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Along with the rapid development of Intelligent Transportation Systems, traffic data collection technologies have progressed fast. The emergence of innovative data collection technologies such as remote traffic microwave sensor, Bluetooth sensor, GPS-based floating car method, and automated license plate recognition, has significantly increased the variety and volume of traffic data. Despite the development of these technologies, the missing data issue is still a problem that poses great challenge for data based applications such as traffic forecasting, real-time incident detection, dynamic route guidance, and massive evacuation optimization. A thorough literature review suggests most current imputation models either focus on the temporal nature of the traffic data and fail to consider the spatial information of neighboring locations or assume the data follow a certain distribution. These two issues reduce the imputation accuracy and limit the use of the corresponding imputation methods respectively. As a result, this paper presents a Kriging based data imputation approach that is able to fully utilize the spatiotemporal correlation in the traffic data and that does not assume the data follow any distribution. A set of scenarios with different missing rates are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The performance of the proposed method was compared with that of two other widely used methods, historical average and K-nearest neighborhood. Comparison results indicate that the proposed method has the highest imputation accuracy and is more flexible compared to other methods.

BACKGROUND:The impacts of nurse-led disease management programs on the quality of life for patients with chronic kidney disease have not been extensively studied. Furthermore, results of the existing related studies are inconsistent. The focus of the proposed meta-analysis is to evaluate the efficacy of nurse-led disease management programs in improving the quality of life for patients with chronic kidney disease. METHODS:Literature survey was performed to identify the eligible studies from PubMed, Current Nursing and Allied Health Literature, and Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials with predefined terms. The outcome measured was quality of life. This meta-analysis was conducted in line with recommendations from the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses. RESULTS:Eight studies comprising a total of 1520 patients were included in this meta-analysis, with 766 patients assigned to the nurse-led disease management program. Nurse-led disease management improved the quality of life in terms of symptoms, sleep, staff encouragement, pain, general health perception, energy/fatigue, overall health and mental component summary when evaluated 6 weeks after the beginning of intervention. When evaluated 12 weeks later, the quality of life in terms of symptoms, sleep, staff encouragement, energy/fatigue, and physical component summary was improved. Stratified by the modalities of dialysis, similar results of pooled analyses were observed for patients with peritoneal dialysis or hemodialysis, compared with the overall analyses. The results of sensitivity analyses were the same as the primary analyses. The symmetric funnel plot suggested that the possibility of potential publication bias was relatively low. CONCLUSION:Nurse-led disease management program seems effective to improve some parameters of quality of life for patients with chronic kidney disease. However, the seemingly promising results should be cautiously interpreted and generalized and still need to be confirmed through well-designed large-scale prospective randomized controlled trials.

Insulin-like growth factor-I (IGF-I) and IGF binding protein-3 (IGFBP-3) are members of the insulin-like growth factor (IGF) family that play important roles in carcinogenesis. We hypothesized that the functional polymorphisms in IGF-I and IGFBP-3 may be associated with the risk of prostate cancer (PCa) in the Chinese population. This hospital-based case-control study included 664 PCa patients and 702 cancer-free controls. Nine SNPs in IGF-I and IGFBP-3 were genotyped using the TaqMan assay. The genetic associations between the pathogenesis and progression of PCa were assessed by logistic regression. We found that the genotype and allele frequency distribution of rs6218, rs35767 and rs5742612 were significantly different when comparing PCa cases to controls (P  = 0.005, 0.005 and 0.020, respectively). In the combined analysis, individuals with 2–6 risk alleles had an elevated risk of PCa compared to those with 0–1 risk alleles. We also found that the association between the combined risk alleles and the risk of PCa appeared stronger in the following subgroups: individuals older than 71 years of age (OR  = 1.41, 95%CI  = 1.05–1.91, P  = 0.020), nonsmokers (OR  = 1.68, 95%CI  = 1.21–2.32, P  = 0.002), nondrinkers (OR  = 1.32, 95%CI  = 1.02–1.61, P  = 0.002), and those with a negative family history of PCa (OR  = 1.28, 95%CI  = 1.02–1.71, P  = 0.022). Our results indicate that the three SNPs (rs6218, rs35767 and rs5742612) and the joint genotypes with 2–6 risk alleles, may contribute to the susceptibility to PCa, but not the progression, in the Chinese population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose:miRNAs can regulate the biological processes, including differentiation, proliferation and apoptosis. DICER and DROSHA are two members of RNase III family, playing pivotal roles in the pathway of miRNAs biogenesis. In this study, we hypothesized that genetic variations of the DICER and DROSHA genes were associated with the bladder cancer risk. Experimental Design:We performed a case-control study of 685 bladder cancer cases and 730 controls to investigate the association between the seven functional SNPs of DICER and DROSHA genes and bladder cancer risk. We then evaluated the functionality of the important SNPs. Results:We found that rs10719T>C polymorphism located in 3’ untranslated region (UTR) of DROSHA gene was associated with the increased risk of bladder cancer. Stratified analysis suggested that rs10719TC/CC genotype can increase risk of bladder cancer among male patients (Adjusted OR = 1.34, 95% CI = 1.05-1.70, P = 0.018), and ever smokers (1.56, 1.14-2.14, 0.006), compared with TT genotype. Furthermore, DROSHA rs10719T>C polymorphism was predicted to regulate the binding activity of hsa-miR-27a/b. Luciferase reported gene assay confirmed that rs10719 T to G substitution disrupted the binding site for hsa-miR-27b, resulting the increased levels of DROSHA protein. Conclusions:Taken together, these findings suggested that DROSHA rs10719T>C polymorphism may be associated with bladder cancer risk in a Chinese population, and hsa-miR-27b can influence the expression of DROSHA protein by binding with 3’UTR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]