Search results for "criteri"

Chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy: can a diagnosis be made in patients not fulfilling electrodiagnostic criteria?

2021

Background and purpose The aim was to identify the clinical and diagnostic investigations that may help to support a diagnosis of chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy (CIDP) in patients not fulfilling the European Federation of Neurological Societies and Peripheral Nerve Society (EFNS/PNS) electrodiagnostic criteria. Methods The data from patients with a clinical diagnosis of CIDP included in a national database were retrospectively reviewed. Results In all, 535 patients with a diagnosis of CIDP were included. This diagnosis fulfilled the EFNS/PNS criteria in 468 patients (87.2%) (definite in 430, probable in 33, possible in three, while two had chronic immune sensory p…

Artificial Decision Maker Driven by PSO : An Approach for Testing Reference Point Based Interactive Methods

2018

Over the years, many interactive multiobjective optimization methods based on a reference point have been proposed. With a reference point, the decision maker indicates desirable objective function values to iteratively direct the solution process. However, when analyzing the performance of these methods, a critical issue is how to systematically involve decision makers. A recent approach to this problem is to replace a decision maker with an artificial one to be able to systematically evaluate and compare reference point based interactive methods in controlled experiments. In this study, a new artificial decision maker is proposed, which reuses the dynamics of particle swarm optimization f…

A multi-objective and multi-criteria approach for district metered area design: water operation and quality analysis

2019

Water distribution network (WDN) operation may be improved by district metered area (DMA) design [1]. A first step to create DMAs uses graph theory and non-supervised learning, where physical features of the WDN, such as node coordinates, elevation and demand, are used for clustering purposes [2]. A second step is related to the necessary isolation of the clustered elements. For isolation purposes, it is important to determine the DMA entrances and, consequently, the needed cut-off valves. Closure of pipes and definition of DMA entrances can be set as an optimization problem with the costs associated to the valves, which are linked to pipe diameters, as a primary objective. However, placeme…

OTTIMIZZAZIONE DEI CRITERI DI SICUREZZA E DI COMFORT NELLA MOBILITA’ NON MOTORIZZATA: LA RETE CICLABILE DI PALERMO

2011

The Value of the Useless in the Urban Landscape of Small Islands

2015

Abstract. In the variety of the Italian landscape-cultural mosaic, the morphology of Favignana (Egadi Islands) is the outcome of the long-term relationship between natural environment and human actions that has drawn both natural and urban landscape. This relationship, that constitutes the Favignana’s architectural and landscape heritage, is often denied or forgotten because of transformations caused by a new demand of efficiency (usefulness?) in reference to an economic policy based on the tourism-related activities. In this case-study, the Analytic Network Process (ANP) (selected among the Multicriteria Analysis techniques because of its holistic approach) has applied to support the choic…

2014

The patient-doctor relationship (PDR) as perceived by the patient is an important concept in primary care and psychotherapy. The PDR Questionnaire (PDRQ-9) provides a brief measure of the therapeutic aspects of the PDR in primary care. We assessed the internal and external validity of the German version of the PDRQ-9 in a representative cross-sectional German population survey that included 2,275 persons aged>=14 years who reported consulting with a primary care physician (PCP). The acceptance of the German version of this questionnaire was good. Confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated that the PRDQ-9 was unidimensional. The internal reliability (Cronbach's ?) of the total score was .95. …

Knowledge and Mistakes

2015

This chapter is about how we attain knowledge, and how we fail to do so. I argue that a true thought counts as a piece of knowledge if and only if it has the right sort of causal history. I also argue that these so-called cognitive thoughts are the criteria of truth in the sense that they are guaranteed to be true and able to guarantee the truth of that which can be inferred from them. So I argue that there are three kinds of knowledge, namely the information conveyed by our senses, the information contained in our preconceptions and the conclusions that can be inferred from our sense-perceptions and our preconceptions. I then argue that we fail to attain knowledge if we assent to a thought…

ANOVA-MOP: ANOVA Decomposition for Multiobjective Optimization

2018

Real-world optimization problems may involve a number of computationally expensive functions with a large number of input variables. Metamodel-based optimization methods can reduce the computational costs of evaluating expensive functions, but this does not reduce the dimension of the search domain nor mitigate the curse of dimensionality effects. The dimension of the search domain can be reduced by functional anova decomposition involving Sobol' sensitivity indices. This approach allows one to rank decision variables according to their impact on the objective function values. On the basis of the sparsity of effects principle, typically only a small number of decision variables significantl…

Influence of the evolutionary optimization parameters on the optimal topology

2016

Topological optimization can be considered as one of the most general types of structural optimization. Between all known topological optimization techniques, the Evolutionary Structural Optimization represents one of the most efficient and easy to implement approaches. Evolutionary topological optimization is based on a heuristic general principle which states that, by gradually removing portions of inefficient material from an assigned domain, the resulting structure will evolve towards an optimal configuration. Usually, the initial continuum domain is divided into finite elements that may or may not be removed according to the chosen efficiency criteria and other parameters like the spee…

Evidence against linkage of schizophrenia to chromosome 5q11-q13 markers in systematically ascertained families.

1992

Ten pedigrees systematically ascertained in Germany were tested for linkage to chromosome 5q11-q13. In order to replicate the previous report by Sherrington et al (1988), families with a bipolar family member were omitted from the lod score calculations, all diagnoses were based upon Research Diagnostic Criteria, and four different models of the affection status were calculated, including the model for which Sherrington et al calculated the highest lod scores. None of the families investigated showed a positive lod score. Using multipoint linkage analyses, we were able to exclude the region for which a positive linkage has been reported.