A hybrid knowledge and ensemble classification approach for prediction of venous thromboembolism

Clinical narratives such as progress summaries, lab reports, surgical reports, and other narrative texts contain key biomarkers about a patient's health. Evidence-based preventive medicine needs accurate semantic and sentiment analysis to extract and classify medical features as the input to appropriate machine learning classifiers. However, the traditional approach of using single classifiers is limited by the need for dimensionality reduction techniques, statistical feature correlation, a faster learning rate, and the lack of consideration of the semantic relations among features. Hence, extracting semantic and sentiment-based features from clinical text and combining multiple classifiers to create an ensemble intelligent system overcomes many limitations and provides a more robust prediction outcome. The selection of an appropriate approach and its interparameter dependency becomes key for the success of the ensemble method. This paper proposes a hybrid knowledge and ensemble learning framework for prediction of venous thromboembolism (VTE) diagnosis consisting of the following components: a VTE ontology, semantic extraction and sentiment assessment of risk factor framework, and an ensemble classifier. Therefore, a component-based analysis approach was adopted for evaluation using a data set of 250 clinical narratives where knowledge and ensemble achieved the following results with and without semantic extraction and sentiment assessment of risk factor, respectively: a precision of 81.8% and 62.9%, a recall of 81.8% and 57.6%, an F measure of 81.8% and 53.8%, and a receiving operating characteristic of 80.1% and 58.5% in identifying cases of VTE.     

Sensitive Mother-to-Adolescent Disclosures After Divorce: Is the Experience of Sons Different From That of Daughters?

This study addressed two main questions: (a) Are adolescent sons and daughters exposed to sensitive maternal disclosures after divorce with similar frequency and in similar detail? and (b) Does gender act as a moderator in the association between maternal disclosures and adolescent adjustment difficulties? Forced-choice and open-ended data were collected from 194 adolescents within 2 years after their parents' divorce. Quantitative analyses revealed that although the majority of adolescents experience some level of maternal disclosure, neither frequency nor detail of maternal disclosure differed as a function of adolescent gender. Frequent and detailed maternal disclosures were associated with adolescent adjustment difficulties, primarily psychological distress. Gender did not moderate that significant association. Qualitative analysis shed light on the link between maternal disclosures and adolescent distress, suggested the importance of how disclosures are made, and revealed several gender differences in reactions to maternal disclosures. Implications of the findings are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Social Support and Social Strain Among Husbands and Wives: A Multilevel Analysis.

In response to recent calls in the literature for within-person examinations of social support processes over time, this study explores the relationships of spousal support, spousal strain, and well-being among husbands and wives, both within the same day and across days. Eighty-three couples were interviewed and completed a structured diary twice daily for 1 week. The results of multilevel hierarchical modeling suggest that both spousal support and spousal strain made significant, independent contributions to concurrent negative affect, although only spousal support was a significant predictor of next-day negative affect. Spousal strain interacted with spousal support to predict next-day negative affect. Direct and moderating effects of perceived marital adjustment on negative affect were discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Repair of extensive ionizing-radiation DNA damage at 95 degrees C in the hyperthermophilic archaeon Pyrococcus furiosus

We investigated the capacity of the hyperthermophile Pyrococcus furiosus for DNA repair by measuring survival at high levels of 60Co gamma-irradiation. The P. furiosus 2-Mb chromosome was fragmented into pieces ranging from 500 kb to shorter than 30 kb at a dose of 2,500 Gy and was fully restored upon incubation at 95 degrees C. We suggest that recombination repair could be an extremely active repair mechanism in P. furiosus and that it might be an important determinant of survival of hyperthermophiles at high temperatures.     

Providing information to clients about psychological tests: A survey of attorneys' and law students' attitudes.

Surveyed 70 practicing attorneys and 150 law students to determine the extent to which they felt it was their responsibility to inform clients they referred for psychological testing about the testing process and about the validity scales on tests. Results showed that almost 50% of the attorneys and over 33% of the students believe that clients referred for testing always or usually should be informed of validity scales on tests. These results suggest that many test takers, particularly in forensic settings, may have information about validity scales that facilitates their giving biased responses without detection. Psychologists doing forensic evaluations should be alert to this possibility and should consider using more than one approach to detect response distortions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Correlation between late potentials duration and QTc dispersion: Is there a causal relationship?

This article is based on the current draft of a new AAMI equipment management standard (AAMI EQ56). Until now, no documentation has clearly specified the requirements for an equipment management program. At the time of the writing of this article, a February 1996 Committee Draft of the new standard was out for ballot and public review. Comments will be reviewed at a meeting of the AAMI Patient-Care Equipment Management Committee in June 1996, in conjunction with the AAMI Annual Meeting, and the standard could be formalized as early as October 1996. Readers should keep in mind that, while the final standard may differ somewhat from the material presented here, the author of this article and BI&T's staff felt that the interest of a very large portion of the AAMI membership warranted an advance article describing the content and general direction of the document.     

Knowledge representation for mathematical discovery: Three experiments in graph theory

This paper describes the nature of mathematical discovery (including concept definition and exploration, example generation, and theorem conjecture and proof), and considers how such an intelligent process can be simulated by a machine. Although the material is drawn primarily from graph theory, the results are immediately relevant to research in mathematical discovery and learning.The thought experiment, a protocol paradigm for the empirical study of mathematical discovery, highlights behavioral objectives for machine simulation. This thought experiment provides an insightful account of the discovery process, motivates a framework for describing mathematical knowledge in terms of object classes, and is a rich source of advice on the design of a system to perform discovery in graph theory. The evaluation criteria for a discovery system, it is argued, must include both a set of behavior to display (behavioral objectives) and a target set of facts to be discovered (factual knowledge).Cues from the thought experiment are used to formulate two hierarchies of representational languages for graphy theory. The first hierarchy is based on the superficial terminology and knowledge of the thought experiment. Generated by formal grammars with set-theoretic semantics, this eminently reasonable approach ultimately fails to meet the factual knowledge criteria. The second hierarchy uses declarative expressions, each of which has a semantic interpretation as a stylized, recursive algorithm that defines a class by generating it correctly and completely. A simple version of one such representation is validated by a successful, implemented system called Graph Theorist (GT) for mathematical research in graph theory. GT generates correct examples, defines and explores new graph theory properties, and conjectures and proves theorems.Several themes run through this paper. The first is the dual goals, behavioral objectives and factural knowledge to be discovered, and the multiplicity of their demands on a discovery system. The second theme is the central role of object classes to knowledge representation. The third is the increased power and flexibility of a constructive (generator) definition over the more traditional predicate (tester) definition. The final theme is the importance of examples and recursion in mathematical knowledge. The results provide important guidance for further research in the simulation of mathematical discovery.     

Institutional research productivity in industrial/organizational psychology.

Updated the report of W. M. Cox and V. Catt (see record 1978-21651-001) by determining the 40 top contributing institutions to the Journal of Applied Psychology, 1976–1982, and assessed the generalizability of productivity rankings based solely on contributions to this journal. A number of industrial and organizational psychologists were asked to indicate all the journals in which psychologists in the field were likely to publish. Five journals suggested by these nominators were used for comparison in the review. A list of the 40 most productive graduate programs based on these 5 journals is included. Results show the inadequacy of Cox and Catt's decision to base productivity ratings solely on contributions to 1 journal. Using 5 journals, 4 programs were catapulted into the top 10 rankings, while 7 programs dropped from top rankings in the Cox study (1970–1975) to below the 65th rank in the present study. Using only the Journal of Applied Psychology contributions, 2 of these programs ranked in the top 10, 1976–1982. (5 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)