The therapeutic effect of intralesional interferon in classical Kaposi's sarcoma

Interferon alpha-2a, which has antineoplastic, antiviral, immunomodulatory, and antiangiogenic effects, was evaluated in a prospective study, treating 10 lesions of patients with classical Kaposi's sarcoma. Ten patients received injections of interferon alpha-2a intralesionally in a dose of 3 million units three times weekly for 4 weeks, and in a variable dose for 4 more weeks. Two of the patients had a complete response, and in one of these, distant lesions also responded. Seven had a partial response, and one did not respond. The treatment was generally well tolerated. The results of our study support the use of interferon in the therapy of classical Kaposi's sarcoma, although it would appear that to achieve maximum efficacy, a longer period of treatment is needed.     

Convergence of the inductive and deductive models in the measurement of reasoning abilities.

Reviews evidence concerning the congruence of the inductive and deductive models in logic and presents support for this congruence in the context of new test items designed to exemplify general-to-particular induction. Data from the Professional and Administrative Career Examination corroborate the logical foundations of deduction and induction as convergent models. Factor analysis of the items demonstrated factorial convergence, which lends additional support to the postulate of convergence. Implications for the understanding of cognitive processes and for psychometric practice are discussed in relation to such issues as the use of verbal and nonverbal test media, redundancy of measurement, and problem-solving strategies. (50 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Recommender systems in the healthcare domain: state-of-the-art and research issues

Journal of Intelligent Information Systems - Nowadays, a vast amount of clinical data scattered across different sites on the Internet hinders users from finding helpful information for their...     

Renewable Hydrogen: Modular Concepts from Production over Storage to the Consumer

A simulation tool called HYDRA to optimize individual hydrogen infrastructure layouts is presented. The different electrolyzer technologies, namely proton exchange membrane electrolysis, anion exchange membrane electrolysis, alkaline electrolysis, and solid oxide electrolysis, as well as hydrogen storage possibilities are described in more detail and evaluated. To illustrate the application opportunities of HYDRA, three project examples are discussed. The examples include central and decentral applications while taking the usage of hydrogen into account.     

Learning to recommend similar items from human judgments

Similar item recommendations—a common feature of many Web sites—point users to other interesting objects given a currently inspected item. A common way of computing such recommendations is to use a similarity function, which expresses how much alike two given objects are. Such similarity functions are usually designed based on the specifics of the given application domain. In this work, we explore how such functions can be learned from human judgments of similarities between objects, using two domains of “quality and taste”—cooking recipe and movie recommendation—as guiding scenarios. In our approach, we first collect a few thousand pairwise similarity assessments with the help of crowdworkers. Using these data, we then train different machine learning models that can be used as similarity functions to compare objects. Offline analyses reveal for both application domains that models that combine different types of item characteristics are the best predictors for human-perceived similarity. To further validate the usefulness of the learned models, we conducted additional user studies. In these studies, we exposed participants to similar item recommendations using a set of models that were trained with different feature subsets. The results showed that the combined models that exhibited the best offline prediction performance led to the highest user-perceived similarity, but also to recommendations that were considered useful by the participants, thus confirming the feasibility of our approach.

     

Automatic identification of bacterial types using statistical imaging methods

The objective of the current study is to develop an automatic tool to identify microbiological data types using computer-vision and statistical modeling techniques. Bacteriophage (phage) typing methods are used to identify and extract representative profiles of bacterial types out of species such as the Staphylococcus aureus. Current systems rely on the subjective reading of profiles by a human expert. This process is time-consuming and prone to errors, especially as technology is enabling the increase in the number of phages used for typing. The statistical methodology presented in this work, provides for an automated, objective and robust analysis of visual data, along with the ability to cope with increasing data volumes.     

Effect of processing on amine formation and the lipid profile of cod (Gadus morhua) roe

The processing of fish roe leads to changes in its chemical composition, the extent of which depends on the techniques and additives employed. This study aimed to investigate the effects of ripening temperature and the use of sodium benzoate and citric acid on the quality of ripened cod roe, with respect to the contents of volatile base nitrogen (VBN), trimethylamine (TMA), biogenic amines (BA) and on the lipid composition. In comparison with fresh roes, ripened roes presented higher contents of VBN, TMA, BA and the proportion of free fatty acids regardless of the temperature and additives used during the ripening process. The greatest increases were observed in the samples ripened at 17 °C without additives, in which histamine was detected at 8.8 mg/100 g. A low ripening temperature was the main factor responsible for minimising changes in the cod roe composition. The addition of sodium benzoate as a preservative or citric acid to decrease the pH value had a significant effect in maintaining the quality of the cod roes, mainly at high ripening temperature.     

Content-based artwork recommendation: integrating painting metadata with neural and manually-engineered visual features

User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction - Recommender Systems help us deal with information overload by suggesting relevant items based on our personal preferences. Although there is a large...