BACKGROUND Scleroderma is a systemic autoimmune disease characterized mainly by skin manifestations and involvement of various visceral organs, especially the lungs. Lung involvement is the leading cause of mortality in patients with scleroderma. There are data to suggest that cyclophosphamide (CYC) and mycophenolate mofetil (MMF) are effective in the management of scleroderma interstitial lung...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to investigate the prevalence, severity, risk factors, and treatment outcomes of cyclophosphamide (CYC)-induced hemorrhagic cystitis (HC) in patients with rheumatic diseases. METHODS We collected the clinical data from 1284 consecutive patients admitted to The First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-Sen University who were treated with CYC between 2006 and 201...

PURPOSE We wished to compare the clinical effectiveness of cystatin C (CyC) and serum creatinine (sCr) to assess renal function in renal transplantation patients. METHODS We compared the clinical effectiveness of CyC with that of the sCr to estimate 24-hour urine creatinine clearance (CrCl) in 72 adult recipients who underwent renal transplantation from January 2001 to December 2008. We analy...

Most GISs uses system specific data models and databases. Although standardisation efforts have been made during decades, the integration of different data models is still a research issue. Ontologies are developed to provide an interface between diverse domains or universes of discourse. For example, ontological engineering is applied for establishing standards in the field of Geographic Infor...

(1) Douglas Lenat insists (according to David Freedman) that “Cyc will change the way we live and work. Schools will use Cyc to provide one-on-one tutoring to students . Cyc will make scientific discoveries, apply justice, and even counsel unhappy couples. As Cyc continues to grow, pieces of it will be stored in computers around the world, its contents made available through phone lines and rad...

We describe a framework for linking together a structured ontology, deductive logic, and probability, to solve classification problems. We illustrate this framework with the Whodunit problem: identifying the perpetrator of a crime. Several experiments show that the use of Cyc’s ontology and inference abilities substantially improves classification accuracy, both in decision tree classifiers and...

A robust dictionary of semantic frames is an essential element of natural language understanding systems that use ontologies. However, creating lexical resources that accurately capture semantic representations en masse is a persistent problem. Where the sheer amount of content makes hand creation inefficient, computerized approaches often suffer from over generality and difficulty with sense d...

Multiple myeloma (MM) is a progressive B-lineage neoplasia characterized by clonal proliferation of malignant plasma cells. Increased numbers of regulatory T cells (Tregs) were determined in mouse models and in patients with MM, which correlated with disease burden. Thus, it became rational to target Tregs for treating MM. The effects of common chemotherapeutic drugs on Tregs are reviewed with ...

Treatment of thrombocytopenia in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is considered in cases of current bleeding, severe bruising, or a platelet count below 50,000/µL. Corticosteroid is the first choice of medication for inducing remission, and immunosuppressive agents can be added when thrombocytopenia is refractory to corticosteroid or recurs despite it. We presented two SLE patients with throm...

Integration of ontologies begins with establishing mappings between their concept entries. We map categories from the largest manually-built ontology, Cyc, onto Wikipedia articles describing corresponding concepts. Our method draws both on Wikipedia’s rich but chaotic hyperlink structure and Cyc’s carefully defined taxonomic and common-sense knowledge. On 9,333 manual alignments by one person, ...