BACKGROUND Guideline developers use different consensus methods to develop evidence-based clinical practice guidelines. Previous research suggests that existing guideline development techniques are subject to methodological problems and are logistically demanding. Guideline developers welcome new methods that facilitate a methodologically sound decision-making process. Systems that aggregate kn...

The Constraint Consensus method moves quickly from an initial infeasible point to a point that is close to feasibility for a set of nonlinear constraints. It is a useful first step prior to launching an expensive local solver, improving the probability that the local solver will find a solution and the speed with which it is found. The two main ingredients are the method for calculating the fea...

Introduction The increasing body of nucleic acid sequence data has created interest among many scientists in computational approaches to macromolecular sequence analysis. Several international databases have been created in C141 order to store the data in a useful format, both for archival and analysis purposes.' Both DNA and protein sequences databases are maintained. The value of simply havin...

PURPOSE Because of an increasing demand for quality comparative effectiveness research (CER), methods guidance documents have been published, such as those from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). Our objective was to identify CER methods guidance documents and compare them to produce a summary of important recommen...

Operational use of consensus track forecasting methods has become relatively widespread in the last four years. This paper gives an overview of current consensus track forecasting methods, summarises recent research regarding consensus track forecasting methods, and looks at implementation challenges faced by operational centers. We consider the relative merits and degree of operational use of ...

INTRODUCTION Biologic therapies are efficacious but costly. A number of health economic models have been developed to determine the most cost-effective way of using them in the treatment pathway. These models have produced conflicting results, driven by differences in assumptions, model structure, and data, which undermine the credibility of funding decisions based on modeling studies. A Consen...

This paper concerns the problem of output consensus in nonlinear non-minimum phase systems. The main contribution of the paper is to guarantee achieving consensus in the presence of unstable zero dynamics. To achieve this goal, an output redefinition method is proposed. The new outputs of agents are functions of original outputs and internal states and defined such that the dynamics of agents a...

in this paper, the optimal adaptive leader-follower consensus of linear continuous time multi-agent systems is considered. the error dynamics of each player depends on its neighbors’ information. detailed analysis of online optimal leader-follower consensus under known and unknown dynamics is presented. the introduced reinforcement learning-based algorithms learn online the approximate solution...

RATIONALE, AIMS AND OBJECTIVES The management of many inherited metabolic disorders (IMDs) is dependent on nutrition intervention, but few clinical management guidelines for these uncommon disorders exist. Clinicians are forced to make nutrition treatment decisions using limited data. This results in clinical variations in both service and cost. We describe a method for establishing management ...