objective: the clinical value of igg anticardiolipin antibody in patients with behçet's disease with or without vascular thrombosis was evaluated.   methods: igg isotype of anticardiolipin (acl) antibody was assessed in 40 behçet's disease (bd) patients with venous or arterial thrombosis, 40 bd patients without venous or arterial thrombosis and 80 healthy subjects as controls. the lev...

Histoplasma urine antigen (UAg) detection is an important biomarker for histoplasmosis. The clinical significance of low-positive (<0.6 ng/ml) UAg results was evaluated in 25 patients without evidence of prior Histoplasma infection. UAg results from 12/25 (48%) patients were considered falsely positive, suggesting that low-positive UAg values should be interpreted cautiously.

Unlike other forms of positive thinking (e.g., expectations), research finds that positive fantasies (experiencing one’s thoughts and mental images about the future positively) predict low effort and little success in several domains. However, for vocational education students of low socioeconomic status and minority ethnicity, for whom the present environment is especially difficult, perhaps i...

Most machine learning systems for binary classification are trained using algorithms that maximize the accuracy and assume that false positives and false negatives are equally bad. However, in many applications, these two types of errors may have very different costs. For instance, in medical screening applications, falsely determining that a patient is healthy is much more serious than falsely...

We propose an algorithm for solving optimization problems defined on a subset of the cone of symmetric positive semidefinite matrices. This algorithm relies on the factorization X = Y Y T , where the number of columns of Y fixes an upper bound on the rank of the positive semidefinite matrix X. It is thus very effective for solving problems that have a low-rank solution. The factorization X = Y ...

Suppose that A ∈ RN×N is symmetric positive semidefinite with rank K ≤ N . Our goal is to decompose A into K rank-one matrices ∑K k=1 gkg T k where the modes {gk} K k=1 are required to be as sparse as possible. In contrast to eigen decomposition, these sparse modes are not required to be orthogonal. Such a problem arises in random field parametrization where A is the covariance function and is ...

BACKGROUND The aim of this prospective study was to determine whether a level of positive airway pressure was generated in participants receiving nasal high flow (NHF) delivered by the Optiflow system (Fisher and Paykel Healthcare Ltd, Auckland, New Zealand) in a cardiothoracic and vascular intensive care unit (ICU). METHODS Nasopharyngeal airway pressure was measured in 15 postoperative card...

Feedbacks involving low-level clouds remain a primary cause of uncertainty in global climate model projections. This issue was addressed by examining changes in low-level clouds over the Northeast Pacific in observations and climate models. Decadal fluctuations were identified in multiple, independent cloud data sets, and changes in cloud cover appeared to be linked to changes in both local tem...

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Unlike the matrix case, computing low-rank approximations of tensors is NP-hard and numerically ill-posed in general. Even the best rank-1 approximation of a tensor is NP-hard. In this paper, we use convex optimization to develop polynomial-time algorithms for low-rank approximation and completion of positive tensors. Our approach is to use algebraic topology to define a new (numerically well-p...