Initial Assignment Research Articles

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OBJECTIVES/SPECIFIC AIMS: Effective HIV therapeutic options for persons with advanced HIV disease whose regimens have failed multiple times are limited. Current clinical practice utilizes regimens comprised of combinations of anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs. Despite the widespread use of ARV medications, optimization of initial treatment composition and subsequent management remains challenging. The goals of this study are (a) to better understand the ARV treatment structuring using prior clinical and patient information including virtual phenotype data and measures of viral load and CD4 cell count. We evaluated the potential impact of ARV strategies on AIDS-defining events and mortality; (b) to assess and understand differences of treatment composition and management when comparing standard ARV strategy (<5 ARVs) with an intensive ARV strategy (at least 5 ARVs). METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: OPTIMA was a tri-national (United States, Canada, and United Kingdom) randomized open label of alternative ARV treatment strategies for patients with advanced HIV disease (CD4≤300 cells/mm3) and evidence of resistance to 3 classes of ARV medications. OPTIMA used a 2×2 factorial design where the 2 factors were an ARV-free period Versus not; and standard Versus intensive ARV regimen. In this study, we focus on participants enrolled in OPTIMA at US participating sites and utilize demographic and clinical data including baseline virtual phenotype, ARV-related data (initial assignments and changes with drugs and dosages), follow-up lab data, AIDS-defining events, and vital status. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: Among 278 US-OPTIMA participants, 146 were randomly assigned to the standard ARV strategy and the rest were assigned to the intensive ARV strategy. Although not the sole factor, baseline virtual phenotype was used in selecting ARV medications within each assigned strategy. Participants in the standard arm exhibited better agreement between virtual phenotype results and the individual drugs selected for their regimen compared with participants in the intensive arm. This agreement had an almost statistically significant impact on survival time. No significant difference was detected in the frequency of ARV changes between standard and intensive ARV groups. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF IMPACT: Even though per design, OPTIMA assigned participants to an ARV strategy using a binary factor (standard vs. intensive ARV) and assessed its effect on HIV-related disease at a coarse level, the trial’s design and rich database allowed for a closer examination of the ARV drug initial selection and subsequent management. Our findings summarize the patterns and discuss the effects of ARV and their management, on AIDS-defining events and survival. Such findings could provide preliminary, yet important insight, in understanding ARV use practice and could inform the conduct of future HIV treatment trials. Since the trial’s randomization was at the ARV strategy level and not the individual ARV drugs, findings cannot be described in terms of causal pathways for specific ARVs.

EnTagRec ++: An enhanced tag recommendation system for software information sites

Software engineers share experiences with modern technologies using software information sites, such as Stack Overflow. These sites allow developers to label posted content, referred to as software objects, with short descriptions, known as tags. Tags help to improve the organization of questions and simplify the browsing of questions for users. However, tags assigned to objects tend to be noisy and some objects are not well tagged. For instance, 14.7% of the questions that were posted in 2015 on Stack Overflow needed tag re-editing after the initial assignment. To improve the quality of tags in software information sites, we propose EnTagRec ++, which is an advanced version of our prior work EnTagRec. Different from EnTagRec, EnTagRec ++ does not only integrate the historical tag assignments to software objects, but also leverages the information of users, and an initial set of tags that a user may provide for tag recommendation. We evaluate its performance on five software information sites, Stack Overflow, Ask Ubuntu, Ask Different, Super User, and Freecode. We observe that even without considering an initial set of tags that a user provides, it achieves [email protected] scores of 0.821, 0.822, 0.891, 0.818 and 0.651, and [email protected] scores of 0.873, 0.886, 0.956, 0.887 and 0.761, on Stack Overflow, Ask Ubuntu, Ask Different, Super User, and Freecode, respectively. In terms of [email protected] and [email protected], averaging across the 5 datasets, it improves upon TagCombine, which is the prior state-of-the-art approach, by 29.3% and 14.5% respectively. Moreover, the performance of our approach is further boosted if users provide some initial tags that our approach can leverage to infer additional tags: when an initial set of tags is given, [email protected] is improved by 10%.

Saliency detection using suitable variant of local and global consistency

In existing local and global consistency (LGC) framework, the cost functions related to classifying functions adopt the sum of each row of weight matrix as an important factor. Some of these classifying functions are successfully applied to saliency detection. From the point of saliency detection, this factor is inversely proportional to the colour contrast between image regions and their surroundings. However, an image region that holds a big colour contrast against it surroundings does not denote it must be a salient region. Therefore a suitable variant of LGC is introduced by removing this factor in cost function, and a suitable classifying function (SCF) is decided. Then a saliency detection method that utilises the SCF, content‐based initial label assignment scheme, and appearance‐based label assignment scheme is presented. Via updating the content‐based initial labels and appearance‐based labels by the SCF, a coarse saliency map and several intermediate saliency maps are obtained. Furthermore, to enhance the detection accuracy, a novel optimisation function is presented to fuse the intermediate saliency maps that have a high detection performance for final saliency generation. Numerous experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves competitive performance against some recent state‐of‐the‐art algorithms for saliency detection.

290 metagenome-assembled genomes from the Mediterranean Sea: a resource for marine microbiology.

The Tara Oceans Expedition has provided large, publicly-accessible microbial metagenomic datasets from a circumnavigation of the globe. Utilizing several size fractions from the samples originating in the Mediterranean Sea, we have used current assembly and binning techniques to reconstruct 290 putative draft metagenome-assembled bacterial and archaeal genomes, with an estimated completion of ≥50%, and an additional 2,786 bins, with estimated completion of 0–50%. We have submitted our results, including initial taxonomic and phylogenetic assignments, for the putative draft genomes to open-access repositories for the scientific community to use in ongoing research.

Integrating cytokines and angiogenic factors and tumour bulk with selected clinical criteria improves determination of prognosis in advanced renal cell carcinoma

Background:In two clinical trials of the vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) receptor inhibitor pazopanib in advanced renal cell carcinoma (mRCC), we found interleukin-6 as predictive of pazopanib benefit. We evaluated the prognostic significance of candidate cytokines and angiogenic factors (CAFs) identified in that work relative to accepted clinical parameters.Methods:Seven preselected plasma CAFs (interleukin-6, interleukin-8, osteopontin, VEGF, hepatocyte growth factor, tissue inhibitor of metalloproteinases (TIMP-1), and E-selectin) were measured using multiplex ELISA in plasma collected pretreatment from 343 mRCC patients participating in the phase 3 registration trial of pazopanib vs placebo (NCT00334282). Tumour burden (per sum of longest diameters (SLD)) and 10 other clinical factors were also analysed for association with overall survival (OS; based on initial treatment assignment).Results:Osteopontin, interleukin-6, and TIMP-1 were independently associated with OS in multivariable analysis. A model combining the three CAFs and five clinical variables (including SLD) had higher prognostic accuracy than the International Metastatic Renal Cell Carcinoma Database Consortium criteria (concordance-index 0.75 vs 0.67, respectively), and distinguished two groups of patients within the original intermediate risk category.Conclusions:A prognostic model incorporating osteopontin, interleukin-6, TIMP-1, tumour burden, and selected clinical criteria increased prognostic accuracy for OS determination in mRCC patients.

Investigating Thematic Roles through Implicit Learning: Evidence from Light Verb Constructions.

The syntactic structure of a sentence is usually a strong predictor of its meaning: Each argument noun phrase (i.e., Subject and Object) should map onto exactly one thematic role (i.e., Agent and Patient, respectively). Some constructions, however, are exceptions to this pattern. This paper investigates how the syntactic structure of an utterance contributes to its construal, using ditransitive English light verb constructions, such as “Nils gave a hug to his brother,” as an example of such mismatches: Hugging is a two-role event, but the ditransitive syntactic structure suggests a three-role event. Data from an eye-tracking experiment and behavioral categorization data reveal that listeners learn to categorize sentences according to the number of thematic roles they convey, independent of their syntax. Light verb constructions, however, seem to form a category of their own, in which the syntactic structure leads listeners down an initial incorrect assignment of thematic roles, from which they only partly recover. These results suggest an automatic influence of syntactic argument structure on semantic interpretation and event construal, even in highly frequent constructions.

Correlation of Lyso-Gb3 levels in dried blood spots and sera from patients with classic and Later-Onset Fabry disease.

Fabry disease (FD), an X-linked lysosomal storage disorder, results from the deficient activity of α-galactosidase A (α-Gal A) and the accumulation of its substrates, globotriaosylceramide (Gb3) and its deacylated derivative, globotriaosyl-sphingosine (Lyso-Gb3). Here, we compared the levels of Lyso-Gb3 in dried blood spots (DBS) and sera in affected males and heterozygotes with the "Classic" and "Later-Onset" phenotypes. The Lyso-Gb3 concentrations in DBS and sera from 56 FD patients were determined by highly sensitive electrospray ionization liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry. The serum Lyso-Gb3 levels in 18 and 5 affected males with the Classic and Later-Onset phenotypes, were 61±38 and 14±12ng/mL, respectively. Lyso-Gb3 levels in 30 females from Classic families and three females from Later-Onset families were 10±5.4 and 2.4±1.0ng/mL, respectively. The linear regression model with serum Lyso-Gb3 as the dependent variable and DBS Lyso-Gb3 an independent variable was described by the function y=-1.83+1.68∗x and showed a high coefficient of determination, R2=0.976. The overall correlation between the Lyso-Gb3 levels in DBS and sera was high (R=0.99; p<0.001). DBS provides a convenient, sensitive, and reproducible source to measure Lyso-Gb3 levels for diagnosis, initial phenotypic assignment, and therapeutic monitoring in patients with Fabry disease.

Gene-centromere mapping in meiotic gynogenetic European seabass

BackgroundFully isogenic lines in fish can be developed using “mitotic” gynogenesis (suppression of first zygotic mitosis following inactivation of the sperm genome). However, genome-wide verification of the steps in this process has seldom been applied. We used ddRADseq to generate SNP markers in a meiotic gynogenetic family of European seabass (Dicentrarchus labrax): (i) to verify the lack of paternal contribution in a meiotic gynogenetic family; (ii) to generate a gene-centromere map from this family; (iii) to identify telomeric markers that could distinguish mitotic gynogenetics from meiotic gynogenetics, which sometimes arise spontaneously in mitotic gynogenetic families.ResultsFrom a single meiotic gynogenetic family consisting of 79 progeny, 42 million sequencing reads (Illumina, trimmed to 148 bases) resolved 6866 unique RAD-tags. The 340 male-informative SNP markers that were identified confirmed the lack of paternal contribution. A gene-centromere map was constructed based on 804 female-informative SNPs in 24 linkage groups (2n = 48) with a total length of 1251.02 cM (initial LG assignment was based on the seabass genome assembly, dicLab v1). Chromosome arm structure could be clearly discerned from the pattern of heterozygosity in each linkage group in 18 out of 24 LGs: the other six showed anomalies that appeared to be related to issues in the genome assembly.ConclusionGenome-wide screening enabled substantive verification of the production of the gynogenetic family used in this study. The large number of telomeric and subtelomeric markers with high heterozygosity values in the meiotic gynogenetic family indicate that such markers could be used to clearly distinguish between meiotic and mitotic gynogenetics.

Updating initial labels from spectral graph by manifold regularization for saliency detection

This paper presents a novel saliency detection method via updating initial labels from spectral graph in a semi-supervised learning (SSL) framework. For updating labels efficiently with graph-based SSL, two principles generally should be considered. The first one is that the updated labels should not change too much from their initial assignment. The second one is that the updated labels should not change too much between similar samples. To follow the first principle, the biggest eigenvector of Laplacian matrix, which contains rich contrast between background regions and salient regions, is employed to obtain the initial label vector. To follow the second principle, a new graph construction scheme, in which only boundary samples with similar features can be connected with each other, is proposed to reduce the geodesic distance in graph. Then a graph-based manifold regularization framework is exploited to update the label vector for separating salient samples from non-salient samples. A refinement function cooperating with an activation function is further presented for saliency optimization. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves competitive performance against some recent state-of-the-art algorithms for saliency detection.

Updated 5-y landmark analyses of phase 2 (BREAK-2) and phase 3 (BREAK-3) studies evaluating dabrafenib monotherapy in patients with BRAF V600–mutant melanoma.

9526 Background: Prior analyses of phase 2 (BREAK-2; NCT01153763) and phase 3 (BREAK-3; NCT01227889) trials showed that durable clinical benefit and tolerability lasting ≥ 3 y are achievable with the BRAF inhibitor dabrafenib in some patients (pts) with BRAFV600–mutant metastatic melanoma. Here, we report 5-y landmark analyses for BREAK-2 and BREAK-3. Methods: BREAK-2, a single-arm, phase 2 study, evaluated dabrafenib 150 mg twice daily in pts with stage IV BRAF V600E/K–mutant MM. BREAK-3, an open-label, randomized (3:1), phase 3 study, assessed dabrafenib 150 mg twice daily vs dacarbazine 1000 mg/m2 every 3 weeks in pts with previously untreated BRAFV600E–mutant unresectable stage III or stage IV MM. Updated analyses were performed to describe ≥ 5-y outcomes in each study. Results: BREAK-2 enrolled 92 pts (V600E, n = 76; V600K, n = 16), of whom most (90%) had prior systemic anticancer therapy. At data cutoff (17 Jun 2016), all pts had discontinued, mostly due to progression (84%). In V600E pts, 5-y progression-free survival (PFS) was 11%, and 5-y overall survival (OS) was 20%. Postprogression immunotherapy was received by 22% of enrolled pts. In BREAK-3 (data cutoff, 16 Sep 2016), median follow-up was 18.6 mo for the dabrafenib arm (n = 187) and 12.8 mo for the dacarbazine arm (n = 63). Follow-up for the 37 dacarbazine-arm pts (59%) who crossed over to receive dabrafenib was based on the initial assignment of dacarbazine. The 5-y PFS was 12% vs 3% and 5-y OS was 24% vs 22% for the dabrafenib and dacarbazine arms, respectively. A subset of pts in each respective arm received postprogression anti–CTLA-4 (24% vs 24%) and/or anti–PD-1 (8% vs 2%) therapy, whereas 31% vs 17% did not receive any further therapy following study treatment. No new safety signals were observed in either study with long-term follow-up. Additional characterization of pts using cfDNA analysis will be presented. Conclusions: These data provide the longest reported PFS and OS follow-up for BRAF inhibitor monotherapy in BRAF V600–mutant MM. Both BREAK-2 and BREAK-3 showed that 11%-12% of pts initially treated with single-agent dabrafenib remained progression free at 5 y. Clinical trial information: NCT01153763; NCT01227889.

Assigning meaning to NEST by technology futures: extended responsibility of technology assessment in RRI

ABSTRACTObjects of responsibility reflections in responsible research and innovation (RRI) emerge at the intersection of projections about future technology and future society. They intersect in a more or less distant future that can be called ‘technology futures’. These are the main medium of assigning social, ethical, and cultural meaning to new and emerging science and technology (NEST) fields – and it is exactly this meaning which gives rise to public, political, and ethical debates on NEST. This assignment of meaning is, it is argued, the most upstream point reachable in RRI: it is simply the origin of respective debates and reasoning. As such, initial assignments of meaning can have high influence on subsequent debate, for example, in determining what is regarded as chance or risk. This perspective gives rise to a major conclusion concerning the scope of responsibilities in RRI. While usually the responsibility for the possible future consequences of NEST is made an issue to RRI, I will argue for extending the scope of responsibility: the assignment of meaning to NEST must itself be made an object of responsibility. This extension has consequences for the roles of technology assessment in RRI.

Heterogeneous Networked Cooperative Scheduling With Anarchic Particle Swarm Optimization

This paper proposes a mathematical model and new solving algorithm for scheduling of a distributed production network with heterogeneous parallel factories distributed in the different geographical places. In this problem, two subproblems must be solved, i.e., 1) assigning jobs to appropriate factory and 2) scheduling jobs on parallel machines in each factory. We also assume that after initial assignment, for better balancing in machines’ loading in the different factories, each job can be shifted among factories. After modeling the problem as mixed integer linear programming, with proposing a new method for solution representation, we propose a novel solving algorithm namely anarchic particle swarm optimization to minimize makespan of jobs. This algorithm is inspired by an anarchic society whose members behave anarchically to improve their situations. By such anarchic particles, the algorithm can prevent falling in local optimum traps. The obtained results of mixed integer linear programming solved by CPLEX are compared with the proposed algorithm, a genetic algorithm and a noncooperative local scheduling for small-sized instances. At the end, the effectiveness of anarchic particle swarm optimization, standard particle swarm optimization, and genetic algorithm are examined on the test problems which contained up to 500 jobs.

A fast multi-level algorithm for community detection in directed online social networks

The discovery of underlying community structures plays a significant role in online social network (OSN) analysis. Many previous methods suffer from inaccuracy or incompleteness in community descriptions because of the multiple factors affecting OSNs and the high computational complexity caused by the large scale of these networks. We present a new community detection approach that focuses on two aspects. First, it relies on a combination of user interests and cohesiveness in describing community structures. Second, it introduces a multi-level community discovery algorithm for large-scale OSN datasets. The algorithm consists of three steps: (1) network coarsening based on the combination of two categories of properties, (2) stochastic inference to find an initial community assignment over the coarsest network and (3) projection and refinement of this assignment to obtain the final community detection result by solving a semi-supervised learning problem. The combination of user interests and cohesiveness leads to a complete and well-interpreted description of the communities embedded in OSNs, and the multi-level algorithm speeds up the computation process and improves the likelihood of finding the global optimal solution by reducing the parameter space. Experiments conducted on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method.

Características citopatológicas de la leucemia aguda en el Hospital de Especialidades Pediátricas de Chiapas, México

BackgroundChildhood acute leukemia cytological features are unknown in Chiapas, Mexico. Defining these features is important because this is a relatively isolated population with high consanguinity index, and these aspects could determine differences in responses to treatment and outcome. MethodsEighty-one childhood acute leukemia cases treated at the Hospital de Especialidades Pediátricas in Chiapas were characterized by morphology, immunophenotype, genotype, initial risk assignment and status at the time of the study. ResultsThe proportion of leukemic cell types found in this study was B cell, 75.3%; myeloid, 16%; T cell, 3.7% and NK 1.2%. In B cell leukemia, genetic alterations were present in 40.6% of cases and had a specific outcome regardless of initial risk assessment. Cases with MLL gene alteration died within a month from diagnosis. Translocations were present in 17.5% B cases; t(1;19) was present in those with a favorable outcome. The t(12;21) translocation was related to initial remission and midterm relapse and dead. Hyperdiploidy was present in 20% of B cell cases with good outcome. In 38.5%of myeloid cases were translocations and karyotypic abnormalities. Short-term outcome in this group has been poor; 69% have died or abandoned treatment in relapse from 15 days to 37 months after diagnosis. ConclusionsRelative frequency of different types of acute leukemia in patients treated at a tertiary level pediatric hospital in Chiapas, Mexico, was similar to the one found in other parts of the country. Patients’ outcome, under a standardized treatment, differs according to the group, the subgroup and the presence and type of genetic alterations.

Cytological features of childhood acute leukemia at the Hospital de Especialidades Pediátricas, Chiapas, Mexico

Abstract Background Childhood acute leukemia cytological features are unknown in Chiapas, Mexico. Defining these features is important because this is a relatively isolated population with high consanguinity index, and these aspects could determine differences in the response to treatment and outcome. Methods Eighty-one childhood acute leukemia cases treated at the Hospital de Especialidades Pediatricas (HEP) in Chiapas were characterized by morphology, immunophenotype, genotype, initial risk assignment and status at the time of the study. Results were compared with national and international relevant information. Results The following proportion of acute leukemia types was found: B-cell, 75.3%; myeloid, 16%; T-cell, 3.7%; B-M, 3.7% and NK cells, 1.2%. Genetic alterations were present in 40.6% of B-cell and 69% of myeloid. The genetic alteration was related to the patient's short-term evolution in type B leukemias but not in myeloid. In B-cell leukemia, the cases with the altered MLL gene died in less than one month; cases with t(1;19) (q23;p13) translocation had a good evolution, and those with t(12;21) (p13;q22) translocation had a poor evolution in the medium term. Hyperdiploidy occurred in 20% of B-cell cases; 83% of them remained in remission 1 to 12 months after diagnosis and 69% of the cases with myeloid leukemias died or abandoned the treatment at relapse after 15 days to 37 months of diagnosis. Conclusions The proportion of different types of acute leukemia treated at the HEP is similar to that found in other parts of the country. Their behavior and outcome are related to the presence or absence of specific and non-specific genetic alterations.

El Mito de Atapuerca: Orígenes, Ciencia, Divulgación. Oliver Hochadel. Barcelona: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. 2013, 383 pp. 24€, paper. ISBN 978-84-939695-4-7.

<i>El Mito de Atapuerca: Orígenes, Ciencia, Divulgación</i>. Oliver Hochadel. Barcelona: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. 2013, 383 pp. 24€, paper. ISBN 978-84-939695-4-7.

Patient NCCN risk classification based on combined clinical cell cycle risk (CCR) score.

249 Background: Improved prognostic tools for newly diagnosed prostate cancer are needed to more appropriately match treatment to a patient’s risk of progression. The cell cycle progression (CCP) score is a highly validated prognostic RNA expression signature which has been combined with CAPRA (CCR, combined clinical cell cycle risk score) to generate an estimate of prostate cancer mortality (PCM) within 10-years of diagnosis. Here, we evaluate how the prognostic information from CCR can reclassify patients compared to their initial assignment to an NCCN risk category based on clinicopathologic features alone. Methods: The CCR score was previously validated and is calculated as a linear combination of CAPRA and CCP score (0.39 x CAPRA + 0.57 x CCP). A risk reclassification scheme was applied to patients tested by the Myriad Genetics commercial laboratory (N = 16,442). First, PCM risk was assigned based on the patient’s CCR score. Next, patients whose PCM risks were outside the interquartile range (IQR) of their NCCN risk category were reclassified according to whether their PCM risks fell within the IQR of another NCCN risk category. Finally, patients whose PCM risks were below (or above) the IQR of the NCCN low (or high) category were reclassified as low (or high). Results: Based on clinicopathologic features alone the commercial cohort was classified according to NCCN Guidelines as low (N = 8,695), favorable intermediate (N = 3,347), intermediate (N = 3,086), or high risk (N = 1,224). After calculating patient risk of PCM based on CCR, 25% of the NCCN low risk men were reclassified to favorable intermediate or intermediate risk; 47% of the NCCN favorable intermediate risk men were reclassified (24% lower and 23% higher); 49% of the NCCN intermediate risk men were reclassified (24% lower and 25% higher); and 25% of the NCCN high risk were reclassified to favorable intermediate or intermediate risk. There is no outcome data associated with commercial samples. Conclusions: The prognostic information in the CCR score results in significant amounts of risk reclassification for all patients with localized disease when compared to stratification based only on NCCN risk categories.

Early responders and remitters to exposure-based CBT for pediatric OCD

ObjectiveTo identify both responders and remitters, at the half-way point (week 7) to exposure-based CBTfor pediatric OCD. Furthermore, evaluate the stability of the improvements, by examining both week 7 and week 14 (post-treatment)response and remission. Method269 children and adolescents, mean age 12.8, 51.3% female with a DSM-IV diagnosis of OCD were included. The NordLOTS study's design involved initial assignment of all participants to CBT. All analyses were conducted using an intent-to-treat model in which all available data were included in the analysis. Primary outcome measure was the CY-BOCS total score at weeks 7 and 14. We identified responders (CY-BOCS≤15) and remitters (CY-BOCS≤10) at the half-way point. ResultsAt week 7, 38.3% were responders (95% CI 32.4–44.5%, n=95) with a CY-BOCS total score of 10.81, symptoms reduction of 52.1%, and 13.7% were remitters (95% CI 10.0–18.6%, n=34), with a CY-BOCS total score of 5.71, symptoms reduction of 75.2%. DiscussionResponse and remission after seven weeks of treatment were persistent. However, a substantial number of non-responders and non-remitters at the half-way point, experienced response and remission at post treatment. ConclusionsGuidelines are needed to ensure that patients with OCD receive the therapy they need to achieve remission, while avoiding overutilization.Clinical trials registration information: This study was registered in Current Controlled Trials; Nordic Long-term Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) Treatment Study (www.controlled-trials.com ISRCTN66385119).

Facial expression recognition based on multi‐regional D–S evidences theory fusion

To achieve decision‐level fusion of multi‐regional features and highlight the credibility of different regional evidences, a facial expression recognition method based on multi‐regional evidence fusion is proposed. A block histogram of gradient Gabor features in three regions, namely eyebrows, eyes, and mouth, is extracted from a facial image and regarded as evidence in expression classification. Then, category membership and regional contribution are solved with the region‐weighted semisupervised fuzzy c‐means clustering algorithm to construct initial basic probability assignment (BPA) and emphasize the importance of different evidences, respectively. The initial BPA of evidence is further reassigned by combining region contribution and evidence supportability to reduce evidential conflict. Finally, the final decision‐level fusion of multi‐regional evidences is obtained based on the Dempster–Shafer (D–S) combination rule. The experimental results for the Cohn–Kanade expression database show that the BPA construction method based on category‐membership degree and the reassignment strategy based on region contribution and evidence supportability improves the recognition rate and maintains good robustness for all types of expressions. Compared with existing decision‐level fusion strategies and classification methods, the proposed recognition framework based on D–S evidences theory has the advantages in recognition performance and reliability, particularly in increasing the recognition rate for expressions that are difficult to distinguish, such as fear, sadness, and disgust. © 2016 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley &amp; Sons, Inc.

Randomized controlled dissemination study of community-to-clinic navigation to promote CRC screening: Study design and implications

IntroductionRegular screening facilitates early diagnosis of colorectal cancer (CRC) and reduction of CRC morbidity and mortality. Screening rates for minorities and low-income populations remain suboptimal. Provider referral for CRC screening is one of the strongest predictors of adherence, but referrals are unlikely among those who have no clinic home (common among poor and minority populations). Methods/study designThis group randomized controlled study will test the effectiveness of an evidence based tailored messaging intervention in a community-to-clinic navigation context compared to no navigation. Multicultural, underinsured individuals from community sites will be randomized (by site) to receive CRC screening education only, or education plus navigation. In Phase I, those randomized to education plus navigation will be guided to make a clinic appointment to receive a provider referral for CRC screening. Patients attending clinic appointments will continue to receive navigation until screened (Phase II) regardless of initial arm assignment. We hypothesize that those receiving education plus navigation will be more likely to attend clinic appointments (H1) and show higher rates of screening (H2) compared to those receiving education only. Phase I group assignment will be used as a control variable in analysis of screening follow-through in Phase II. Costs per screening achieved will be evaluated for each condition and the RE-AIM framework will be used to examine dissemination results. ConclusionThe novelty of our study design is the translational dissemination model that will allow us to assess the real-world application of an efficacious intervention previously tested in a randomized controlled trial.