1,533 results on '"Quality Score"'
Search Results
2. Assessment of the Relationship Between the Quality of YouTube Videos on Penile Enlargement Surgery and Scholarly Profiles of Surgeons
- Author
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Emre Bülbül and Fahri Yavuz İlki
- Subjects
penile enlargement ,andrology ,publications ,h-index ,surgeon ,quality score ,Surgery ,RD1-811 ,Diseases of the genitourinary system. Urology ,RC870-923 - Abstract
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
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- 2024
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- View/download PDF
3. Assessment of the Relationship Between the Quality of YouTube Videos on Penile Enlargement Surgery and Scholarly Profiles of Surgeons.
- Author
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Bülbül, Emre and İlki, Fahri Yavuz
- Subjects
- *
PENIS surgery , *SOCIAL media , *STATISTICAL correlation , *UROLOGISTS , *MISINFORMATION , *RESEARCH , *COMMUNICATION , *PLASTIC surgery , *COMPARATIVE studies , *VIDEO recording - Abstract
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]
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- 2024
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4. A Hospital Medical Record Quality Scoring Tool (MeReQ): Development, Validation, and Results of a Pilot Study.
- Author
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Torsello, Alessandra, Aromatario, Mariarosaria, Scopetti, Matteo, Bianco, Lavinia, Oliva, Stefania, D'Errico, Stefano, and Napoli, Christian
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EXPERIMENTAL design ,PILOT projects ,RESEARCH ,RESEARCH methodology ,RESEARCH methodology evaluation ,QUALITY assurance ,MEDICAL records ,STATISTICAL models ,ELECTRONIC health records ,RISK management in business ,DATA analysis software ,PATIENT safety - Abstract
Hospital medical records are valuable and cost-effective documents for assessing the quality of healthcare provided to patients by a healthcare facility during hospitalization. However, there is a lack of internationally validated tools that measure the quality of the whole hospital medical record in terms of both form and content. In this study, we developed and validated a tool, named MeReQ (medical record quality) tool, which quantifies the quality of the hospital medical record and enables statistical modeling using the data obtained. The tool was applied to evaluate a sample of hospital individual patient medical records from a secondary referral hospital and to identify the departments that require quality improvement interventions and the effects of improvement actions already implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2024
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
5. Possibilities of using the results of soil rating in agricultural technologies of the Republic of Adygea
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Yu. A. Chumachenko, N. I. Mamsirov, and E. M. Baronov
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soil ,rating ,quality score ,qualitative assessment ,soil cover ,land ,agricultural crops ,the republic of adygea ,economic efficiency ,Technology - Abstract
Soil rating is a comparative characteristic of the quality of arable land and other areas, assessed in points. It is carried out on the basis of special soil surveys, taking into account the supply of nutrients and other factors that determine the level of natural fertility. Soil rating is a necessary starting point for the economic assessment of land, determining the standard price and creating a land cadastre. The article presents the results of a comprehensive study aimed at determining the qualitative characteristics of the soil cover of the Republic of Adygea. As a result of determining the quality score, it is possible to predict how much agricultural land will be harvested in the future, as well as to determine the sowing plan for this area for the year. Determining the soil quality score is also important when resolving issues such as regulation of land relations, timely adoption of measures to improve land plots that are unsatisfactory in terms of indicators. Establishing a quality score allows for high-quality implementation of agrotechnical, hydraulic and chemical measures in those areas that are considered the worst as a result of determining soil quality. The groups of soils established during rating, which are quantitatively characterized by certain natural characteristics, form the information basis for the economic assessment of land, the data of which are important for the rational use of selected agricultural production groups, taking into account their natural characteristics. Based on the conducted research, recommendations are offered for using the obtained assessment results for the cultivation of various agricultural crops. The importance of using the results of soil assessment to improve the efficiency of land use, improve agricultural production and ensure sustainable development of the region has been emphasized.
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- 2024
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6. Blind Image Quality Evaluation Method Based on Cyclic Generative Adversarial Network
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Xiaoying Li and Shouwu He
- Subjects
Blind images ,deep learning ,attention block ,quality score ,evaluation ,Electrical engineering. Electronics. Nuclear engineering ,TK1-9971 - Abstract
The mission of blind image quality evaluation is currently a challenging computer vision problem. Due to the shortage of reference images, it is hard for blind image quality evaluation methods to achieve the same performance as full reference image quality evaluation methods. In addition, current quality evaluation methods are difficult to effectively forecast the quality scores of synthesized distorted images as well as real distorted images. To address such issues, this study proposed a cyclic generative adversarial network composed of a quality perception network and a quality regression network on the grounds of generative adversarial networks. For further enhancing the predictive performance of quality aware networks, this study proposed using attention blocks for adaptively fusing high-level semantic features and low-level semantic features. It extracted content and distortion information from images through an image quality evaluation method on the grounds of content perception and distortion inference. And according to the different properties of the extracted features, adaptive fusion blocks were used for adaptively fusing content features and distortion features. Experiments showcased that the Spearman order correlation coefficient and Pearson linear correlation coefficient obtained by the proposed method on multiple datasets were higher than other similar methods. At the same time, the proposed method has achieved good prediction results on various types of distorted images, and has surpassed other methods. The prediction accuracy of the proposed method on five types of distortion was 0.971, 0.963, 0.984, 0.971, and 0.926, respectively. The proposed method achieved the highest predictive accuracy on all distortion types in the LIVE dataset, with predicted accuracy values of 0.973, 0.965, 0.984, 0.963, and 0.944, respectively. In summary, the proposed method not only achieved good prediction accuracy, but also had strong generalization performance in cross dataset testing. This provides a scientific and effective research direction for blind image quality evaluation.
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- 2024
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7. Applicability of Search Engine Optimization for WordPress (WP) Website
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Singh, Debabrata, Shivamurthaiah, M, Samanta, Debabrata, Bhattacharya, Abhishek, Dutta, Soumi, Howlett, Robert J., Series Editor, Jain, Lakhmi C., Series Editor, Bhattacharyya, Siddhartha, editor, Banerjee, Jyoti Sekhar, editor, and Köppen, Mario, editor
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- 2023
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8. ÉVALUATION DE LA QUALITE DES PRESCRIPTIONS MEDICALES AVANT L'INTRODUCTION D'UN FORMULAIRE THERAPEUTIQUE : CAS DU CENTRE HOSPITALIER UNIVERSITAIRE Pr BOCAR SIDY SALL DE KATI.
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Traoré, Mohamed dit Sarmoye, Traoré, Sylvestre, Sangho, Aboubacar, Coulibaly, Issa, Diarra, Abdramane, Coulibaly, Balla Fatogoma, Bah, Sékou, Ouedrago, Raogo, and Youl, Estelle Noëla Hoho
- Abstract
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]
- Published
- 2023
9. Regression trees to identify combinations of farming practices that achieve the best overall intrinsic quality of milk
- Author
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L. Rey-Cadilhac, A. Ferlay, M. Gelé, S. Léger, and C. Laurent
- Subjects
dairy cow ,bulk tank milk ,quality score ,dairy products ,regression analysis ,Dairy processing. Dairy products ,SF250.5-275 ,Dairying ,SF221-250 - Abstract
ABSTRACT: 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.
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- 2023
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10. Guidelines for Sanger sequencing and molecular assay monitoring
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Crossley, Beate M, Bai, Jianfa, Glaser, Amy, Maes, Roger, Porter, Elizabeth, Killian, Mary Lea, Clement, Travis, and Toohey-Kurth, Kathy
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Biological Sciences ,Genetics ,Genetic Testing ,Detection ,screening and diagnosis ,4.1 Discovery and preclinical testing of markers and technologies ,Animal Diseases ,Animals ,Base Sequence ,High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing ,Humans ,Laboratories ,Phylogeny ,Polymerase Chain Reaction ,Sequence Analysis ,DNA ,quality score ,Sanger sequencing ,validation ,Zoology ,Veterinary Sciences ,Veterinary sciences - Abstract
Genetic sequencing, or DNA sequencing, using the Sanger technique has become widely used in the veterinary diagnostic community. This technology plays a role in verification of PCR results and is used to provide the genetic sequence data needed for phylogenetic analysis, epidemiologic studies, and forensic investigations. The Laboratory Technology Committee of the American Association of Veterinary Laboratory Diagnosticians has prepared guidelines for sample preparation, submission to sequencing facilities or instrumentation, quality assessment of nucleic acid sequence data performed, and for generating basic sequencing data and phylogenetic analysis for diagnostic applications. This guidance is aimed at assisting laboratories in providing consistent, high-quality, and reliable sequence data when using Sanger-based genetic sequencing as a component of their laboratory services.
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- 2020
11. Identification of Torquetenovirus Species in Patients with Kawasaki Disease Using a Newly Developed Species-Specific PCR Method.
- Author
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Spezia, Pietro Giorgio, Filippini, Fabio, Nagao, Yoshiro, Sano, Tetsuya, Ishida, Takafumi, and Maggi, Fabrizio
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MUCOCUTANEOUS lymph node syndrome , *NUCLEOTIDE sequencing , *IDENTIFICATION , *VIRAL load , *SPECIES , *LONGITUDINAL method - Abstract
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]
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- 2023
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12. An Iterative Model for Quality Assessment in Collaborative Content Generation Systems
- Author
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Abedinzadeh, Fariba, Amintoosi, Haleh, Allahbakhsh, Mohammad, Goos, Gerhard, Founding Editor, Hartmanis, Juris, Founding Editor, Bertino, Elisa, Editorial Board Member, Gao, Wen, Editorial Board Member, Steffen, Bernhard, Editorial Board Member, Yung, Moti, Editorial Board Member, Hacid, Hakim, editor, Aldwairi, Monther, editor, Bouadjenek, Mohamed Reda, editor, Petrocchi, Marinella, editor, Faci, Noura, editor, Outay, Fatma, editor, Beheshti, Amin, editor, Thamsen, Lauritz, editor, and Dong, Hai, editor
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- 2022
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13. Improved Image Quality Assessment by Utilizing Pre-Trained Architecture Features with Unified Learning Mechanism.
- Author
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Ryu, Jihyoung
- Subjects
DEEP learning ,PERCEIVED quality ,LEARNING - Abstract
The purpose of the no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) is to measure perceived image quality based on subjective judgments; however, due to the lack of a clean reference image, this is a complicated and unresolved challenge. Massive new IQA datasets have facilitated the creation of deep learning-based image quality measurements. We present a unique model to handle the NR-IQA challenge in this research by employing a hybrid strategy that leverages from pre-trained CNN model and the unified learning mechanism that extracts both local and non-local characteristics from the input patch. The deep analysis of the proposed framework shows that the model uses features and a mechanism that improves the monotonicity relationship between objective and subjective ratings. The intermediary goal was mapped to a quality score using a regression architecture. To extract various feature maps, a deep architecture with an adaptive receptive field was used. Analyses of this biggest NR-IQA benchmark datasets demonstrate that the suggested technique outperforms current state-of-the-art NR-IQA measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2023
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
14. Regression trees to identify combinations of farming practices that achieve the best overall intrinsic quality of milk.
- Author
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Rey-Cadilhac, L., Ferlay, A., Gelé, M., Léger, S., and Laurent, C.
- Subjects
- *
REGRESSION trees , *MILK quality , *AGRICULTURE , *RAW milk , *TREE farms , *MILK storage , *TRAVELING salesman problem , *DIMENSIONS - Abstract
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]
- Published
- 2023
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
15. Quality-Driven Dual-Branch Feature Integration Network for Video Salient Object Detection.
- Author
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Zhou, Xiaofei, Gao, Hanxiao, Yu, Longxuan, Yang, Defu, and Zhang, Jiyong
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VIDEO compression ,VIDEOS ,VIDEO surveillance ,COOPERATION ,FORECASTING - Abstract
Video salient object detection has attracted growing interest in recent years. However, some existing video saliency models often suffer from the inappropriate utilization of spatial and temporal cues and the insufficient aggregation of different level features, leading to remarkable performance degradation. Therefore, we propose a quality-driven dual-branch feature integration network majoring in the adaptive fusion of multi-modal cues and sufficient aggregation of multi-level spatiotemporal features. Firstly, we employ the quality-driven multi-modal feature fusion (QMFF) module to combine the spatial and temporal features. Particularly, the quality scores estimated from each level's spatial and temporal cues are not only used to weigh the two modal features but also to adaptively integrate the coarse spatial and temporal saliency predictions into the guidance map, which further enhances the two modal features. Secondly, we deploy the dual-branch-based multi-level feature aggregation (DMFA) module to integrate multi-level spatiotemporal features, where the two branches including the progressive decoder branch and the direct concatenation branch sufficiently explore the cooperation of multi-level spatiotemporal features. In particular, in order to provide an adaptive fusion for the outputs of the two branches, we design the dual-branch fusion (DF) unit, where the channel weight of each output can be learned jointly from the two outputs. The experiments conducted on four video datasets clearly demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our model against the state-of-the-art video saliency models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
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- 2023
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16. A Hospital Medical Record Quality Scoring Tool (MeReQ): Development, Validation, and Results of a Pilot Study
- Author
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Alessandra Torsello, Mariarosaria Aromatario, Matteo Scopetti, Lavinia Bianco, Stefania Oliva, Stefano D’Errico, and Christian Napoli
- Subjects
hospital medical record quality ,clinical risk management ,quality index ,quality score ,patient safety ,Medicine - Abstract
Hospital medical records are valuable and cost-effective documents for assessing the quality of healthcare provided to patients by a healthcare facility during hospitalization. However, there is a lack of internationally validated tools that measure the quality of the whole hospital medical record in terms of both form and content. In this study, we developed and validated a tool, named MeReQ (medical record quality) tool, which quantifies the quality of the hospital medical record and enables statistical modeling using the data obtained. The tool was applied to evaluate a sample of hospital individual patient medical records from a secondary referral hospital and to identify the departments that require quality improvement interventions and the effects of improvement actions already implemented.
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- 2024
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
17. CMIC: an efficient quality score compressor with random access functionality
- Author
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Hansen Chen, Jianhua Chen, Zhiwen Lu, and Rongshu Wang
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FASTQ ,Quality score ,Random access ,Lossless compressor ,Computer applications to medicine. Medical informatics ,R858-859.7 ,Biology (General) ,QH301-705.5 - Abstract
Abstract 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 .
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- 2022
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18. Incorporating Variation and Quality of the Underlying Effects in Meta-Analysis.
- Author
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Fu, Jinyu and Lin, Jinguan
- Abstract
This paper proposes a model to further explore the effects of the quality information and variation of the underlying effects on the summary effect measure in meta-analysis. A shape parameter is used in this model to quantify the asymmetry of the effect sizes of studies that are included. Estimation of the proposed model parameters is carried out by the Bayesian MCMC method. Performances of the resultant estimates are examined in the simulations and empirical case with data obtained from a total of 22 meta-analyses taken from three different designs. A conclusion would be drawn that it is advisable to take the proposed model, when quality information becomes available, in particular with a situation where the underlying effects approximately follow a normal distribution. If, however, the quality information is absent, the skew-normal distribution for random effect model should be adopted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2022
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19. Evaluation of the loss of fingermark ridge clarity as a function of biological sex.
- Author
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Salmeron, Lily C. and De Alcaraz‐Fossoul, Josep
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- *
HUMAN fingerprints , *MAGNETIC particles , *SEX (Biology) , *DATA analysis , *SECRETION - Abstract
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]
- Published
- 2022
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20. FCLQC: fast and concurrent lossless quality scores compressor
- Author
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Minhyeok Cho and Albert No
- Subjects
Concurrency ,FASTQ ,Lossless compressor ,Quality score ,Random access ,Computer applications to medicine. Medical informatics ,R858-859.7 ,Biology (General) ,QH301-705.5 - Abstract
Abstract 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.
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- 2021
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21. Modeling and optimizing an agro-supply chain considering different quality grades and storage systems for fresh products: a Benders decomposition solution approach.
- Author
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Keshavarz-Ghorbani, Fatemeh and Pasandideh, Seyed Hamid Reza
- Abstract
This paper proposes a mathematical model in the context of agro-supply chain management, considering specific characteristics of agro-products to assist purchase, storage, and transportation decisions. In addition, a new method for determining the required quality score of different types of products is proposed based on their loss factors and purchasing costs. The model aims to minimize total cost imposed by purchasing fresh products, opening warehouses, holding inventories, operational activities, and transportation. Two sets of examples, including small and medium-sized problems, are implemented by general algebraic modeling language (GAMS) software to evaluate the model. Then, Benders decomposition (BD) algorithm is applied to tackle the complexity of solving large-sized instances. The results of both GAMS and BD are compared in terms of objective function values and computational time to demonstrate the efficiency of the BD algorithm. Finally, the model is applied in a real case study involving an apple supply chain to obtain managerial insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2022
- Full Text
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22. SIQA Based on 2D IQA Weighting Strategy
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Ding, Yong, Sun, Guangming, Ding, Yong, and Sun, Guangming
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- 2020
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
23. Identification of Torquetenovirus Species in Patients with Kawasaki Disease Using a Newly Developed Species-Specific PCR Method
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Pietro Giorgio Spezia, Fabio Filippini, Yoshiro Nagao, Tetsuya Sano, Takafumi Ishida, and Fabrizio Maggi
- Subjects
anellovirus ,quantitative PCR ,next-generation sequencing ,primer set ,quality score ,Biology (General) ,QH301-705.5 ,Chemistry ,QD1-999 - Abstract
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.
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- 2023
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- View/download PDF
24. CMIC: an efficient quality score compressor with random access functionality.
- Author
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Chen, Hansen, Chen, Jianhua, Lu, Zhiwen, and Wang, Rongshu
- Subjects
- *
NUCLEOTIDE sequencing , *COMPRESSORS , *TECHNOLOGICAL innovations , *SPEED - Abstract
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]
- Published
- 2022
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
25. Folate Mediated One Carbon Metabolism in Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma: A Systematic Review.
- Author
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PALASKAR, SANGEETA JAYANT, MUKKANWAR, RUTUJA NARSING, and JOSHI, KALPANA
- Subjects
- *
HEAD & neck cancer , *CARBON metabolism , *SQUAMOUS cell carcinoma , *FOLIC acid , *AMINO acid metabolism , *DNA - Abstract
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]
- Published
- 2022
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
26. Reliability of Gradient-Echo Magnetic Resonance Elastography of Lumbar Muscles: Phantom and Clinical Studies.
- Author
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Hsieh, Tsyh-Jyi, Chou, Ming-Chung, Chen, Yi-Chu, Chou, Yi-Chen, Lin, Chien-Hung, and Chen, Clement Kuen-Huang
- Subjects
- *
PSOAS muscles , *MAGNETIC resonance , *LEG muscles , *ELASTOGRAPHY , *BONFERRONI correction , *ANALYSIS of variance - Abstract
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]
- Published
- 2022
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
27. Folate Mediated One Carbon Metabolism in Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma: A Systematic Review
- Author
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Sangeeta Jayant Palaskar, Rutuja Narsing Mukkanwar, and Kalpana Joshi
- Subjects
cancer metabolism ,folic acid ,new castle ottawa scale ,quality score ,Medicine - Abstract
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 15-30 November 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 2005-2019 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 three studies had quality score of 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 tumour growth and subsequent metabolic changes, or they may precede and accelerate tumour progression.
- Published
- 2022
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
28. Improved Image Quality Assessment by Utilizing Pre-Trained Architecture Features with Unified Learning Mechanism
- Author
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Jihyoung Ryu
- Subjects
Inception-ResNet-v2 ,spinal network ,image quality assessment (IQA) ,no-reference (NR) ,quality score ,Technology ,Engineering (General). Civil engineering (General) ,TA1-2040 ,Biology (General) ,QH301-705.5 ,Physics ,QC1-999 ,Chemistry ,QD1-999 - Abstract
The purpose of the no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) is to measure perceived image quality based on subjective judgments; however, due to the lack of a clean reference image, this is a complicated and unresolved challenge. Massive new IQA datasets have facilitated the creation of deep learning-based image quality measurements. We present a unique model to handle the NR-IQA challenge in this research by employing a hybrid strategy that leverages from pre-trained CNN model and the unified learning mechanism that extracts both local and non-local characteristics from the input patch. The deep analysis of the proposed framework shows that the model uses features and a mechanism that improves the monotonicity relationship between objective and subjective ratings. The intermediary goal was mapped to a quality score using a regression architecture. To extract various feature maps, a deep architecture with an adaptive receptive field was used. Analyses of this biggest NR-IQA benchmark datasets demonstrate that the suggested technique outperforms current state-of-the-art NR-IQA measures.
- Published
- 2023
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- View/download PDF
29. Management Mechanism for Continuous Improvement of Production Processes Using Quality Management Methods
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Antsev, V. Yu., Vitchuk, N. A., Miroshnikov, V. V., Radionov, Andrey A., editor, Kravchenko, Oleg A., editor, Guzeev, Victor I., editor, and Rozhdestvenskiy, Yurij V., editor
- Published
- 2019
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
30. FCLQC: fast and concurrent lossless quality scores compressor.
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Cho, Minhyeok and No, Albert
- Subjects
- *
COMPRESSORS , *DNA sequencing , *CLINICAL medicine - Abstract
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]
- Published
- 2021
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
31. LCQS: an efficient lossless compression tool of quality scores with random access functionality
- Author
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Jiabing Fu, Bixin Ke, and Shoubin Dong
- Subjects
Quality score ,Lossless compression ,Random access ,Robust ,Efficient ,Parallelization ,Computer applications to medicine. Medical informatics ,R858-859.7 ,Biology (General) ,QH301-705.5 - Abstract
Abstract 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.
- Published
- 2020
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32. Systematic review and quality evaluation of published human ingestion-time trials of blood pressure-lowering medications and their combinations.
- Author
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Hermida, Ramón C., Hermida-Ayala, Ramón G., Mojón, Artemio, Smolensky, Michael H., and Fernández, José R.
- Subjects
- *
BLOOD pressure , *CLINICAL chronobiology , *CARDIOVASCULAR diseases risk factors , *HYPERTENSION , *MEDICAL societies , *DRUGS - Abstract
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]
- Published
- 2021
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
33. ngsComposer: an automated pipeline for empirically based NGS data quality filtering.
- Author
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Kuster, Ryan D, Yencho, G Craig, and Olukolu, Bode A
- Subjects
- *
DATA quality , *DATABASES , *ERROR rates , *NUCLEOTIDE sequencing , *FILTERS & filtration , *PIPELINE inspection , *ALGORITHMS - Abstract
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]
- Published
- 2021
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
34. Sensory Variations in Olive Oils from the Arbequina Variety Elaborated with Changes in Fruit Selection and Process.
- Author
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dos Santos, Amanda Neris, de Oliveira da Silva, Luiz Fernando, and Fante, Camila Argenta
- Abstract
In order to analyze possible sensory variations in extra virgin olive oils (EVOOs) by a trained sensory panel, three degree of maturity (DM) of Arbequina olives (green, verdant, and ripe) and four beat times (BT) of 30, 40, 50, and 60 min were studied during the production process. In this sense, twelve different elaboration forms of EVOO, monovarietal from Serra da Mantiqueira, were analyzed. Analyses of acidity, peroxide index, specific extinction, and descriptive sensory were performed on olive oils. The results were analyzed by parametric and nonparametric statistics according to the assumptions of ANOVA. The sensory profiles of the elaborated EVOOs showed different characteristics; the EVOOs of the DM green and verdant with BT 50 highlighted for "pungency" and sensory evolution harmonious and balanced; the BT 60 obtained the highest values for "green fruity," and the DM ripe with BT 40 showed balance to the sensory attributes. From these results, it is possible to structure protocols for the preparation of olive oil in order to achieve an oil with desirable sensory characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2021
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
35. Quality Assessment of High-Throughput DNA Sequencing Data via Range Analysis
- Author
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Fotouhi, Ali, Majidi, Mina, Külekci, M. Oğuzhan, Hutchison, David, Series Editor, Kanade, Takeo, Series Editor, Kittler, Josef, Series Editor, Kleinberg, Jon M., Series Editor, Mattern, Friedemann, Series Editor, Mitchell, John C., Series Editor, Naor, Moni, Series Editor, Pandu Rangan, C., Series Editor, Steffen, Bernhard, Series Editor, Terzopoulos, Demetri, Series Editor, Tygar, Doug, Series Editor, Weikum, Gerhard, Series Editor, Rojas, Ignacio, editor, and Ortuño, Francisco, editor
- Published
- 2018
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
36. Toward a No-Reference Quality Metric for Camera-Captured Images
- Author
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Xiongkuo Min, Ke Gu, Guangtao Zhai, Yutao Liu, and Runze Hu
- Subjects
Source code ,Computer science ,business.industry ,Image quality ,media_common.quotation_subject ,ComputingMethodologies_IMAGEPROCESSINGANDCOMPUTERVISION ,Pattern recognition ,Semantics ,Computer Science Applications ,Image (mathematics) ,Human-Computer Interaction ,Support vector machine ,Control and Systems Engineering ,Metric (mathematics) ,Quality Score ,Quality (business) ,Artificial intelligence ,Electrical and Electronic Engineering ,business ,Software ,Information Systems ,media_common - Abstract
Existing no-reference (NR) image quality assessment (IQA) metrics are still not convincing for evaluating the quality of the camera-captured images. Toward tackling this issue, we, in this article, establish a novel NR quality metric for quantifying the quality of the camera-captured images reliably. Since the image quality is hierarchically perceived from the low-level preliminary visual perception to the high-level semantic comprehension in the human brain, in our proposed metric, we characterize the image quality by exploiting both the low-level image properties and the high-level semantics of the image. Specifically, we extract a series of low-level features to characterize the fundamental image properties, including the brightness, saturation, contrast, noiseness, sharpness, and naturalness, which are highly indicative of the camera-captured image quality. Correspondingly, the high-level features are designed to characterize the semantics of the image. The low-level and high-level perceptual features play complementary roles in measuring the image quality. To infer the image quality, we employ the support vector regression (SVR) to map all the informative features to a single quality score. Thorough tests conducted on two standard camera-captured image databases demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed quality metric in assessing the image quality and its superiority over the state-of-the-art NR quality metrics. The source code of the proposed metric for camera-captured images is released at https://github.com/YT2015?tab=repositories.
- Published
- 2023
37. CSPP-IQA: a multi-scale spatial pyramid pooling-based approach for blind image quality assessment
- Author
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Chen, Jingjing, Qin, Feng, Lu, Fangfang, Guo, Lingling, Li, Chao, Yan, Ke, and Zhou, Xiaokang
- Published
- 2022
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
38. Rating sputum cell quality in clinical trials for asthma and COPD treatment
- Author
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Pedersen F, Zissler UM, Watz H, Rabe KF, Hohlfeld JM, and Holz O
- Subjects
Sputum cell quality ,quality score ,clinical trials ,airway inflammation ,Diseases of the respiratory system ,RC705-779 - Abstract
Frauke Pedersen,1,2 Ulrich M Zissler,3 Henrik Watz,2 Klaus F Rabe,1 Jens M Hohlfeld,4,5 Olaf Holz41LungenClinic Grosshansdorf, Airway Research Center North (ARCN), German Center for Lung Research (DZL), Grosshansdorf, Germany; 2Pulmonary Research Institute at LungenClinic Grosshansdorf, Airway Research Center North (ARCN), German Center for Lung Research (DZL), Grosshansdorf, Germany; 3Center of Allergy & Environment (ZAUM), Technical University of Munich and Helmholtz Center Munich, German Research Center for Environmental Health, Germany, Member of the German Center for Lung Research (DZL), Munich, Germany; 4Fraunhofer ITEM, Clinical Airway Research – Biomedical Research in End-stage and Obstructive Lung Disease Hannover (BREATH), German Center for Lung Research (DZL), Hannover, Germany; 5Department of Respiratory Medicine, Hannover Medical School (MHH), Biomedical Research in End-stage and Obstructive Lung Disease Hannover (BREATH), Hannover, GermanyBackgroundInduced sputum is a method to assess airway inflammation in clinical trials for asthma and COPD.1–3 Sputum is a heterogeneous, viscous material containing inflammatory cell plugs, cellular debris, mucus, and saliva with squamous cells.The quality of sputum cell preparations for differential cell count analysis depends on multiple factors and can be highly variable.4,5 Percentage of squamous cell contamination (SQ%) is often used to assess the quality of sputum cell preparations.6Here, we evaluated a comprehensive quality score,7 which also includes an assessment of the inflammatory cell morphology and amount of cellular debris.
- Published
- 2019
39. Reliability of Gradient-Echo Magnetic Resonance Elastography of Lumbar Muscles: Phantom and Clinical Studies
- Author
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Tsyh-Jyi Hsieh, Ming-Chung Chou, Yi-Chu Chen, Yi-Chen Chou, Chien-Hung Lin, and Clement Kuen-Huang Chen
- Subjects
MR elastography ,stiffness ,technical failure rate ,quality score ,muscle ,lumbar spine ,Medicine (General) ,R5-920 - Abstract
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.
- Published
- 2022
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
40. Fingerprint Image Quality Assessment and Scoring
- Author
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Sharma, Ram Prakash, Dey, Somnath, Hutchison, David, Series editor, Kanade, Takeo, Series editor, Kittler, Josef, Series editor, Kleinberg, Jon M., Series editor, Mattern, Friedemann, Series editor, Mitchell, John C., Series editor, Naor, Moni, Series editor, Pandu Rangan, C., Series editor, Steffen, Bernhard, Series editor, Terzopoulos, Demetri, Series editor, Tygar, Doug, Series editor, Weikum, Gerhard, Series editor, Ghosh, Ashish, editor, Pal, Rajarshi, editor, and Prasath, Rajendra, editor
- Published
- 2017
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
41. Empirical Mode Decomposition and Wavelet Transform Based ECG Data Compression Scheme.
- Author
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Jha, C.K. and Kolekar, M.H.
- Subjects
HILBERT-Huang transform ,WAVELET transforms ,DATA compression ,DISCRETE wavelet transforms ,RUN-length encoding ,ELECTROCARDIOGRAPHY - Abstract
• Empirical mode decomposition and wavelet transform are used as compression tools. • Empirical mode decomposition provides significant components of ECG signal. • Wavelet transform coefficients are quantized using dead-zone quantization. • Transform coefficients are coded using run-length encoding. • Reconstructed ECG signals are very much similar to original signals. In health-care systems, compression is an essential tool to solve the storage and transmission problems. In this regard, this paper reports a new electrocardiogram (ECG) data compression scheme which employs sifting function based empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and discrete wavelet transform. EMD based on sifting function is utilized to get the first intrinsic mode function (IMF). After EMD, the first IMF and four significant sifting functions are combined together. This combination is free from many irrelevant components of the signal. Discrete wavelet transform (DWT) with mother wavelet 'bior4.4' is applied to this combination. The transform coefficients obtained after DWT are passed through dead-zone quantization. It discards small transform coefficients lying around zero. Further, integer conversion of coefficients and run-length encoding are utilized to achieve a compressed form of ECG data. Compression performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated using 48 ECG records of the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database. In the comparison of compression results, it is observed that the proposed method exhibits better performance than many recent ECG compressors. A mean opinion score test is also conducted to evaluate the true quality of the reconstructed ECG signals. The proposed scheme offers better compression performance with preserving the key features of the signal very well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2021
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
42. DIBR-synthesised video quality assessment by measuring geometric distortion and spatiotemporal inconsistency.
- Author
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Huang, Yipo, Zhou, Yu, Hu, Bo, Tian, Shishun, and Yan, Jiebin
- Subjects
- *
VIDEO processing , *VIDEOS , *MOTIVATION (Psychology) , *STREAMING video & television - Abstract
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]
- Published
- 2020
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
43. LCQS: an efficient lossless compression tool of quality scores with random access functionality.
- Author
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Fu, Jiabing, Ke, Bixin, and Dong, Shoubin
- Subjects
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COMPRESSORS , *DATA compression , *TALLIES - Abstract
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]
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- 2020
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44. Data Quality Scores for Pricing on Data Marketplaces
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Stahl, Florian, Vossen, Gottfried, Goebel, Randy, Series editor, Tanaka, Yuzuru, Series editor, Wahlster, Wolfgang, Series editor, Nguyen, Ngoc Thanh, editor, Trawiński, Bogdan, editor, Fujita, Hamido, editor, and Hong, Tzung-Pei, editor
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- 2016
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45. Automated Quality Assessment of Unstructured Resolution Text in IT Service Systems
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Agarwal, Shivali, Sridhara, Giriprasad, Dasgupta, Gargi, Hutchison, David, Series editor, Kanade, Takeo, Series editor, Kittler, Josef, Series editor, Kleinberg, Jon M., Series editor, Mattern, Friedemann, Series editor, Mitchell, John C., Series editor, Naor, Moni, Series editor, Pandu Rangan, C., Series editor, Steffen, Bernhard, Series editor, Terzopoulos, Demetri, Series editor, Tygar, Doug, Series editor, Weikum, Gerhard, Series editor, Sheng, Quan Z., editor, Stroulia, Eleni, editor, Tata, Samir, editor, and Bhiri, Sami, editor
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- 2016
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46. Internet Advertising and Google AdWords
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Ciomek, Nicole and Lee, Newton, editor
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- 2016
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47. Estimating Phred scores of Illumina base calls by logistic regression and sparse modeling
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Sheng Zhang, Bo Wang, Lin Wan, and Lei M. Li
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Base-calling ,Logistic regression ,Quality score ,L 1 regularization ,AIC ,BIC ,Computer applications to medicine. Medical informatics ,R858-859.7 ,Biology (General) ,QH301-705.5 - Abstract
Abstract 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 L 1 regularization learning method. The L 1-regularized one was then compared with the Illumina scoring method. Conclusions The L 1-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 L 1 method identifies more base calls of high fidelity. Computationally, the L 1 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.
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- 2017
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48. Role of Radiomics in the Prediction of Muscle-invasive Bladder Cancer: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis
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Konrad Bilski, Jakub Dobruch, Rodrigo Suarez-Ibarrola, Shahrokh F. Shariat, Christian Gratzke, Mieszko Kozikowski, Rafał Osiecki, and Arkadiusz Miernik
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medicine.medical_specialty ,Bladder cancer ,business.industry ,Muscles ,Urology ,030232 urology & nephrology ,Muscle invasive ,Context (language use) ,medicine.disease ,Sensitivity and Specificity ,Confidence interval ,03 medical and health sciences ,0302 clinical medicine ,Systematic review ,ROC Curve ,Urinary Bladder Neoplasms ,Radiomics ,Artificial Intelligence ,030220 oncology & carcinogenesis ,Meta-analysis ,Quality Score ,Humans ,Medicine ,Radiology ,business - Abstract
Context Radiomics is a field of science that aims to develop improved methods of medical image analysis by extracting a large number of quantitative features. New data have emerged on the successful application of radiomics and machine-learning techniques to the prediction of muscle-invasive bladder cancer (MIBC). Objective To systematically review the diagnostic performance of radiomic techniques in predicting MIBC. Evidence acquisition The literature search for relevant studies up to July 2020 was performed in the PubMed and EMBASE databases by two independent reviewers. The meta-analysis was inducted according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses guidelines. Inclusion criteria comprised studies that evaluated the diagnostic accuracy of radiomic models in predicting MIBC and used pathological examination as the reference standard. For bias assessment, Quality Assessment of Diagnostic Accuracy Studies-2 and Radiomic Quality Score were used. Weighted summary proportions were used to calculate pooled sensitivity and specificity. A linear mixed model was implemented to calculate the hierarchical summary receiver-operating characteristic (HSROC). Meta-regression analyses were performed to explore heterogeneity. Evidence synthesis Eight studies with a total of 860 patients were included. The summary estimates for sensitivity and specificity in predicting MIBC were 82% (95% confidence interval [CI]: 77–86%) and 81% (95% CI: 76–85%), respectively. The area under HSROC was 0.88. There were no relevant heterogeneity in diagnostic accuracy measures (I2 = 33% and 41% for sensitivity and specificity, respectively), which was confirmed by a subsequent meta-regression analysis. Conclusions Radiomics shows high diagnostic performance in predicting MIBC. Despite differences in approaches, radiomic models were relatively homogeneous in their diagnostic accuracy. With further improvements, radiomics has the potential to become a useful adjunct in clinical management of bladder cancer. Patient summary Rapidly evolving imaging analysis methods using artificial intelligence algorithms, called radiomics, show high diagnostic performance in predicting muscle-invasive bladder cancer.
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- 2022
49. Assessment of treatment resistance criteria in non-invasive brain stimulation studies of schizophrenia
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Jami Kronick, Amer M. Burhan, Lena Palaniyappan, and Priyadharshini Sabesan
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Psychosis ,medicine.medical_specialty ,medicine.medical_treatment ,Treatment resistance ,Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation ,03 medical and health sciences ,0302 clinical medicine ,Physical medicine and rehabilitation ,medicine ,Humans ,Non-invasive brain stimulation ,Biological Psychiatry ,business.industry ,Non invasive ,Brain ,medicine.disease ,Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation ,030227 psychiatry ,Clinical trial ,Transcranial magnetic stimulation ,Psychiatry and Mental health ,Schizophrenia ,Brain stimulation ,Quality Score ,business ,030217 neurology & neurosurgery ,Transcranial electrical stimulation - Abstract
Novel treatment modalities, such as non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS), typically focus on patient groups that have failed multiple treatment interventions. Despite its promise, the clinical translation of NIBS in schizophrenia has been limited. One important obstacle to implementation is the inconsistent reporting of treatment resistance in the clinical trial literature contributing to heterogeneity in reported effects. In response, we develop a numerical approach to synthesize quality of assessment of Treatment-Resistant Schizophrenia (TRS) and apply this to studies investigating therapeutic response to NIBS in patients with schizophrenia. Literature search conducted through PubMed database identified 119 studies investigating Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation and Transcranial Electrical Stimulation in treating resistant schizophrenia symptoms. A quality score out of 11 was assigned to each study based on adherence to the international consensus guidelines for TRS developed by the Treatment Response and Resistance in Psychosis (TRRIP) group. Results revealed an overall paucity of studies with thorough assessment and/or reporting of TRS phenomenon, as evidenced by a mean quality score of 3.38/11 (SD: 1.01) for trials and 5.16/11 (SD: 1.57) for case reports, though this improved minimally since the publication of consensus criteria. Most studies considered treatment-resistance as a single dimensional construct by reporting resistance of a single symptom, and failed to establish treatment adherence, resistance time course and functional impairment. We conclude that the current NIBS literature in schizophrenia do not reflect its true effects on treatment-resistance. There is an urgent need to improve assessment and reporting standards of clinical trials that target TRS.
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- 2022
50. Effectiveness Dimension of Performance
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Ozcan, Yasar A., Price, Camille C, Series editor, and Ozcan, Yasar A.
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- 2014
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