MOTIVATION Granzyme B (GrB) and caspases cleave specific protein substrates to induce apoptosis in virally infected and neoplastic cells. While substrates for both types of proteases have been determined experimentally, there are many more yet to be discovered in humans and other metazoans. Here, we present a bioinformatics method based on support vector machine (SVM) learning that identifies s...

In this paper a technique for early detection of breast cancer from digital mammograms is proposed. The proposed technique focuses on the detection of microcalcifications using multilayer back propagation (MLBP) neural network. A set of spatial domain features based on discrete Radon transform (DRT) and spectral domain features based on the discrete cosine transform (DCT) of mammograms are extr...

BACKGROUND Near term infants are a main part of preterms. They are at higher risk for mortality and morbidity than term infants and could show a quite different development of tone and reflexes from them. The aim of the present study was to describe longitudinally, in a large sample of healthy near term infants, the development of the forward parachute reaction (FPR) and its correlation with th...

In recent years, a robust movement has emerged within psychology to increase the evidentiary value of our science. This movement, which has analogs throughout the empirical sciences, is broad and diverse, but its primary emphasis has been on the reduction of statistical false positives. The present article addresses epistemological and pragmatic issues that we, as a field, must consider as we s...

Genome-wide association (GWA) studies typically lack power to detect genotypes significantly associated with complex diseases, where different causal mutations of small effect may be present across cases. A common, tractable approach for identifying genomic elements associated with complex traits is to evaluate combinations of variants in known pathways or gene sets with shared biological funct...

The Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve generated based on assuming a constant shape Bi-Weibull distribution is studied. In the context of ROC curve analysis, it is assumed that biomarker values from controls and cases follow some specific distribution and the accuracy is evaluated by using the ROC model developed from that specified distribution. This article assumes that the biomark...

In binary classification problems, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) graphs are commonly used for visualizing, organizing and selecting classifiers based on their performances. An important issue in the ROC literature is to obtain the ROC convex hull (ROCCH) that covers potentially optima for a given set of classifiers [1]. Maximizing the ROCCH means to maximize the true positive rate (tp...

BACKGROUND Previous studies showed that soluble LHCGR/hCG-sLHCGR concentrations in serum or plasma combined with PAPP-A and free βhCG significantly increased the sensitivity of Down's syndrome screen at early pregnancy without altering the false positive rate. The goal of the present study was to further examine the role of sLHCGR forms as combinatorial markers and to investigate whether sLHCGR...

We investigate a long-debated question, which is how to create predictive models of recidivism that are sufficiently accurate, transparent, and interpretable to use for decision-making. This question is complicated as these models are used to support different decisions, from sentencing, to determining release on probation, to allocating preventative social services. Each case might have an obj...