The aim of the study was to determine the association between the number of natural teeth and oral impacts in Sri Lankan adults. The sample consisted of 476, 40-59 and 452, ≥60 year olds. Oral impacts were assessed using a validated Sinhalese translation of the Oral Health Impact Profile-14 scale. A receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) curve was plotted to determine the number of natural tee...

Deriving predictive models in medicine typically relies on a population approach where a single model is developed from a dataset of individuals. In this paper we describe and evaluate a personalized approach in which we construct a new type of decision tree model called decision-path model that takes advantage of the particular features of a given person of interest. We introduce three persona...

The Visual Concept Detection Task (VCDT) of ImageCLEF 2008 is described. A database of 2,827 images were manually annotated with 17 concepts. Of these, 1,827 were used for training and 1,000 for testing the automated assignment of categories. In total 11 groups participated and submitted 53 runs. The runs were evaluated using ROC curves, from which the Area Under the Curve (AUC) and Equal Error...

For many years now, there is a growing interest around ROC curve for characterizing machine learning performances. This is particularly due to the fact that in real-world problems misclassification costs are not known and thus, ROC curve and related metrics such as the Area Under ROC curve (AUC) can be a more meaningful performance measures. In this paper, we propose a quadratic programming bas...

We show that any weak ranker that can achieve an area under the ROC curve slightly better than 1/2 (which can be achieved by random guessing) can be efficiently boosted to achieve an area under the ROC curve arbitrarily close to 1. We further show that this boosting can be performed even in the presence of independent misclassification noise, given access to a noise-tolerant weak ranker.

multiple diagnostic tools are used by emergency physicians, every day. in addition, new tools are evaluated to obtain more accurate methods and reduce time or cost of conventional ones. in the previous parts of this educational series, we described diagnostic performance characteristics of diagnostic tests including sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive values, and likeliho...

diastolic phase of cardiac function is associated with lower arterial flow and hence higher concentration of intra arterially injected drug is achieved at the site of injection. it is herein postulated that drugs show higher efficacy when injected during the diastolic phase of cardiac function. it is also postulated that this benefit cannot be achieved when the drug is injected with higher rate...

The accuracy of a diagnostic test with continuous-scale results is of high importance in clinical medicine. It is often summarised by the area under the ROC curve (AUC). In this article, we discuss and compare nine non-parametric confidence intervals of the AUC for a continuous-scale diagnostic test. Simulation studies are conducted to evaluate the relative performance of the confidence interva...

The objective of this study was to assess the effect of a high-fat meal on the pharmacokinetics of moxidectin. Healthy male subjects were randomized to receive single oral 8 mg doses of moxidectin after an overnight fast or high-fat breakfast. In fasted subjects (N = 27), mean [SD] parameters were C(max): 58.9 [12.5] ng/mL; t(max): 3.7 [1.5] h; area under concentration-time curve (AUC): 3,387 [...

BACKGROUND Double-blind, placebo-controlled (DBPC) trials are the gold standard for demonstrating clinical efficacy and tolerability. The placebo effect, although an important feature in placebo-controlled studies, has never been systematically investigated in allergen-specific immunotherapy (SIT) studies. This study was performed to examine the placebo response in SIT trials that employed a ba...