Proximity rank join is the problem of finding the top-K combinations with the highest aggregate score in which the best combinations of objects coming from different services are sought, and each object is equipped with both a score and a real-valued feature vector. The proximity of the objects i.e. the geometry of the feature space plays a distinctive role in the computation of the overall sco...

BACKGROUND Screening tools to identify persons with high cardiovascular risk exist, but less is known about their validity in different population groups. The aim of this article is to compare the sensitivity and specificity of three different cardiovascular disease risk scores and their ability to detect high-risk individuals in daily practice. METHODS The sensitivity and specificity of risk...

BACKGROUND Item response theory (IRT) has been increasingly applied to patient-reported outcome (PRO) measures. The purpose of this study is to apply IRT to examine item properties (discrimination and severity of depressive symptoms), measurement precision and score comparability across five depression measures, which is the first study of its kind in the Chinese context. METHODS A clinical s...

Biomedical scientific communities increasingly articulate concern about the unsustainable status quo of traditional publishing paradigms [2], feeding an ongoing debate and consideration of alternative publishing models [3]. Seizing an opportune moment to contribute to the ongoing assessment and refinement of scholarly publishing in biomedical education, research, and patient care, an energetic ...

In order to estimate the causal effects of one or more exposures or treatments on an outcome of interest, one has to account for the effect of "confounding factors" which both covary with the exposures or treatments and are independent predictors of the outcome. In this paper we present regression methods which, in contrast to standard methods, adjust for the confounding effect of multiple cont...

Introduction: Articular cartilage injuries are a common pathology of the knee joint and many patients could benefit from cartilage repair. Therefore, widespread surgical cartilage repair techniques, including marrow-stimulation techniques, osteochondral grafting, and chondrocyte implantation/transplantation, require objective and reliable follow-up examination. With its excellent soft tissue co...