Search results for "Information Storage and Retrieval"
showing 10 items of 48 documents
Scientific abstracts and plain language summaries in psychology: A comparison based on readability indices.
2020
Findings from psychological research are usually difficult to interpret for non-experts. Yet, non-experts resort to psychological findings to inform their decisions (e.g., whether to seek a psychotherapeutic treatment or not). Thus, the communication of psychological research to non-expert audiences has received increasing attention over the last years. Plain language summaries (PLS) are abstracts of peer-reviewed journal articles that aim to explain the rationale, methods, findings, and interpretation of a scientific study to non-expert audiences using non-technical language. Unlike media articles or other forms of accessible research summaries, PLS are usually written by the authors of th…
Characterization of entropy measures against data loss: Application to EEG records
2012
This study is aimed at characterizing three signal entropy measures, Approximate Entropy (ApEn), Sample Entropy (SampEn) and Multiscale Entropy (MSE) over real EEG signals when a number of samples are randomly lost due to, for example, wireless data transmission. The experimental EEG database comprises two main signal groups: control EEGs and epileptic EEGs. Results show that both SampEn and ApEn enable a clear distinction between control and epileptic signals, but SampEn shows a more robust performance over a wide range of sample loss ratios. MSE exhibits a poor behavior for ratios over a 40% of sample loss. The EEG non-stationary and random trends are kept even when a great number of samp…
Advice for health-care professionals on how to retrieve more efficiently scientifically strong and up-to-date studies on treatments by PubMed.
2008
AND trial (Title/Abstract))). Obviously, clini- cians using the PubMed Clinical Queries may be unaware of the PubMed search engine technical approach even whether they can remain unaware of what the PubMed search engine is doing. We demonstrated substantial mild retrieval bias of PubMed Clinical Queries filter focusing on therapy (narrow search) that can miss up-to-date scientifically information on treatments. This bias occurs because the search string does not consider the Britannic English variant of the term randomized (i.e., randomised). We suggested a slight change in the original search string by the addition of the term randomised as follows: (randomized controlled trial (Publicatio…
openSNP–A Crowdsourced Web Resource for Personal Genomics
2014
Genome-Wide Association Studies are widely used to correlate phenotypic traits with genetic variants. These studies usually compare the genetic variation between two groups to single out certain Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) that are linked to a phenotypic variation in one of the groups. However, it is necessary to have a large enough sample size to find statistically significant correlations. Direct-To-Consumer (DTC) genetic testing can supply additional data: DTC-companies offer the analysis of a large amount of SNPs for an individual at low cost without the need to consult a physician or geneticist. Over 100,000 people have already been genotyped through Direct-To-Consumer genet…
File system scalability with highly decentralized metadata on independent storage devices
2016
This paper discusses using hard drives that integrate a key-value interface and network access in the actual drive hardware (Kinetic storage platform) to supply file system functionality in a large scale environment. Taking advantage of higher-level functionality to handle metadata on the drives themselves, a serverless system architecture is proposed. Skipping path component traversal during the lookup operation is the key technique discussed in this paper to avoid performance degradation with highly decentralized metadata. Scalability implications are reviewed based on a fuse file system implementation. Peer Reviewed
PASSIM – an open source software system for managing information in biomedical studies
2007
Abstract Background One of the crucial aspects of day-to-day laboratory information management is collection, storage and retrieval of information about research subjects and biomedical samples. An efficient link between sample data and experiment results is absolutely imperative for a successful outcome of a biomedical study. Currently available software solutions are largely limited to large-scale, expensive commercial Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS). Acquiring such LIMS indeed can bring laboratory information management to a higher level, but often implies sufficient investment of time, effort and funds, which are not always available. There is a clear need for lightweig…
FASTdoop: A versatile and efficient library for the input of FASTA and FASTQ files for MapReduce Hadoop bioinformatics applications
2017
Abstract Summary MapReduce Hadoop bioinformatics applications require the availability of special-purpose routines to manage the input of sequence files. Unfortunately, the Hadoop framework does not provide any built-in support for the most popular sequence file formats like FASTA or BAM. Moreover, the development of these routines is not easy, both because of the diversity of these formats and the need for managing efficiently sequence datasets that may count up to billions of characters. We present FASTdoop, a generic Hadoop library for the management of FASTA and FASTQ files. We show that, with respect to analogous input management routines that have appeared in the Literature, it offers…
Harmonising and linking biomedical and clinical data across disparate data archives to enable integrative cross-biobank research
2015
A wealth of biospecimen samples are stored in modern globally distributed biobanks. Biomedical researchers worldwide need to be able to combine the available resources to improve the power of large-scale studies. A prerequisite for this effort is to be able to search and access phenotypic, clinical and other information about samples that are currently stored at biobanks in an integrated manner. However, privacy issues together with heterogeneous information systems and the lack of agreed-upon vocabularies have made specimen searching across multiple biobanks extremely challenging. We describe three case studies where we have linked samples and sample descriptions in order to facilitate glo…
A comparative analysis of the statistical properties of large mobile phone calling networks.
2014
Mobile phone calling is one of the most widely used communication methods in modern society. The records of calls among mobile phone users provide us a valuable proxy for the understanding of human communication patterns embedded in social networks. Mobile phone users call each other forming a directed calling network. If only reciprocal calls are considered, we obtain an undirected mutual calling network. The preferential communication behavior between two connected users can be statistically tested and it results in two Bonferroni networks with statistically validated edges. We perform a comparative analysis of the statistical properties of these four networks, which are constructed from …
A framework to analyse gender bias in epidemiological research
2007
The design and analysis of research may cause systematic gender dependent errors to be produced in results because of gender insensitivity or androcentrism. Gender bias in research could be defined as a systematically erroneous gender dependent approach related to social construct, which incorrectly regards women and men as similar/different. Most gender bias can be found in the context of discovery (development of hypotheses), but it has also been found in the context of justification (methodological process), which must be improved. In fact, one of the main effects of gender bias in research is partial or incorrect knowledge in the results, which are systematically different from the real…