INTRODUCTION The objective of the study was to determine the relative importance (RI) of treatment attributes psoriasis patients and physicians consider when choosing between biologic therapies based on psoriasis severity. METHODS A discrete choice experiment (DCE) weighting preference for eight sets of hypothetical treatments for moderate or severe psoriasis was conducted. DCE hypothetical t...

This paper proposes a Retrieval Outcome Analysis Framework, or ROA Framework, to systematically evaluate retrieval performance of Cross-Language Information Retrieval systems. The ROA framework goes beyond TREC-type retrieval evaluation methodology by including procedures focusing on individual queries, especially difficult queries. The framework is comprised of four interrelated components: (1...

OBJECTIVES Individual metabolic characteristics and age-related changes may affect osteoarthritis (OA) risk as well as levels of potential OA biomarkers such as serum cartilage oligomeric protein (sCOMP) and urinary cross-linked C-telopeptide of type 2 collagen (uCTX2). We investigated hand OA and these putative OA biomarker characteristics at different ages in individuals with a propensity for...

We propose a calculus, cCOA, combining, thus more expressive than each of, two orientation calculi well-known in QSR: Frank’s projection-based cardinal direction calculus, CDA, and a coarser version, ROA, of Freksa’s relative orientation calculus. An original constraint propagation procedure, PcS4c+(), for cCOA-CSPs is presented, which aims at (1) achieving path consistency (Pc) for the CDA pro...

Raman and Raman optical activity (ROA) spectra were collected for four RNA oligonucleotides based on the EMCV IRES Domain I to assess the contributions of helix, GNRA tetraloop, U.C mismatch base pair and pyrimidine-rich bulge structures to each. Both Raman and ROA spectra show overall similarities for all oligonucleotides, reflecting the presence of the same base paired helical regions and GNR...

OBJECTIVE To validate an automatic scheme for the segmentation and quantitative analysis of the medial meniscus (MM) and lateral meniscus (LM) in magnetic resonance (MR) images of the knee. METHOD We analysed sagittal water-excited double-echo steady-state MR images of the knee from a subset of the Osteoarthritis Initiative (OAI) cohort. The MM and LM were automatically segmented in the MR im...

Real option analysis (ROA) is a way of valuing real assets by invoking option pricing theory. In contrast to the traditional net present value approach, ROA makes it possible to explicitly incorporating management flexibility. Because of such advantages, ROA has become an important tool for project valuation and is widely used in practice. In this paper, we develop a real option model with regi...

Circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) spectra are extremely sensitive to molecular structure. However, conventional CPL measurements are difficult and require expensive instrumentation. As an alternative, we explore CPL using Raman scattering and Raman optical activity (ROA) spectroscopy. The cesium tetrakis(3-heptafluoro-butylryl-(+)-camphorato) europium(III) complex was chosen as a model as...

In a previous work we developed a convex infinite dimensional linear programming (LP) approach to approximating the region of attraction (ROA) of polynomial dynamical systems subject to compact basic semialgebraic state constraints. Finite dimensional relaxations to the infinite-dimensional LP lead to a truncated moment problem in the primal and a polynomial sum-of-squares problem in the dual. ...

Many organizations have invested substantial resources in recent years to implement a balanced scorecard of performance metrics. From a historical focus exclusively on financial metrics of performance, the emphasis has shifted recently to a consideration of a portfolio of non-financial performance metrics related to customers, business process and technology. In this paper, we investigate the b...