PURPOSE The mechanisms underlying syncope remain unknown in about 20% of patients with recurrent syncope. The implantable loop recorder (ILR) has been shown to be a useful diagnostic tool in patients with unexplained syncope even after negative initial evaluations. Nevertheless, ILR has rarely been used in clinical practice. MATERIALS AND METHODS This study included 18 consecutive patients wh...

Tissue analysis is commonly used in ecology and agronomy to portray plant nutrient signatures. Nutrient concentration data, or ionomes, belongs to the compositional data class, i.e., multivariate data that are proportions of some whole, hence carrying important numerical properties. Statistics computed across raw or ordinary log-transformed nutrient data are intrinsically biased, hence possibly...

A thoughtful history and complete physical examination, performed by an astute clinician, will provide diagnostic clues to guide management.2,8,9 Unfortunately, the approach often undertaken includes low-yield testing (EEG, CT scan, carotid Dopplers, Holter monitor, and cardiac enzymes),2,4,10 yet even “proper” testing (electrophysiology testing and tilt table testing) can be fruitless. In near...

People-centric sensing with smart phones can be used for large scale sensing of the physical world at low cost by leveraging the available sensors on the phones. Despite its benefits, mobile people-centric sensing has two main issues: (i) incentivizing the participants, and (ii) reliability of the sensed data. Unfortunately, the existing solutions to solve these issue either requires infrastruc...

INTRODUCTION Patients with cardiac syncope have a significantly higher mortality than patients with syncope of non-cardiac causes, while patients with syncope of unknown aetiology constitute an intermediate risk group, presumably because this group is mixed, which suggests that further diagnostic testing is warranted. MATERIAL AND METHODS This was a retrospective single-centre study evaluatin...

Georeferenced compositional data are prominent in many scientific fields and spatial statistics. This work addresses the problem of proposing models methods to analyze predict, through kriging, this type data. To purpose, a novel class α-transformations, named Isometric α-transformation (α-IT), is proposed, which encompasses traditional Log-Ratio (ILR) transformation. Similarly other α-transfor...

Compositional explanatory variables should not be directly used in a linear regression model because any inference statistic can become misleading. While various approaches for this problem were proposed, here an approach based on the isometric logratio (ilr) transformation is used. It turns out that the resulting model is easy to handle, and that parameter estimation can be done like in usual ...

Syncope is a symptom of many underlying disease states, which range from the relatively benign to the life threatening. There are numerous investigations done for patients with recurrent unexplained syncope which may have very low yield when it comes to making a definitive diagnosis. Recently, the implantable loop recorder (ILR) for continuous monitoring of the cardiac rhythm has been launched ...

We present results from a new Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) based comprehension test. This new test design presents questions at multiple ILR difficulty levels within each document. We incorporated Arabic machine translation (MT) output from three independent research sites, arbitrarily merging these materials into one MT condition. We contrast the MT condition, for both text and audio ...