The sixth Report of the Joint National Committee on Prevention, Detection, Evaluation, and Treatment of High Blood Pressure classifies blood pressure into stages on the basis of both systolic (SBP) and diastolic (DBP) blood pressure levels. When a disparity exists between SBP and DBP stages, patients are classified into the higher stage ("up-staged"). We evaluated the effect of disparate levels...

OBJECTIVE To determine whether and how eligibility criteria of participants prespecified in protocols of randomised trials are reported in subsequent articles. DESIGN Cohort study. SETTING Protocols submitted to the ethics committee of a German medical faculty. DATA SOURCES 52 trial protocols and 78 subsequent publications published between 2000 and 2006. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE Proportion...

CONTEXT Intracranial hemorrhage must be excluded prior to administration of thrombolytic agents in acute stroke. OBJECTIVE To evaluate physician accuracy in cranial computed tomography scan interpretation for determining eligibility for thrombolytic therapy in acute stroke. DESIGN Administration of randomly selected, randomly ordered series of 15 computed tomography scans from a pool of 54 ...

OBJECTIVES To evaluate the post hoc study power of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in the treatment of non-renal SLE and to determine the generalizability of these RCTs using an SLE database. METHODS RCTs in non-renal SLE were identified using PubMed (1975-2007). Inclusion/exclusion criteria, trial quality (5-point scale) and results of each study were recorded. The inclusion/exclusion cr...

Some people suffering from diabetes use insulin injection pumps to control the blood glucose level. Sometimes, the fault may occur in the sensor or actuator of these pumps. The main objective of this paper is controlling the blood glucose level at the desired level and fault-tolerant control of these injection pumps. To this end, the eligibility traces algorithm is combined with the sliding mod...

A mechanism called Eligibility Propagation is proposed to speed up the Time Hopping technique used for faster Reinforcement Learning in simulations. Eligibility Propagation provides for Time Hopping similar abilities to what eligibility traces provide for conventional Reinforcement Learning. It propagates values from one state to all of its temporal predecessors using a state transitions graph....

A mechanism called Eligibility Propagation is proposed to speed up the Time Hopping technique used for faster Reinforcement Learning in simulations. Eligibility Propagation provides for Time Hopping similar abilities to what eligibility traces provide for conventional Reinforcement Learning. It propagates values from one state to all of its temporal predecessors using a state transitions graph....