BACKGROUND Lack of patient involvement in decision making has been suggested as one reason for limited treatment success. Concepts such as shared decision making may contribute to high quality healthcare by supporting patients to make informed decisions together with their physicians.A multi-component shared decision making programme on the prevention of heart attack in type 2 diabetes has been...

Electroencephalogram oscillations recorded both within and over the medial frontal cortex have been linked to a range of cognitive functions, including positive and negative feedback processing. Medial frontal oscillatory characteristics during decision making remain largely unknown. Here, we examined oscillatory activity of the human medial frontal cortex recorded while subjects played a compe...

The randomised controlled trial (RCT) has developed a central role in applied cost-effectiveness studies in health care as the vehicle for analysis. This paper considers the role of trial-based economic evaluation in this era of explicit decision making. It is argued that any framework for economic analysis can only be judged insofar as it can inform two key decisions and be consistent with the...

Despite large numbers of eligible patients, accrual into randomized cancer clinical trials (RCTs) remains low.1 Little is understood about reasons for low RCT accrual of ethnic minorities. Hispanic participation in RCTs is far below their representation in the general population.2,3 When comparing Hispanic and non-Hispanic cancer incidence and mortality, Hispanics carry a higher burden due to c...

We describe an adaptive Bayesian design for a clinical trial of an experimental treatment for patients with hematologic malignancies who initially received an allogeneic bone marrow transplant but subsequently suffered a disease recurrence. Treatment consists of up to two courses of targeted immunotherapy followed by allogeneic donor lymphocyte infusion. The immunotherapy is a necessary precurs...

BACKGROUND Microglia, one of the glial cells, play important roles in various brain pathologies including psychiatric disorders. In addition, microglia have recently been proved to monitor synaptic reactions via direct-touching even in normal brain. Human microglia may modulate various social/mental functions, while microglial social/mental roles remain unresolved especially in healthy humans. ...

Learning from rewards and punishments is essential to survival and facilitates flexible human behavior. It is widely appreciated that multiple cognitive and reinforcement learning systems contribute to decision-making, but the nature of their interactions is elusive. Here, we leverage methods for extracting trial-by-trial indices of reinforcement learning (RL) and working memory (WM) in human e...

Once the excitement of trial design, grant-writing and award are behind us, the great open expanse of the next few years is filled almost exclusively by trial management, the nitty-gritty of getting stuff done - delivering the goal. The most important members of the trial team now are not the professors and investigators but the trial managers. These trial managers have limited published inform...

In this article we discuss variable selection for decision making with focus on decisions regarding when to provide treatment and which treatment to provide. Current variable selection techniques were developed for use in a supervised learning setting where the goal is prediction of the response. These techniques often downplay the importance of interaction variables that have small predictive ...