BACKGROUND The role of apoptosis in treatment-induced HCV clearance is controversial. We sought to assess the kinetics of serum apoptosis-related cytokines during pegylated interferon-α2a or -α2b plus weight-based ribavirin therapy for genotype 1 chronic HCV infection. METHODS Serum levels of soluble Fas (sFas), soluble Fas ligand (sFasL) and soluble tumour necrosis factor receptor I (sTNF-RI...

Support vector regression (SVR) has been widely used to reduce the high computational cost of computer simulation. SVR assumes input parameters have equal sample sizes, but unequal sizes are often encountered in engineering practices. To solve this issue, a new prediction approach based on SVR, namely as high-low level (HL-SVR) is proposed for data modeling paper. The consists low-level models ...

Hybrid metaheuristic algorithm (MA), an advanced tool in the artificial intelligence field, provides precise reference evapotranspiration (ETo) prediction that is highly important for water resource availability and hydrological studies. However, hybrid MAs are quite scarcely used to predict ETo existing literature. To this end, abilities of two support vector regression (SVR) models coupled wi...

results in patients with an svr, the serum levels of aminotransferases were decreased after hcv eradication. although general liver functional tests (albumin and total bilirubin) did not significantly change, the btr values significantly increased. however, in patients without an svr, an improvement in the btr value was not observed after ifn treatment. conclusions hcv eradication can improve t...

BACKGROUND AND RATIONALE Age is one of the predictors for sustained virological response (SVR) when treating chronic hepatitis C (CHC) patients with pegylated-interferon/ribavirin (PegIFN/RBV). However, the treatment responses of the young patients had not been analyzed before. Therefore, we conducted this study to investigate the treatment responses of CHC patients younger than 40 years old (y...

BACKGROUND To compare on-treatment and off-treatment parameters acquired using acoustic radiation force impulse elastography, the Fibrosis-4 (FIB-4) index, and aspartate aminotransferase-to-platelet ratio index (APRI) in patients with chronic hepatitis C (CHC). METHODS Patients received therapies based on pegylated interferon or direct-acting antiviral agents. The changes in paired patient pa...

BACKGROUND An estimated 170 million people worldwide are infected with hepatitis C virus (HCV). HCV genotype 4 (HCV-4)-the most prevalent hepatitis C strain in the Middle East and Africa-is difficult to treat, with an estimated sustained virological response (SVR) of 53% when using pegylated interferon and ribavirin (P/R) in treatment-naïve patients with HCV-4 infection. In regions where access...

BACKGROUND Tolerance and response to antiviral HCV treatment is poor in advanced fibrosis. The aim of this study was to assess SVR rate and its predictive factors in HCV advanced fibrosis patients treated in real life with full dose PEG-IFN plus RBV and to evaluate the adverse events related to treatment. METHODS A multicentric, retrospective study was conducted at six university hospitals. M...

In this paper, the annealing robust fuzzy neural networks (ARFNNs) are proposed to improve the problems of fuzzy neural networks for modeling of the molecular autoregulatory feedback loop systems with outliers. Firstly, the support vector regression (SVR) approach is proposed to determine the initial structure of the ARFNNs. Because of a SVR approach is equivalent to solving a linear constraine...

Genetic variation upstream of the apoptosis pathway has been associated with outcome of hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection. We investigated genetic polymorphisms in the intrinsic apoptosis pathway to assess their influence on sustained virological response (SVR) to pegylated interferon-α and ribavirin (pegIFN/RBV) treatment of HCV genotypes 1 and 3 infections. We conducted a candidate gene assoc...