Artificial neural networks (ANNs) have been used in a great number of medical diagnostic decision support system applications and within feedforward ANNs framework there are a number of established measures such as saliency measures for identifying important input features. By identifying a set of salient features, the noise in a classification model can be reduced, resulting in more accurate c...

OBJECTIVE The study aimed to use myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI) as a semi-quantitative method to assess the clinical severity of pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) in patients with congenital heart disease (CHD). SUBJECTS AND METHODS A total of 24 patients with PAH related to CHD (PAH-CHD) who received interventional or medical treatment were included. All patients underwent physical e...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the effects that prevalence has on the diagnostic performance of junior doctors in interpreting x-rays. DESIGN Two-armed cross-sectional design using systematic sampling. SETTING Emergency department in the UK. PARTICIPANTS From a sample of 2593 patients (1434 men and 1159 women) taken from an unselected attending cohort between January and April 2002, 967 x-rays ...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate and analyze the existing evidence for the diagnosis and treatment of acute uncomplicated sinusitis in children. DESIGN A systematic overview and meta-analysis considered all pertinent studies with at least 10 children younger than 18 years with acute symptoms of <30 days and without serious complications. OUTCOMES Clinical improvement rates for intervention studies of ...

BACKGROUND The accuracy of synovial fluid (SF) white cell count (WCC) and polymorphonuclear (PMN) cell evaluation for predicting prosthetic joint infection (PJI) at the total hip arthroplasty (THA) or total knee arthroplasty (TKA) site is unknown. Therefore, we performed a meta-analysis to summarize the diagnostic validity of SF-WCC and SF-PMN for diagnosing PJI. METHODS The MEDLINE, EMBASE, ...

BACKGROUND This study was conducted to assess the accuracy and feasibility of diagnostic hysteroscopy in the evaluation of intrauterine abnormalities in women with abnormal uterine bleeding. SEARCH STRATEGY Electronic databases were searched from 1 January 1965 to 1 January 2006 without language selection. The medical subject heading (MeSH) and textwords for the following terms were used: hys...

pasteurella multocida (p. multocida) is an important pathogen of various domestic animals. the outer membrane proteins (omps) play a major role in pathogenesis and immunogenicity of p. multocida. the aim of the study was to develop indirect enzyme linked immuno sorbant assay (elisa) based on omps to ascertain the antibody titers in animals post-infection or to gauge the potency of vaccine. the ...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS In the view of small sample sizes of the studies published so far, the value of video capsule endoscopy (VCE) in diagnosing celiac disease (CD) is yet to be determined. The aim of this work was to systemically determine the overall diagnostic characteristics of VCE in diagnosing noncomplicated CD, compared to the gold standard, using meta-analysis. PATIENTS AND METHODS An ...

We investigated the diagnostic utility of frequent serial determinations of aspartate aminotransferase, alanine aminotransferase (ALT), lipase, amylase, and the lipase/amylase (L/A) ratio for distinguishing patients with acute pancreatitis due to biliary obstruction from those with acute pancreatitis due to other pathogenesis. Analyzed were enzyme activities obtained at admission and peak enzym...