INTRODUCTION Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a major cause of cancer worldwide. The vast majority of cases occur in individuals with a chronic HBV or HCV infection. In addition, a number of metabolic diseases of the liver are associated with the development of HCC. PATHOPHYSIOLOGIC MECHANISMS The mechanisms responsible for the progression of the metabolic liver disease and HCC differ from t...

Dual antiplatelet therapy (DAPT) has been established for the treatment of coronary artery disease, especially in and after acute coronary syndromes, and after coronary interventions. Data suggest that a significant percentage of individuals treated with clopidogrel do not receive the expected therapeutic benefit because of a decreased responsiveness of their platelets, which is caused by sever...

SPONTANEOUS, non-traumatic intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) in the adult is most commonly secondary to hypertensive cerebrovascular disease. In 70-90% of cases of spontaneous ICH, arterial hypertension is the presumed cause. These hypertensive hemorrhages show a predilection for certain anatomic locations: the basal ganglia (the putamen in particular), the subcortical white matter, and the thalam...

Introduction: Highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) has improved outcomes for individuals infected with human immunodefi ciency virus (HIV). This study describes the causes of death in hospitalised HIV-positive patients from 2008 to 2010 in Tan Tock Seng Hospital, the national referral centre for HIV management in Singapore. Materials and Methods: Data were retrospectively collected from...

In the process of designing pattern recognition systems one may choose a representation based on pairwise dissimilarities between objects. This is especially appealing when a set of discriminative features is difficult to find. Various classification systems have been studied for such a dissimilarity representation: the direct use of the nearest neighbor rule, the postulation of a dissimilarity...

We study a generative model in which hidden causes combine competitively to produce observations. Multiple active causes combine to determine the value of an observed variable through a max function, in the place where algorithms such as sparse coding, independent component analysis, or non-negative matrix factorization would use a sum. This max rule can represent a more realistic model of non-...

In many pattern recognition applications object structure is essential for the discrimination purpose. In such cases researchers often use recognition schemes based on template matching which lead to the design of non-Euclidean dissimilarity measures. A vector space derived from the embedding of the dissimilarities is desirable in order to use general classifiers. An isometric embedding of the ...