BACKGROUND Left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH) is very common in hemodialysis patients and an independent risk factor for mortality in this population. The myocardial remodeling underlying the LVH can affect ventricular repolarization causing abnormalities in QT interval. OBJECTIVE to evaluate the reproducibility and reliability of measurements of corrected QT interval (QTc) and its dispersion...

In fMRI both model-led and exploratory data-driven methods are used to identify groups of voxels according to their correlation either with an external reference or with some similarity measure. Here we present a technique to assess intragroup homogeneity using Kendall's coefficient of concordance W once groups have been identified. We show that the time-courses belonging to the group may be ra...

The body adiposity index (BAI) is a recent anthropometric measure proven to be valid in predicting body fat percentage (BF%) in some populations. However, the results have been inconsistent across populations. This study was designed to verify the validity of BAI in predicting BF% in a sample of overweight/obese adults, using dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA) as the reference method. A cr...

We examined the reliability and accuracy of a colorimetric assay using Alamar Blue reagent in the performance of susceptibility tests for Candida albicans. We compared the broth macrodilution method recommended by the National Committee for Clinical Laboratory Standards (NCCLS) with a macrodilution method modified with the Alamar reagent and a microdilution method modified with the Alamar reage...

OBJECTIVE To analyze the results obtained in the evaluation of intra-vaginal pressure using three different brands of perineometers in nulliparous volunteers. MATERIALS AND METHODS Twenty nulliparous women with no anatomical alterations and/or dysfunction of the pelvic floor were enrolled in our study. All the women had the ability to voluntarily contract their PFM (Pelvic Floor Muscles), as ...

BACKGROUND In drug development, animal toxicology data are very important for the evaluation of clinical safety. We quantitatively assessed the safety profiles of blood cancer drugs approved in Japan from category I (high) to V (low). We examined the ratios of drug exposure in animals at the no observed adverse effect level to those in humans at the expected therapeutic dose. In addition, quali...

We analyzed the World Color Survey (WCS) color-naming data set by using k-means cluster and concordance analyses. Cluster analysis relied on a similarity metric based on pairwise Pearson correlation of the complete chromatic color-naming patterns obtained from individual WCS informants. When K, the number of k-means clusters, varied from 2 to 10, we found that (i) the average color-naming patte...

For twin time-to-event data, we consider different concordance probabilities, such as the casewise concordance that are routinely computed as a measure of the lifetime dependence/correlation for specific diseases. The concordance probability here is the probability that both twins have experienced the event of interest. Under the assumption that both twins are censored at the same time, we show...

We study the clustering properties of galaxy clusters expected to be observed by various forthcoming surveys both in the X-ray and sub-mm regimes by the thermal Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect. Several different background cosmological models are assumed, including the concordance ΛCDM and various cosmologies with dynamical evolution of the dark energy. Particular attention is paid to models with a s...

In a stock market, numerous stock prices move under a high level of randomness and some regularity. Some stocks exhibit strong correlation to other stocks. A strong correlation among eminent stocks should result in a visible global pattern. However, the networks of such correlation are unstable and the patterns are only temporal. In such a condition, a detailed description of the network may no...