Search results for " Bias"
showing 10 items of 437 documents
Antifungal agents for preventing fungal infections in non-neutropenic critically ill patients
2016
Background Invasive fungal infections are important causes of morbidity and mortality among critically ill patients. Early institution of antifungal therapy is pivotal for mortality reduction. Starting a targeted antifungal therapy after culture positivity and fungi identification requires a long time. Therefore, alternative strategies (globally defined as 'untargeted antifungal treatments') for antifungal therapy institution in patients without proven microbiological evidence of fungal infections have been discussed by international guidelines. This review was originally published in 2006 and updated in 2016. This updated review provides additional evidence for the clinician dealing with s…
Cardiorespiratory fitness and all-cause mortality in adults diagnosed with cancer systematic review and meta-analysis.
2021
INTRODUCTION The inverse association between cardiorespiratory fitness and all-cause mortality in apparently healthy populations has been previously reported; however, the existence of this association among adults diagnosed with cancer is unclear. AIM To determine the association between cardiorespiratory fitness and all-cause mortality in adults diagnosed with cancer. METHODS Medline, Embase, and SPORTDiscus databases were searched. Eligible prospective cohort studies that examined the association of cardiorespiratory fitness with all-cause mortality in adults diagnosed with cancer were included. Hazard ratios (HRs) with associated 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were extracted from studie…
Learning from good examples
1995
The usual information in inductive inference for the purposes of learning an unknown recursive function f is the set of all input /output examples (n,f(n)), n ∈ ℕ. In contrast to this approach we show that it is considerably more powerful to work with finite sets of “good” examples even when these good examples are required to be effectively computable. The influence of the underlying numberings, with respect to which the learning problem has to be solved, to the capabilities of inference from good examples is also investigated. It turns out that nonstandard numberings can be much more powerful than Godel numberings.
Toxic Theisms? New Strategies for Prebunking Religious Belief-Behaviour Complexes
2020
This article offers a brief epidemiological analysis and description of some of the main cognitive (and coalitional) biases that can facilitate the emergence and enable the maintenance of a broad category of toxic traditions, which will be referred to here as “religious” belief-behaviour complexes (BBCs) or “theisms”. I argue that such BBCs played an “adaptive” role in the Upper Paleolithic and have continued to “work” throughout most of human history by enhancing the species’ capacity for material production and promoting its biological reproduction. However, today the theist credulity and conformity biases that surreptitiously shape these kinds of social assemblages have now becom…
Fuzzy C-Means Segmentation on Brain MR Slices Corrupted by RF-Inhomogeneity
2007
Brain MR Images corrupted by RF-Inhomogeneity exhibit brightness variations in such a way that a standard Fuzzy C-Means (fcm) segmentation algorithm fails. As a consequence, modified versions of the algorithm can be found in literature, which take into account the artifact. In this work we show that the application of a suitable pre-processing algorithm, already presented by the authors, followed by a standard fcm segmentation achieves good results also. The experimental results ones are compared with those obtained using SPM5, which can be considered the state of the art algorithm oriented to brain segmentation and bias removal.
Illumination Correction on MR Images
2006
Objective. An important artifact corrupting Magnetic Resonance Images is the rf inhomogeneity, also called bias artifact. This anomaly produces an abnormal illumination fluctuation on the image, due to variations of the device magnetic field. This artifact is particularly strong on images acquired with a device specialized on upper and lower limbs due to their coil configuration. A method based on homomorphic filtering aimed to suppress this artifact was proposed by Guillemaud. This filter has two faults: it doesnt provide an indication about the cutoff frequency (cf) and introduces another illumination artifact on the edges of the foreground. This work is an improvement to this method because i…
Operational forecasting of daily summer maximum and minimum temperatures in the Valencia Region
2013
Extreme-temperature events have a great impact on human society. Thus, knowledge of summer temperatures can be very useful both for the general public and for organizations whose workers operate in the open. An accurate forecasting of summer maximum and minimum temperatures could help to predict heatwave conditions and permit the implementation of strategies aimed at minimizing the negative effects that high temperatures have on human health. The objective of this work is to evaluate the skill of the regional atmospheric and modelling system (RAMS) model in determining daily summer maximum and minimum temperatures in the Valencia Region. For this, we have used the real-time configuration of…
A Comprehensive Spatiotemporal Framework for Hedonic Pricing: Integrating the Comparable Sales Approach and Minimizing Spatial Omitted Variable Bias
2019
This paper develops a theoretical and methodological framework that integrates Hedonic Pricing (HP), grid comparable sales approach (CSA), and nearest neighbors into a general spatiotemporal specification. By explicitly providing a theoretical justification for introducing spatial (or spatiotemporal) econometrics to HP, this approach is not only relevant to house price forecasting and automated valuation models (AVM) but also to valuing environmental goods capitalized in housing and to all other fields employing house pricing models. The resulting econometric CSA and spatiotemporal Durbin models provide higher prediction accuracy and reliability to alternatives by reducing the spatially-del…
Directionnalité graphique et dominance manuelle : une perspective développementale et interculturelle
2012
In the present work, we try to provide some understanding about the factors underlying the directional tendencies, by examining the impact of biomechanical constraints and cultural habits on directionality in graphic movements. French and Syrian subjects, children and adults, were compared in six experiments in order, to put in evidence the cognitive and psychomotor differences caused by the fact that the Eastern and Western cultures oppose on the directionality of writing and reading habits, and that the two hands are opposite in the directionality by adopting movements determined by biomechanical constraints. Likewise, this comparison allowed us to determine the relative strength of these…
Recurrences following treatment of proliferative verrucous leukoplakia: A systematic review and meta-analysis.
2021
Objective A systematic review and meta-analysis was made of the incidence of recurrences in patients with proliferative verrucous leukoplakia subjected to different types of treatment. Methods The study was carried out following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) statement guidelines. A literature search was made in the Medline (PubMed), EMBASE and Web of Science databases, together with a manual search, covering the period from 1985 to January 2020, with no language restrictions. Studies were included if they described treatments applied to at least 10 patients with the corresponding outcomes. Methodological quality was evaluated using Jadad sca…