BACKGROUND The growth of the private health insurance sector in Western countries, which is characterized by information deficiencies and limited competition, necessitates the implementation of effective regulatory tools. One measure which is widely used is the medical loss ratio (MLR). Our objective was to analyze how MLR is applied as a regulatory measure in the Israeli voluntary health insur...

BACKGROUND Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a common complication of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) and the leading cause of blindness in adults. DR pathogenesis has not been fully elucidated, but inflammation is widely accepted to play an important role. Emerging evidence suggests that the platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio (PLR), monocyte-to-lymphocyte ratio (MLR), and neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (...

The meta-learner MLR (Multi-response Linear Regression) has been proposed as a trainable combiner for fusing heterogeneous baselevel classifiers. Although it has interesting properties, it never has been evaluated extensively up to now. This paper employs learning curves to investigate the relative performance of MLR for solving multi-class classification problems in comparison with other train...

Few objective analysis techniques have been developed for, or applied to, the auditory evoked middle latency response (MLR). This report demonstrates the applicability of the Fsp statistical technique (Elberling and Don, 1984) to the MLR time domain. Subjects for this study were 10 normal hearing young adults. The stimuli were 60, 40, 20 dB nHL clicks and a NS control. Evoked responses were obt...

Gastric carcinoma is the most common cancer and the second most common cause of cancer-related death in Korea. Many studies have been reported regarding prognostic factors. Among the category I prognostic factors of gastric carcinoma, lymph node metastasis (nodal status) is considered to be the strongest prognostic factor. According to the current UICC (the International Union Against Cancer)/A...

BACKGROUND A common complaint of patients with (central) auditory processing disorder is difficulty understanding speech in noise. Because binaural hearing improves speech understanding in compromised listening situations, quantifying this ability in different levels of noise may yield a measure with high clinical utility. PURPOSE To examine binaural enhancement (BE) and binaural interaction ...

Ultraviolet-B (UV-B) irradiation of antigen presenting cells (APCs) modifies their allogenecity, resulting in inhibition of the proliferative response of T cells in mixed lymphocyte reaction (MLR). Costimulation by the CD28 ligand CD80 (B7/B7-1) and CD86 (B70/B7-2) plays an important role during T-cell proliferation by augmenting synthesis of interleukin-2 (IL-2) and other cytokines. In this st...

The mixed lymphocyte reaction (MLR) is the proliferative response of one individual's lymphocytes cultured in the presence of another individual's lymphocytes. In man, the MLR is elicited by cell surface antigens coded for by the HLA-D gene locus. This locus is among a cluster of genes which are located on the sixth chromosome and which include genes coding for the major histocompatibility anti...

In this report we examined the possibility that suppression of the mixed lymphocyte response by MLR-TsF results from interference with IL-2 regulation of T cell proliferation. Two distinct processes of inhibition involving both a direct effect on IL-2-driven proliferation of responder T cells, and induction of a second-order suppressor cell (Ts2) were described. Exogenous IL-2 did not abrogate ...