The use of expert knowledge to quantify a Bayesian Network (BN) is necessary when data is not available. This however raises questions regarding how opinions from multiple experts can be used in a BN. Linear pooling is a popular method for combining...
3 September 2021
Reliability, accuracy, and timeliness of diagnostic testing for SARS-CoV-2 infection have allowed adequate public health management of the disease, thus notably helping the timely mapping of viral spread within the community. Furthermore, the most vu...
The Loess Plateau is highly susceptible to landslides due to its fragile geological structure and frequent human activities, particularly old landslides with historical structural damage. The features of these landslides in remote sensing images beco...
The testing capacity of the laboratory is paramount for better control of the pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2. The pooling method is promising to increase testing capacity, and the use of direct NAAT-based detection of SARS-CoV-2 on a non-invasive spec...
The problem of combining statistical evidence concerning an unknown, contained in each of the k Bayesian inference bases, is discussed. This can be considered as being related to the problem of pooling k priors to determine a consensus prior, but the...
Acquisition of labeled data for supervised Hyperspectral Image (HSI) classification is expensive in terms of both time and costs. Moreover, manual selection and labeling are often subjective and tend to induce redundancy into the classifier. Active l...
Objectives: Hypersensitivity reactions (HSRs) are uncommon but serious adverse events following the administration of iodinated contrast media (ICM) prior to CT imaging. While premedication is almost universally given in high-risk patients, there is...
In October 2016, Public Health England was initially notified of four cases of cryptosporidiosis among users of two swimming pools. We investigated to identify further cases, the outbreak source, and ensure the implementation of appropriate control m...
18 November 2015
Pooling biological specimens prior to performing expensive laboratory assays has been shown to be a cost effective approach for estimating parameters of interest. In addition to requiring specialized statistical techniques, however, the pooling of s...
Refining microstructure is an important issue for laser additive manufacturing (LAM) of titanium alloy. In the present work, the microstructures of LAM-fabricated Ti6Al4V alloy were refined using a low energy density with the combination of a small s...
This study extends the political science and political psychology literature on the political ideology of lawmakers by addressing the following question: How stable is a legislator’s political ideology over time? In doing so, we employ Nokken&n...
The transfer of water from a swimming pool to the treatment location is key in determining the effectiveness of water treatment by filtration in removing turbidity and managing the risk from particulate material, including microbial pathogens, such a...
Bayesian estimation of latent variable models provides some unique advantages to researchers working with small samples and complex models when compared with the more commonly used maximum likelihood approach. A key aspect of Bayesian modeling involv...
Although primary studies have reported the safety and efficacy of LITT as a primary treatment in glioma, they are limited by sample sizes and institutional variation in stereotactic parameters such as temperature and laser power. The current literatu...
Breast cancer accounts for 30% of all female cancers. Accurately distinguishing dangerous malignant tumors from benign harmless ones is key to ensuring patients receive lifesaving treatments on time. However, as doctors currently do not identify 10%...
The aim of this review was to delve into the extent of mosquito virome coverage (proportion of viral reads) via meta-viromic sequencing and uncover potential factors of heterogeneity that could impact this coverage. Data sources were PubMed, Web of S...
15 September 2021
Ambient air pollution is projected to become a major environmental risk in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Research into its health impacts is hindered by limited data. We aimed to investigate the cross-sectional relationship between particulate matter wit...
This paper discusses Bayesian model averaging (BMA) in Stochastic Frontier Analysis and investigates inference sensitivity to prior assumptions made about the scale parameter of (in)efficiency. We turn our attention to the “standard” prio...
Previous studies have demonstrated that cold pools play a pivotal role in the initiation and organization of convection, yet their influence on the evolution of gust fronts (GFs) remains inadequately understood. A destructive wind event associated wi...
Background and Objectives: Statins are among the most prescribed medications globally, primarily due to their potent lipid-lowering capabilities. This systematic review aims to identify, synthesize and evaluate current evidence regarding the potentia...
Biomarkers for the early detection of pancreatic cancer are urgently needed. The aim of this pilot study was to evaluate changes in serum N-glycoproteins and their glycosylation status prior to clinical presentation of pancreatic cancer that may be p...
31 July 2013
Vector surveillance for infectious diseases is labor intensive and constantly threatened by budget decisions. We report on outcomes of an undergraduate research experience designed to build surveillance capacity for West Nile Virus (WNV) in Montana (...
Oral fluid (OF) can be a simple, cheap and non-invasive alternative to serum or meat juice for the diagnosis and surveillance of important pathogens in pigs. This study was conducted on four Salmonella Typhimurium-positive farrow-to-finish pig farms:...
For more than a decade, both academia and industry have focused attention on the computer vision and in particular the computational color constancy (CVCC). The CVCC is used as a fundamental preprocessing task in a wide range of computer vision appli...
With the mass vaccination program for COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, there has been sufficient real-world study (RWS) on the topic to summarize their safety in the total population and in immunocompromised (IC) patients who were excluded from phase 3 clinic...
Recent trials provide evidence that HER2 is a potential new target for patients with colorectal cancer. While HER2-positive tumors do not show a very encouraging response to anti-HER2-positive agents like trastuzumab alone, promising results have bee...
18 July 2018
Introduction: Prior meta-analysis has reported mortality rates among post-operative bariatric patients, but they have not considered psychiatric factors like suicide contributing to mortality. Objectives: The current meta-analysis aims to determine t...
Contrary to traditional assumptions, recent evidence suggests that neoadjuvant systemic therapy (NST) given for invasive breast cancer may eradicate co-existent ductal carcinoma in-situ (DCIS), which may facilitate de-escalation of breast resections....
Trans-1-amino-3-18F-fluorocyclobutanecarboxylic-acid (anti-[18F]-FACBC) has been approved for the detection of prostate cancer (PCa) in patients with elevated prostate-specific-antigen following prior treatment. This review and meta-analysis aimed to...
Tumor hypoxia is a negative prognostic factor in many tumors and is predictive of metastatic spread and poor responsiveness to both chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Purpose: To assess the feasibility of using 18F-Fluoroazomycin arabinoside (FAZA) PET/M...
Background: Contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) is a diagnostic tool that is gaining popularity for its ability to improve overall diagnostic accuracy in bladder cancer (BC) staging. Our aim is to determine the cumulative diagnostic performance of CE...
As the direction and strategies of new ventures depend on the top management team (TMT)’s stability and continuous efforts, we investigate the relationship between executive turnover and research and development (R&D) investment investment....
In this paper, we present FVR-Net, which is a novel finger vein recognition network using a convolutional neural network (CNN) with a hybrid pooling mechanism. The scheme is based on the use of a block-wise feature extraction network to extract discr...
Three regional gene pools of Polyprion americanus have been described so far, i.e., the North Atlantic, the Southwest Atlantic, and the Indo-Pacific Ocean. However, there is taxonomic uncertainty about the Southeast Atlantic population and there is s...
In this contribution, we present a physically motivated heat source model for the numerical modeling of laser beam welding processes. Since the calibration of existing heat source models, such as the conic or Goldak model, is difficult, the represent...
Phenotypes are necessary for genomic evaluations and management. Sometimes genomics can be used to measure phenotypes when other methods are difficult or expensive. Prolificacy of bulls used in multiple-bull pastures for commercial beef production is...
Background: Solid organ transplant recipients (SOTRs) are highly vulnerable to severe COVID-19 infection, yet initial vaccine trials provided limited data on efficacy and safety in this immunocompromised population. Heterogeneous seroconversion rates...
Temperate conifer forests in the Colorado Front Range are fire-adapted ecosystems where wildland fires leave a legacy in the form of char and charcoal. Long-term soil charcoal C (CC) pools result from the combined effects of wildland fires, abovegrou...
Vertical distributions of biogenic silica (bSi), particulate inorganic carbon (PIC) and key biomineral-forming phytoplankton indicate vertical zoning, or partitioning, during the late summer stratified period in the northeast Atlantic. Coccolithophor...
The epidemiology of different respiratory viral infections is believed to be affected by prior viral infections in addition to seasonal effects. This PROSPERO-registered systematic review identified 7388 studies, of which six met our criteria to answ...
In Bayesian statistics, prior specification has an important role in determining the quality of posterior estimates. We use expert judgments to quantify uncertain quantities and produce appropriate prior distribution. The aim of this study was to qua...
Zika virus (ZIKV) is an important arbovirus, responsible for recent outbreaks of Guillain Barré Syndrome and Congenital Zika Syndrome (CZS). After thousands of CZS cases, ZIKV is under constant surveillance in Brazil. Reliable and robust detec...
Preventive measures for infectious diseases caused by the harmful plant pathogenic bacterium Xylella fastidiosa include inspections and diagnostic tests on imported consignments of plants and in nurseries. Currently, mandatory checks on plant propaga...
Since its discovery, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) has emerged as an important technology for the diagnosis and identification of infectious diseases. It is a highly sensitive and reliable nucleic acids (NA) detection tool for various sample types....
(1) Background: The objective of this review was to synthesize available data on the use of machine learning to evaluate its accuracy (as determined by pooled sensitivity and specificity) in detecting keratoconus (KC), and measure reporting completen...
Background: We aimed to evaluate the incidence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus type-2 (SARS-CoV2) vaccine-related hypermetabolic lymphadenopathy (HLA) and evaluate which time point produces the least number of false-positive findings...
Background: Advanced adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC) remains a challenging malignancy with limited therapeutic options. Multi-kinase inhibitors (MKIs), either alone or in combination with immuno-oncology (IO) agents, have been investigated in recent s...
Accurate and real-time detection of polyps in colonoscopy is a critical task for the early prevention of colorectal cancer. The primary difficulties include insufficient extraction of multi-scale contextual cues for polyps of different sizes, ineffic...
(1) Background: Ovarian tissue transplantation with adipose tissue-derived stem cells (ASCs) has been shown to enhance graft vascularization and increase follicle survival after a short interval of 7 days. The aim of the present study was to investig...
Prior to the introduction of COVID-19 vaccines, patients with severe mental illness (SMI) were at greater risk of COVID-19-related outcomes than the general population. It is not yet clear whether COVID-19 vaccines have reduced the risk gap. We syste...
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