OBJECTIVE To compare the absolute risk (AR) screening approach to the current approach of risk adjusted to maternal age in patients undergoing first-trimester screening (FTS). MATERIAL AND METHODS Three-stage retrospective analysis of 3073 pregnancies that had FTS during 2006-2007. (1) Distribution analysis of AR as defined by (final FTS risk)/(risk by age). (2) Analysis of the screen-positiv...

SURE-LET Approach is used for reducing or removing noise in brain Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI). Removing or reducing noise is an active research area in image processing. Rician noise is the dominant noise in MRIs. Due to this type of noise, the abnormal tissue (cancerous tissue) may be misclassified as normal tissue and introduces bias into MRI measurements that can have significant impact ...

This work addresses the properties of a sub-class of sigmoid based shrinkage functions: the non zeroforcing smooth sigmoid based shrinkage functions or SigShrink functions. It provides a SURE optimization for the parameters of the SigShrink functions. The optimization is performed on an unbiased estimation risk obtained by using the functions of this sub-class. The SURE SigShrink performance me...

This paper addresses the properties of a subclass of sigmoid-based shrinkage functions: the non zeroforcing smooth sigmoid-based shrinkage functions or SigShrink functions. It provides a SURE optimization for the parameters of the SigShrink functions. The optimization is performed on an unbiased estimation risk obtained by using the functions of this subclass. The SURE SigShrink performance mea...

The estimation problem in multivariate linear calibration with elliptical errors is considered under a loss function which can be derived from the Kullback-Leibler distance. First, we discuss the problem under normal errors and we give unbiased estimate of risk of an alternative estimator by means of the Stein and Stein-Haff identities for multivariate normal distribution. From the unbiased est...

BACKGROUND The objective was to compare women's personal estimates of their risk with objective breast cancer risk estimates and to describe the risk factors for breast cancer identified by women. METHODS Telephone survey of a random sample of 761 rural and urban women with no history of breast cancer. Survey instrument included measures of perceptions of lifetime risk for breast cancer for t...

OBJECTIVE To examine the relationship between hospital volume and mortality for nonsurgical patients receiving mechanical ventilation. DATA SOURCES Pennsylvania state discharge records from July 1, 2004, to June 30, 2006, linked to the Pennsylvania Department of Health death records and the 2000 United States Census. STUDY DESIGN We categorized all general acute care hospitals in Pennsylvan...

Production coordination is a common phenomenon in supply chains. Unlike the existing literature, we examine the production coordination problem from the perspective of asymmetric information: how a manufacturer (leading firm) coordinates the relationships with its subsidiary firm(s) and, subsequently, how market returns influence the leading firm's expected utilities, agency cost and the subsid...

Smooth James-Stein thresholding-based estimators enjoy smoothness like ridge regression and perform variable selection like lasso. They have added flexibility thanks to more than one regularization parameters (like adaptive lasso), and the ability to select these parameters well thanks to a unbiased and smooth estimation of the risk. The motivation is a gravitational wave burst detection proble...

We propose a general methodology (PURE-LET) to design and optimize a wide class of transform-domain thresholding algorithms for denoising images corrupted by mixed Poisson-Gaussian noise. We express the denoising process as a linear expansion of thresholds (LET) that we optimize by relying on a purely data-adaptive unbiased estimate of the mean-squared error (MSE), derived in a non-Bayesian fra...