BACKGROUND The purpose of this research is to discover whether measurement of cervical length and cervical volume at term is helpful in predicting the onset of labor in VBAC candidates. METHODS Transvaginal sonographic evaluations of the cervixes of pregnant women who desired to undergo VBAC were performed between 36 - 40 weeks gestation. Clinical information such as labor onset time, gestati...

BACKGROUND/AIMS Single, global or unitary, indicators of test diagnostic performance have intuitive appeal for clinicians. The Q* index, the point in receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve space closest to the ideal top left-hand corner and where test sensitivity and specificity are equal, is one such measure. METHODS Datasets from four pragmatic accuracy studies which examined the Min...

Video EEG monitoring (VEM) is a valuable tool for the diagnosis of epileptic seizures (ES) and psychogenic nonepileptic seizures (PNES). We sought to determine the benefits of prolonged length of stay (LOS). We retrospectively reviewed the records of patients admitted for VEM. We analyzed LOS for ES and PNES patients to determine if there was reduced utility, as evidenced by a significantly hig...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this research was to assess the relationship between mitral annular calcification (MAC) and whole blood viscosity (WBV). SUBJECTS AND METHODS A total of 184 patients with MAC and 133 patients without MAC were enrolled in the study. The WBV was calculated with a confirmed formulation using the hematocrit and total plasma protein at a low shear rate (LSR) and high shear rat...

Objective. To identify the degree of association between anthropometric indices and components of metabolic syndrome (MS) and to determine optimal cut-off points of these indices for predicting MS in obese adolescents. Methods. A cross-sectional study with a sample of (n = 110) Mexican obese adolescents grouped by sex and the presence/absence of MS. BMI percentile, waist circumference (WC), and...

The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve is often used to evaluate the performance of a biomarker measured on continuous scale to predict the disease status or a clinical condition. Motivated by the need for novel study designs with better estimation efficiency and reduced study cost, we consider a biased sampling scheme that consists of a SRC and a supplemental TDC. Using this approac...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Risk and prognostic scores quantify the patient's risk of death or complication according to the severity of his illness. The aim of this study was to evaluate the predictive accuracy of O-POSSUM vs ASA and APACHE II models on patients undergoing oesophageal surgery. MATERIAL AND METHOD In this observational retrospective study 55 patients were enrolled who had undergone s...

The purpose of this study was to calculate and validate reference standards for the 20-m shuttle run test (SR) in youths aged 10-18 years. Reference standards based on the number of completed SR laps were calculated by LMS method in a reference group of 5559 students. Cut-off values for SR laps were determined and tested by ROC curve analysis in a validation group (633 students), from which wai...

OBJECTIVES To evaluate the accuracy of three different cutoff points for the detection of high blood pressure in adolescents, given the strong relationship between overweight and high blood pressure levels. METHODS A total of 1,021 adolescents of both sexes were enrolled in the study, selected at random from public and private schools in Londrina, Brazil. Their body weight was measured using ...

The partial area under the ROC curve (partial AUC) summarizes the accuracy of a diagnostic or screening test over a relevant region of the ROC curve and represents a useful tool for the evaluation and the comparison of tests. In this paper, we propose a jackknife empirical likelihood method for making inference on partial AUCs. Following the idea in Jing, Yuan, and Zhou (2009), we combine the e...