Search results for "Random"

Tibial Nerve Block: Supramalleolar or Retromalleolar Approach? A Randomized Trial in 110 Participants.

2020

Of the five nerves that innervate the foot, the one in which anesthetic blocking presents the greatest difficulty is the tibial nerve. The aim of this clinical trial was to establish a protocol for two tibial nerve block anesthetic techniques to later compare the anesthetic efficiency of retromalleolar blocking and supramalleolar blocking in order to ascertain whether the supramalleolar approach achieved a higher effective blocking rate. A total of 110 tibial nerve blocks were performed. Location of the injection site was based on a prior ultrasound assessment of the tibial nerve. The block administered was 3 mL of 2% mepivacaine. The two anesthetic techniques under study provided very simi…

Effects of Ribavirin Dose Reduction vs Erythropoietin for Boceprevir-Related Anemia in Patients With Chronic Hepatitis C Virus Genotype 1 Infection—A…

2013

International audience; Background & AimsTreatment of hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection with boceprevir, peginterferon, and ribavirin can lead to anemia, which has been managed by reducing ribavirin dose and/or erythropoietin therapy. We assessed the effects of these anemia management strategies on rates of sustained virologic response (SVR) and safety.MethodsPatients (n = 687) received 4 weeks of peginterferon and ribavirin followed by 24 or 44 weeks of boceprevir (800 mg, 3 times each day) plus peginterferon and ribavirin. Patients who became anemic (levels of hemoglobin approximately ≤10 g/dL) during the study treatment period (n = 500) were assigned to groups that were managed by ribavi…

In vivo versus augmented reality exposure in the treatment of small animal phobia: A randomized controlled trial

2016

Although in vivo exposure is the treatment of choice for specific phobias, some acceptability problems have been associated with it. Virtual Reality exposure has been shown to be as effective as in vivo exposure, and it is widely accepted for the treatment of specific phobias, but only preliminary data are available in the literature about the efficacy of Augmented Reality. The purpose of the present study was to examine the efficacy and acceptance of two treatment conditions for specific phobias in which the exposure component was applied in different ways: In vivo exposure (N = 31) versus an Augmented Reality system (N = 32) in a randomized controlled trial. “One-session treatment” guidel…

Spatio-temporal behaviour of five picophytoplankton populations in Tyrrhe- nian Sea: Model and data

2014

Recent works presented detailed analyses of spatio-temporal dynamics in marine ecosystems, reproducing real vertical distributions of phytoplankton biomass. These study however do not take into account the changes in environmental variables. On the contrary, seasonal variations can influence considerably the primary production, i.e. phytoplankton biomass, in marine ecosystems, determining significative consequences in the whole food chain, in particular fish species, whose growth is mainly explained by seasonal changes in the chlorophyll concentration, a marker of phytoplankton species. Here we present a one-dimensional reaction-diffusion-taxis model to describe the spatio-temporal dynamics…

Reaction-diffusion-taxis model for spatio-temporal dynamics of five picophytoplankton populations

2014

Recently new models were devised to study spatio-temporal dynamics of phytoplankton populations in view of obtaining more precise predictions of the vertical biomass distributions in marine ecosystems. These studies can be crucial from the point of view of shery. Indeed the abundance of fi sh species is strictly connected with primary production, i.e. phytoplankton biomass, responsible for chlorophyll concentration. In this work a one-dimensional deterministic reaction-di ffusion-taxis model is used to reproduce the spatio-temporal dynamics, along a water column, of five picophytoplankton populations sampled in a real ecosystem. In our analysis, to better reproduce the spatio-temporal behav…

Eminence, or rather eloquence, or rather economy-based medicine?

2004

A GRASP algorithm for constrained two-dimensional non-guillotine cutting problems

2005

This paper presents a greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP) for the constrained two-dimensional non-guillotine cutting problem, the problem of cutting the rectangular pieces from a large rectangle so as to maximize the value of the pieces cut. We investigate several strategies for the constructive and improvement phases and several choices for critical search parameters. We perform extensive computational experiments with well-known instances previously reported, first to select the best alternatives and then to compare the efficiency of our algorithm with other procedures.

GRASP with path relinking for the orienteering problem

2014

In this paper, we address an optimization problem resulting from the combination of the well-known travelling salesman and knapsack problems. In particular, we target the orienteering problem, originated in the context of sport, which consists of maximizing the total score associated with the vertices visited in a path within the available time. The problem, also known as the selective travelling salesman problem, is NP-hard and can be formulated as an integer linear program. Since the 1980s, several solution methods for this problem have been developed and applied to a variety of fields, particularly in routing and tourism. We propose a heuristic method—based on the Greedy Randomized Adapt…

Statistical analysis of β decays and the effective value of gA in the proton-neutron quasiparticle random-phase approximation framework

2016

We perform a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) statistical analysis of a number of measured groundstate-to-ground-state single β+/electron-capture and β− decays in the nuclear mass range of A = 62–142. The corresponding experimental comparative half-lives (log f t values) are compared with the theoretical ones obtained by the use of the proton-neutron quasiparticle random-phase approximation (pnQRPA) with G-matrixbased effective interactions. The MCMC analysis is performed separately for 47 isobaric triplets and 28 more extended isobaric chains of nuclei to extract values and uncertainties for the effective axial-vector coupling constant gA in nuclear-structure calculations performed in the p…

Bayesian methods in cost-effectiveness studies: objectivity, computation and other relevant aspects.

2009

In a probabilistic sensitivity analysis (PSA) of a cost-effectiveness (CE) study, the unknown parameters are considered as random variables. A crucial question is what probabilistic distribution is suitable for synthesizing the available information (mainly data from clinical trials) about these parameters. In this context, the important role of Bayesian methodology has been recognized, where the parameters are of a random nature. We explore, in the context of CE analyses, how formal objective Bayesian methods can be implemented. We fully illustrate the methodology using two CE problems that frequently appear in the CE literature. The results are compared with those obtained with other popu…