OBJECTIVES Instead of evaluating one risk factor at a time, we illustrate the utility of "field-wide meta-analyses" in considering all available data on all putative risk factors of a disease simultaneously. STUDY DESIGN AND SETTING We identified studies on putative risk factors of pterygium (surfer's eye) in PubMed, EMBASE, and Web of Science. We mapped which factors were considered, reporte...

Tourism is one of the world’s largest and fastest growing industries. Industrial cluster theory is perhaps the leading model for economic development today. Despite this, the academic literature of industrial cluster theory has paid relatively little attention to the tourism industry. Meanwhile, practitioners of tourism development are experimenting with the cluster concept across the US and ar...

In genome-wide association studies, results have been improved through imputation of a denser marker set based on reference haplotypes and phasing of the genotype data. To better handle very large sets of reference haplotypes, pre-phasing with only study individuals has been suggested. We present a possible problem which is aggravated when pre-phasing strategies are used, and suggest a modifica...

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DNA methylation is a well-recognized epigenetic mechanism that has been the subject of a growing body of literature typically focused on the identification and study of profiles of DNA methylation and their association with human diseases and exposures. In recent years, a number of unsupervised clustering algorithms, both parametric and non-parametric, have been proposed for clustering large-sc...

The decreasing cost of performing genome-wide association studies has made genomics widely accessible. However, there is a paucity of guidance for best practice in conducting such analyses. For the results of a study to be valid and replicable, multiple biases must be addressed in the course of data preparation and analysis. In addition, standardizing methods across small, independent studies w...

Meta-analyses of data from human studies are invaluable resources in the life sciences and the methods to conduct these are well documented. Similarly there are a number of benefits in conducting meta-analyses on data from animal studies; they can be used to inform clinical trial design, or to try and explain discrepancies between preclinical and clinical trial results. However there are inheri...

Current methods for manual evaluation of surgical skill yield a global score for the entire task. The global score does not inform surgical trainees about where in the task they need to improve. We developed and evaluated a framework to automatically generate an objective score for assessing skill in maneuvers (circumscribed segments) within a surgical task. We used an existing video and kinema...

Apart from the specific findings of this analysis, the authors encourage the use of what they call a nutrientwide association study, analogous to a genome-wide association study (GWAS), to investigate dietary determinants of health outcomes.1 Similar to the agnostic approach used in a GWAS, the features of their approach include the following: (1) the inclusion of all available nutrient exposur...

Hang Zhang, Xiao-Jun Tian, Abhishek Mukhopadhyay, Kenneth S. Kim, Jianhua Xing 1, Department of Biological Sciences, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, 24061-0406, USA 2, Department of Physics, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, 24061-0406, USA 3, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and University of California, Livermore, California, USA 4, Beijing Computational Science Research Center,...