BACKGROUND Sarcoidosis is a granulomatous disorder of unknown cause, affecting multiple organs. Tuberculosis is the world's second most common cause of death from infectious diseases. Due to the similar clinical, radiological and histopathological pictures in sarcoidosis and tuberculosis, Mycobacterium tuberculosis has been considered as potential infectious factor. However, it remains difficul...

Background: Several scoring systems are available to evaluate the cardiac surgery risk. Frailty increases the risk of adverse outcomes after surgery. The Frailty evaluation system is a relatively new method, and in this study, we compared the frailty scoring method with the conventional Euroscore method. Methods: This cross-sectional study was performed on 88 elderly patients (over 65 years of...

This paper presents a thesis proposal on approaches to automatically scoring non-native speech from second language tests. Current speech scoring systems assess speech by primarily using acoustic features such as fluency and pronunciation; however content features are barely involved. Motivated by this limitation, the study aims to investigate the use of content features in speech scoring syste...

Abstract. Black-box mathematical models are powerful tools in classification and regression problems. Thanks to the use of (unknown) transformations of the inputs, the outcome can be estimated, improving performance in comparison to standard statistical models. A disadvantage of these complex models however, is their lack of interpretability. This work illustrates how advanced methods can be ma...

Liver cancer is the second most common cause of mortality among all cancers in the world. A holistic prognostic classification in hepatocellular carcinoma has not been unified yet. Many prognostic scoring systems have been made from different centres, some of which have been validated in large series. Even then, universally acceptable scoring systems are still an unmet need in this disease beca...

Perceptron learning is proposed in the context of so-called scoring systems used for assessing creditworthiness as stipulated in the Basel II central banks capital accord of the G10-states. The approximate solution of a related ranking problem using a large margin algorithm is described. Some experimental results obtained by utilizing a Java prototype are exhibited. From these it becomes appare...

We study a new type of proof system, where an unbounded prover and a polynomial time verifier interact, on inputs a string x and a function f , so that the Verifier may learn f(x). The novelty of our setting is that there no longer are “good” or “malicious” provers, but only rational ones. In essence, the Verifier has a budget c and gives the Prover a reward r ∈ [0, c] determined by the transcr...

One of the largest challenges to the field of musculoskeletal ultrasonography is attempting to accurately quantify the changes seen in chronic arthritis. With advances in ultrasound technology, researchers have been increasingly exploring ways of more accurately assessing these changes and attempting to reach consensus with agreed scoring systems. This review presents the main scoring systems d...

conclusions this new suggested scale shows a better value to predict patients’ length of hospital stay compared to iss and niss. however, future studies with larger sample sizes and more confounding factors such as prehospital procedures, intubation and other procedures during admission, should be designed to examine these scoring systems and confirm the results of our study. background trauma ...