An environmental decision support system (EDSS) can be used as an important tool for the rehabilitation and preservation of ecosystems. Nonetheless, high assimilation costs (both money time) are one main reasons these tools not widely adopted in practice. This work presents a low-cost paradigm “EDSS Service.” is demonstrated developing water quality EDSS service that utilizes well-known CE-QUAL...

OBJECTIVES Recent phase III clinical trials of immunomodulatory therapies in relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis have shown significant benefits of active treatment on relapse related end points, but effects on disability outcomes have been inconsistent. These apparent discrepancies could be due to differences in the clinical end points employed, the behaviour of placebo cohorts, or both. ...

BACKGROUND There are a number of instruments that describe severity and progression of multiple sclerosis and they are increasingly used as endpoints to assess the effectiveness of therapeutic interventions. We examined to what extent the psychometric properties of two accepted instruments--EDSS and MSFC--meet methodological standards and the value they have in clinical trials. METHODS We con...

Disability status, depression and anxiety are important determinants of quality of life (QoL) in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS). We investigated whether anxiety and depression influence the relation between disability status and QoL in our cohort of recently diagnosed patients. Disability status [Expanded Disability Status Scale (EDSS)], anxiety and depression [Hospital Anxiety and Depre...

The problem of estimating the parameters of exponentially damped sinusoids (EDSs) signal has received very much attention in many fields. In this paper, a specific neural network termed EDSNN for parameter estimation of the EDSs has been proposed. Aiming at effectively evaluating the parameters of the EDSs signal, we construct a specific topology of EDSNN strictly following the mathematic formu...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The T2-weighted MR imaging total lesion volume and Expanded Disability Status Scale (EDSS) score are two common measures of relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis disability and pathologic abnormality. Because the whole-brain N-acetylaspartate concentration is considered to be a new marker of the disease burden, the purpose of this study was to evaluate the relationship a...

Late onset multiple sclerosis (LOMS) is when the first symptom starts after 50 years of age, representing 4.5% of multiple sclerosis (MS) patients. This study describes the clinical characteristics of patients with LOMS followed at a specialized MS center in São Paulo. Data was obtained from medical records of 742 patients with MS. The LOMS frequency was 4.18%, median age at onset was 54 years ...

The mantra that successful Environmental Decision Support Systems (EDSS’s) are those that benefit from a high level of end-user involvement during the design phase and subsequent implementation is well founded. However the practical matter of eliciting the relevant information from stakeholders to develop a useful and robust EDSS is rarely adequate and this weakness contributes to the high rate...

OBJECTIVES To explore long-term effects of treatment and prognostic relevance of variables assessed at baseline and during the European secondary progressive multiple sclerosis (SPMS) trial of interferon beta 1b (IFNB-1b). METHODS We assessed 362 patients (60% female; median age 41 years; Expanded Disability Status Scale (EDSS): 5.5; 51% randomized to IFNB-1b) for their EDSS and treatment his...