high and low quality and using a large study as a reference standard. Study Design and Setting: Observational study of meta-analyses from the Cochrane Library. These had to have binary outcomes that included more than 10 studies, one or more of which randomized more than 500 people into each group. Results: Eighteen systematic reviews, with 65 meta-analyses using binary outcomes, were included and the included trials were scored for 43 different quality scores. None of these scores was better at dividing the studies in to low and high quality, and none of the scores was better over the 65 meta-analyses in making the result closer to the reference standard. Conclusion: None of the quality scores found appeared to measure quality validly. It is a mistake to assign meaning to the result of a quality score. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]