OBJECTIVES To evaluate whether patients with abnormal Reflux Symptom Index (RSI) and Reflux Finding Score (RFS) benefit from proton pump inhibitor (PPI) therapy. STUDY DESIGN Open, multicenter, prospective longitudinal cohort study. METHODS Patients with suspected reflux-associated laryngologic symptoms were evaluated by 40 community practice otolaryngologists using RSI and RFS. Patients we...

OBJECTIVES/HYPOTHESIS Determine temporal trends in otolaryngologists' utilization of computed tomography (CT) in the diagnosis of sinonasal disorders. STUDY DESIGN Cross-sectional analysis of national health-care database. METHODS The National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey was examined from 2005 to 2010, and all visits to otolaryngologists with a chronic sinonasal diagnosis code (e.g., chr...

INTRODUCTION The management and use of antimicrobial drugs has clinical, economic, and environmental implications. In many countries, antimicrobial drugs are the most frequently prescribed therapeutic agents. Therefore, health-care policy should focus on how to establish a rational attitude toward antibiotics. This study was performed to investigate antibiotic usage as a prophylactic regimen in...

The goal of the “Emotion in Music” task in MediaEval 2015 is to automatically estimate the emotions expressed by music (in terms of Arousal and Valence) in a time-continuous fashion. In this paper, considering the high context correlation among the music feature sequence, we study several multiscale approaches at different levels, including acoustic feature learning with Deep Brief Networks (DB...

We discuss the relative merits of optimistic and randomized approaches to exploration in reinforcement learning. Optimistic approaches presented in the literature apply an optimistic boost to the value estimate at each state-action pair and select actions that are greedy with respect to the resulting optimistic value function. Randomized approaches sample from among statistically plausible valu...

Introduction An influential conjecture in neuroscience states that a brain organized according to principles of hierarchical predictive coding (HPC) can effectively and efficiently perform genuine Bayesian inferences, providing a neurally plausible account of how Bayesian models of cogntion may be physically implemented in the brain. However, each key subcomputation invoked in HPC potentially h...

Several other methods of achieving dynamic range control were also discussed in the previous chapter. These methods are typically unsharp mask filters with large kernel sizes, and multi-scale approaches such as multi scale image contrast amplification (MUSICA) developed by the Agfa-Gevaert company (Vuylsteke & Schoeters, 1999). In achieving their goal of dynamic range control, these methods alt...

The precise probability of a compound event (e.g. e1 _ e2; e1 ^ e2) depends upon the known relationships (e.g. independence, mutual exclusion, ignorance of any relationship, etc.) between the primitive events that constitute the compound event. To date, most research on probabilistic logic programming 20, 19, 22, 23, 24] has assumed that we are ignorant of the relationship between primitive eve...