8,213 Results Found

Optical brain monitoring techniques, including near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS), and photoplethysmography (PPG) have gained attention for their non-invasive, affordable, and portable nature. These methods offe...

Background/Objectives: Precautionary health behaviours (PHBs), such as hand-washing or self-isolation, are non-pharmaceutical interventions used to reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission. We investigated the potential confounding by PHBs of COVID-19 vaccine...

Proinflammatory biomarkers have been increasingly used in epidemiologic and intervention studies over the past decades to evaluate and identify an association of systemic inflammation with cardiovascular diseases. Although there is a strong correlati...

Several meta-analyses have found a positive association between a popular type of “fad diet”, ketogenic diets, and their effect on anthropometric and blood parameters. However, the non-specific inclusion criteria for meta-analyses may lead to incorre...

Software defect prediction technology can effectively improve software quality. Depending on the code metrics, machine learning models are built to predict potential defects. Some researchers have indicated that the size metric could cause confoundin...

Machine learning models for medical image analysis are vulnerable to hidden confounders, which can compromise generalization and clinical reliability. Existing detection strategies typically require explicit knowledge or labels of the confounder, whi...

Background: Adequate control for confounding is key to many observational study designs. Confounders are often identified based on subject matter knowledge from empirical investigations. Negative confounders, which typically generate type 2 error, i....

Software defect prediction technology can effectively detect potential defects in the software system. The most common method is to establish machine learning models based on software metrics for prediction. However, most of the prediction models are...

Objective diagnosis in psychiatry remains challenging due to the lack of reliable biological markers and the presence of confounding variables in observational data. While EEG-based machine learning models have shown promising classification performa...

Sample size calculation for adequate power analysis is critical in optimizing RNA-seq experimental design. However, the complexity increases for directly estimating sample size when taking into consideration confounding covariates. Although a number...

Controlling for confounding bias is crucial in causal inference. Causal inference using data from observational studies (e.g., electronic health records) or imperfectly randomized trials (e.g., imperfect randomization or compliance) requires accounti...

Confounding adjustment is important for observational studies to derive valid effect estimates for inference. Despite the theoretical advancement of confounding selection procedure, it is often challenging to distinguish between confounders and media...

Confounding factors in olfactory aroma data, such as high humidity levels, substantially affect sensor outputs, masking subtle volatile organic compound (VOC) patterns and hindering generalizable machine learning models. Traditional representation le...

Timeseries forecasting plays an important role in many applications where knowledge of the future behaviour of a given quantity of interest is required. Traditionally, this task is approached using methods such as exponential smoothing, ARIMA and, mo...

Objectives: Fruit and vegetable (FV) consumption has been inversely associated with cardiovascular disease, but questions remain about the extent to which these results are due to confounding. Methods: From 2006–2010, >0.5 million adults age...

Gesture recognition with electrical impedance tomography (EIT) is an enormous potential tool for human–machine interaction because of its low cost, low complexity and high temporal resolution. Although high-precision EIT-based gesture recogniti...

The aim of our study is to utilise longitudinal data to explore if the association between the retail fast food environment and overweight in adolescents is confounded by neighbourhood deprivation. Data from the Millennium Cohort Study for England we...

This paper provides a methodology to better understand the relationships between different aspects of vocal fold motion, which are used as features in machine learning-based approaches for detecting respiratory infections from voice recordings. The r...

Background/Objectives: Tetralogy of Fallot (TOF) is the most common cyanotic congenital heart defect, and cardiac computed tomography (CT) is increasingly central to its anatomical and pre-procedural assessment. Artificial-intelligence research in TO...

Objective: To identify key predictors of clinical outcomes in burn survivors and clarify the role of mixed-depth burns and confounding by indication in observational rehabilitation research. Design: Retrospective cohort study using data from a burn r...

This study critically evaluates a recent machine learning method called the X-Learner, that aims to estimate treatment effects by predicting counterfactual quantities. It uses information from the treated group to predict counterfactuals for the cont...

Background and Objectives: Observational comparisons of laparoscopic and open colorectal resection are vulnerable to confounding by indication because fitter patients with earlier disease are preferentially offered the minimally invasive approach. Us...

Pattern similarity analysis is widely used to assess response reliability in repeated-stimulus fMRI designs, but pairwise similarity estimates may be confounded by temporal structure, including slow drift, autocorrelation, hemodynamic smoothing, and...

With the aim to shorten the time for diagnosis and accelerate access to correct management, a non-invasive diagnostic test for endometriosis was developed and validated. The IVD test combines an ELISA test kit to quantify CA125 and BDNF concentration...

Background: Pooling public blood transcriptome studies never designed for integration introduces failures that standard diagnostics miss. Objective: To define safeguards for confounding-aware integration and establish what an integrated stroke datase...

Background: Low admission low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) is paradoxically associated with worse outcomes after acute coronary syndrome, but this may reflect confounding rather than causation. We examined the paradox in statin-naïve...

Background/Objectives: Automated dermoscopic image analysis can assist research on early skin cancer detection, but deep learning models may learn acquisition-related shortcuts, including terminal hairs, illumination gradients, gel bubbles, shadows a...

When symbolic regression (SR) is run on data pooled from several facilities, a compact expression can fit well and still describe where the measurements happen to lie rather than a physical relationship. We present an audit framework for this structu...

This work is about observational causal discovery for deterministic and stochastic dynamic systems. We explore what additional knowledge can be gained by the usage of standard conditional independence tests and if the interacting systems are located...

Mare’s milk carries cultural and economic importance in Central Asia, yet udder and teat morphology in relation to individual milk yield remain poorly characterized, and farm-level confounding inflates apparent associations in multi-farm data....

The critical flicker fusion frequency (cFFF) refers to the frequency at which a regularly recurring change of light stimuli is perceived as steady. The cFFF threshold is often assessed in clinics to evaluate the temporal characteristics of the visual...

Background and Objectives: Carbetocin is increasingly used for postpartum hemorrhage (PPH) prophylaxis, but its selection in routine practice may bias comparisons with oxytocin. This observational study examined the association between the agent rece...

Soil penetration resistance (PR) is widely used to assess compaction, although water content and field position can confound its relationships with crops. This study characterised depth-specific PR, identified its principal soil predictors, and evalu...

The prevalence of health problems during childhood and adolescence is high in developing countries such as Brazil. Social inequality, violence, and malnutrition have strong impact on youth health. To better understand these issues we propose to combi...

Background/Objectives: Temporomandibular disorders (TMDs) are a heterogeneous subset of orthodontic conditions with persistent diagnostic and reporting variability. This review compared transparency, reporting quality, and spin prevalence in TMD/TMJ...

Intestinal dysbiosis has been widely documented in inflammatory bowel diseases (IBDs) and is thought to influence the onset and perpetuation of gut inflammation. However, it remains unclear whether such bacterial changes rely in part on the modificat...

Case–control observational studies suggested that aspirin might prevent hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) in high-risk patients, even if randomized clinical trials are lacking. Information regarding aspirin in subjects who already developed HCC, e...

Background: Causality has recently been suggested to associate early childhood caries with psychomotor deficiency in preschoolers, where their causal interactions via other risk determinants remain unclear. Methods: To analyze such causality, we rand...

Background: The antimicrobial resistance crisis is driven by antibiotic overuse, often due to the difficulty in distinguishing bacterial from viral infections. In the European Union, acute respiratory tract infections account for about 38% of all ant...

Reference-library comparisons are widely used in target-focused cheminformatics to characterize the chemical space occupied by bioactive compounds. The separation obtained from such comparisons may, however, reflect differences in library provenance...

Smart-city advanced metering infrastructure enables utility-scale remote analytics, but some forms of under-registration closely resemble lawful changes in demand and are hard to model as anomalies. We study a narrow, physically motivated event famil...

We first want to thank the authors of the excellent review for their contributions to summarizing the confounders associated with critical flicker fusion frequency (CFFF) [...]

It has been suggested that molecular pathological mechanisms responsible for periodontitis can be linked with biochemical alterations in neurodegenerative disorders. Hypothetically, chronic systemic inflammation as a response to periodontitis plays a...

The vascularized fibula transfer is a well-established technique for extremity reconstruction, but operative planning and patient selection remains crucial. Although recently developed techniques for bone reconstruction, such as bone segment transfer...

Numerous variables can affect the assessment of language dominance using presurgical functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) in patients with brain tumors. This work organizes the variables into confounding and modulating factors. Confounding factors gi...

Sarcopenic obesity is closely associated with knee osteoarthritis (KOA) and has high risk of total knee replacement (TKR). In addition, poor nutrition status may lead to sarcopenia and physical frailty in KOA and is negatively associated with surgery...

Electromagnetic (EM) medical technologies are rapidly expanding worldwide for both diagnostics and therapeutics. As these technologies are low-cost and minimally invasive, they have been the focus of significant research efforts in recent years. Such...

Measures of narcissism often overlap with global self-esteem, risking that observed associations with outcomes may reflect associations of self-regard rather than actual narcissistic dispositions. The present study examined whether common narcissism...

The relationships between selected upper airway-related symptoms (speech disturbances, voice disorders, cough, and breathing abnormalities) and mental illness and sleep disorders have been previously demonstrated. However, these relationships have no...

Online review platforms are core infrastructure of digital commerce, yet the business-level determinants of review content remain poorly understood. We examine how service participation intensity, the degree to which a business format requires active...