Early adequate fluid loading was the corner stone of hemodynamic optimization for sepsis and septic shock. Meanwhile, recent recommended protocol for fluid resuscitation was increasingly debated on hemodynamic stability vs risk of overloading. In recent publications, it was found that a priority was often given to hemodynamic stability rather than organ function alternation in the early fluid r...

The authors present algorithms to compute the confidence interval for a Poisson parameter (lambda) and the p value for testing the hypothesis that lambda is equal to a constant, which can be used to make inferences about the standardized mortality ratio and the standardized incidence ratio. The p value and confidence interval always agree, despite the discrete nature of the Poisson distribution...

BACKGROUND The CONSORT statement requires clinical trials to report confidence intervals, which help to assess the precision and clinical importance of the treatment effect. Conventional sample size calculations for clinical trials, however, only consider issues of statistical significance (that is, significance level and power). METHOD A more consistent approach is proposed whereby sample si...

BACKGROUND Recently, several adaptive one-arm two-stage designs have been developed by fully using the information from previous stages to reduce the expected sample size in clinical trials with binary endpoints as primary outcome. It is important to compute exact confidence limits for these studies. METHODS In this article, we propose three new one-sided limits by ordering the sample space b...

In this paper the asymptotic expansion of first-order Melnikov function of a heteroclinic loop connecting a cusp and a nilpotent saddle both of order one for a planar near-Hamiltonian system are given. Next, we consider the bifurcation of limit cycles of a class of hyper-elliptic Liénard system with this kind of heteroclinic loop. It is shown that this system can undergo Poincarè bifurcation fr...

The serialization constraints imposed by true data dependences have always been regarded as an absolute dataflow limit on the parallel execution of serial programs. This paper describes value prediction, a new technique that allows data dependent instructions to issue and execute in parallel without violating program semantics. This technique exploits value locality, or the likelihood of the re...

Allocating resources to detect invasive pests, diseases, and pathogens on exposure pathways requires a trade-off between the need to detect as many contaminated items as possible and the need to acquire knowledge about contamination rates. We develop a model and an algorithm that provide guidance for the allocation of inspection resources across multiple dynamic pathways in cases where not ever...