Evaluating agent performance when outcomes are stochastic and agents use randomized strategies can be challenging when there is limited data available. The variance of sampled outcomes may make the simple approach of Monte Carlo sampling inadequate. This is the case for agents playing heads-up no-limit Texas hold’em poker, where man-machine competitions have involved multiple days of consistent...

Endovascular abdominal aortic aneurysm repair (EVAR) is a safe and efficacious treatment for both unruptured and ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysms. While perioperative mortality is lower with EVAR, long-term outcomes are similar between EVAR and open repair, including quality of life and cost-effectiveness. We review the long-term outcomes from the EUROSTAR registry, and DREAM, EVAR 1, and OV...

Aortobronchial fistula (ABF) in the setting of aortic coarctation repair is very rare but uniformly fatal if untreated. Endovascular stenting of the descending aorta is now the first-choice approach for ABF presenting with haemoptysis and offers a less-invasive technique with improved outcomes, compared with open repair. We report a case of late ABF occurring following bypass for aortic coarcta...

Many natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, such as shallow parsing (i.e., text chunking) and semantic slot filling, require the assignment of representative labels to the meaningful chunks in a sentence. Most of the current deep neural network (DNN) based methods consider these tasks as a sequence labeling problem, in which a word, rather than a chunk, is treated as the basic unit for lab...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Intra-arterial reperfusion therapies are expanding frontiers in acute ischemic stroke (AIS) management but there is considerable variability in clinical practice. The use of general anesthesia (GA) is one example. We aimed to better understand sedation practices in AIS. METHODS An online survey was distributed to the 68 active members of the Society of Vascular and Inte...

This paper introduces tree transducers as a unifying theory for semantic parsing models based on tree transformations. Many existing models use tree transformations, but implement specialized training and smoothing methods, which makes it difficult to modify or extend the models. By connecting to the rich literature on tree automata, we show how semantic parsing models can be developed using co...

The introduction of endovascular abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) repair has revolutionized the therapeutic approach to patients with AAA. Due to an on-going and prolific collaboration between vascular interventionalists and biomedical engineers, the devices used to perform endovascular AAA repair have also changed dramatically. The purpose of this publication is to provide an overview of the cu...

If the holiday shopping season turns out to be as grim as many forecasters are warning, among the reasons will be a little brain region called the insula. Maxed-out consumers have been heeding the advice to take scissors to their credit cards, since paying with cash controls the eventual cost of a purchase (carrying a credit-card balance can double an item's original price) and limits impulse b...

Size does matter. While endlessly debated in social circles, this is unquestionably true for the normal function of the epithelial and endothelial tubes that comprise such organs as the vascular system, lung and kidney. The enlarged tubules in a polycystic kidney, for instance, literally crush the surrounding normal tubules, while narrowed blood vessels can cause ischemic tissue injuries. Surpr...