Search results for "Size determination"

Sympathetic blocks for visceral cancer pain management: A systematic review and EAPC recommendations.

2015

The neurolytic blocks of sympathetic pathways, including celiac plexus block (CPB) and superior hypogastric plexus block (SHPB) , have been used for years. The aim of this review was to assess the evidence to support the performance of sympathetic blocks in cancer patients with abdominal visceral pain. Only comparison studies were included. All data from the eligible trials were analyzed using the GRADE system. Twenty-seven controlled studies were considered. CPB, regardless of the technique used, improved analgesia and/or decrease opioid consumption, and decreased opioid-induced adverse effects in comparison with a conventional analgesic treatment. In one study patients treated with superi…

The efficacy of balneotherapy, mud therapy and spa therapy in patients with osteoarthritis: an overview of reviews.

2021

Osteoarthritis is a degenerative disease considered a leading cause of functional disability. Its treatment is based on a combination of pharmacological and non-pharmacological interventions, but the role of these latter is still debated. This overview of systematic reviews aimed at evaluating the short-term efficacy of different thermal modalities in patients with osteoarthritis. We searched PubMed, Scopus, CINHAL, Web of Science, ProQuest and the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews from inception until October 2020, with no language restrictions. We selected the following outcomes a priori: pain, stiffness and quality of life. Seventeen systematic reviews containing 27 unique relevant…

2013

Currently, a growing number of programs become available in statistical software for multiple imputation of missing values. Among others, two algorithms are mainly implemented: Expectation Maximization (EM) and Multiple Imputation by Chained Equations (MICE). They have been shown to work well in large samples or when only small proportions of missing data are to be imputed. However, some researchers have begun to impute large proportions of missing data or to apply the method to small samples. A simulation was performed using MICE on datasets with 50, 100 or 200 cases and four or eleven variables. A varying proportion of data (3% - 63%) was set as missing completely at random and subsequent…

Meta-analysis of the correlation between serum uric acid level and carotid intima-media thickness

2021

Objective Recently, increasing epidemiological evidence has shown that there is a correlation between serum uric acid level (SUA) and carotid intima-media thickness (CIMT). This paper explored the relationship between them through meta-analysis. Methods PubMed, Cochrane Library, EMBASE, Web of Science and Google Scholar were searched to obtain literature. The keywords used to retrieve the literature were carotid intima thickness, intima-media thickness, carotid atherosclerosis, carotid stenosis, carotid artery, uric acid, blood uric acid, and hyperuricaemia. The retrieval time was from the establishment of the database through July 2020. Stata15.0 and RevMan5.3 software were used for stati…

Taopatch® combined with home-based training protocol to prevent sedentary lifestyle and biochemical changes in MS patients during COVID-19 pandemic

2021

In Multiple sclerosis (MS) it is important to preserve the residual physiological functions of subjects. The aim of the present study was to investigate the influence of nanotechnological device treatment combined with home-based training program (TP) on lactate level, hand grip strength and cervical mobility on MS patients. Seventeen MS patients were enrolled in the study and randomly assigned to an experimental group (EG) in which the Taopatch® nanotechnological device was applied or to a control group (CG). All the participants carried out a cervical range of motion (1) assessment and the hand grip test at baseline (T0) and after TP (T1), also investigating the lactate levels to figure o…

VIII: Statistik in klinischen Publikationen: Checklisten für Autoren

2003

The "Material and Methods" section of clinical research papers should reference major aspects concerning statistical planning and evaluation of the study design and the resulting clinical data. Particular focus is laid on the listing of methods for description and significance evaluation of the trial data, as well as on design-associated study determinants (randomisation and masking strategy, response rate evaluation, primary endpoints, power and sample size determination, multiple testing, software and methods for statistical analysis). Suggestions for the minimum content to be mentioned in a trial publication are listed in author check lists and are illustrated by means of the study synop…

Fallzahlplanung bei ophthalmologischen Studien*

2000

An essential aspect in the cooperation of clinic and biometry consists in designing of studies, e.g. during the preparation of grant applications or for review by official drug surveillance institutions. A central aspect in study planning is the design-adequate and well-documented prediction of sample size, which should be recommended for any intended study. Based on several examples for sample size planning in study designs, which are of common relevance for ophthalmology, guidelines are derived to enable clinical researchers to perform sample size planning on their own. The latter can be based on the various available software packages for sample size prediction.

The impact of sample reduction on PCA-based feature extraction for supervised learning

2006

"The curse of dimensionality" is pertinent to many learning algorithms, and it denotes the drastic raise of computational complexity and classification error in high dimensions. In this paper, different feature extraction (FE) techniques are analyzed as means of dimensionality reduction, and constructive induction with respect to the performance of Naive Bayes classifier. When a data set contains a large number of instances, some sampling approach is applied to address the computational complexity of FE and classification processes. The main goal of this paper is to show the impact of sample reduction on the process of FE for supervised learning. In our study we analyzed the conventional PC…

Editing prototypes in the finite sample size case using alternative neighborhoods

1998

The recently introduced concept of Nearest Centroid Neighborhood is applied to discard outliers and prototypes 111 class overlapping regions in order to improve the performance of the Nearest Neighbor rule through an editing procedure, This approach is related to graph based editing algorithms which also define alternative neighborhoods in terms of geornetric relations, Classical editing algorithms are compared to these alternative editing schemes using several synthetic and real data problems. The empirical results show that, the proposed editing algorithm constitutes a good trade-off among performance and computational burden.

Register data in sample allocations for small-area estimation

2018

The inadequate control of sample sizes in surveys using stratified sampling and area estimation may occur when the overall sample size is small or auxiliary information is insufficiently used. Very small sample sizes are possible for some areas. The proposed allocation based on multi-objective optimization uses a small-area model and estimation method and semi-collected empirical data annually collected empirical data. The assessment of its performance at the area and at the population levels is based on design-based sample simulations. Five previously developed allocations serve as references. The model-based estimator is more accurate than the design-based Horvitz–Thompson estimator and t…