Test Collection Research Articles

GAMIFICAÇÃO E JOGOS NO ENSINO DE MECÂNICA NEWTONIANA: UMA PROPOSTA DIDÁTICA UTILIZANDO OS APLICATIVOS BUNNY SHOOTER E SOCRATIVE


 Muito embora o estudante da educação básica da era digital conviva com jogos e mídias digitais praticamente durante o dia todo, essas ferramentas são ainda pouco utilizadas no ambiente formal da escola. Neste artigo são descritos o desenvolvimento e a aplicação de uma proposta didática que utiliza o jogo para celular Bunny Shooter com objetivo de ensinar Mecânica Clássica no ensino médio. Um acervo de testes composto por problemas elaborados de acordo com as fases do jogo é construído, juntamente com um material apostilado sobre a teoria, usando o ambiente de jogo como pano de fundo para explorar conceitos da física newtoniana. Finalmente, a sala de aula é dividida em equipes que devem vencer passos, cujos resultados são avaliados pelo professor em tempo real com o uso do aplicativo Socrative. Resultados preliminares envolvendo a aplicação da prática e receptividade com alunos da primeira série do ensino médio de uma escola da rede privada de ensino da cidade de Belém-Pará são apresentados. 

Echovis – A collection of human echolocation tests performed by blind and sighted individuals: A pilot study

The article presents research on the echolocation skills of blind and sighted individuals gathered for the purpose of development of an echolocation training app. The goal of the research was to determine the influence of the environment type, reverberation, clicking patterns, and the average differences between the two tested groups. Ten blind and 10 sighted subjects were tested in various echolocation tasks – stationary, moving, indoor and outdoor, using mechanical clickers, and artificially generated clicks. Ten blind children also took part in the static indoor tests. The tests were repeated using binaural recordings and spatially rendered virtual audio. The following parameters and dependencies between them were analyzed: correctness of the obstacle localization, certainty of answer, type of environment and clicker sound, and frequency and number of clicks. It was found that the number of clicks influenced the correctness and certainty of the answer in case of obstacle direction determination, but not the distance. Better results were obtained in outdoor environments and in an empty room, what implies that reverberation has a positive influence on echolocation. The expected success rates in tested echolocation tasks provided a comparison of the echolocation abilities of blind and sighted subjects and set a benchmark for future tests.

The effect of co-opinion on the cocitation-based information retrieval systems’ effectiveness evaluated by semantic similarity

The co-opinionatedness measure, that is, the similarity of cociting documents in their opinions about their cocited articles, has been recently proposed. The present study uses a wider range of baselines and benchmarks to investigate the measure’s effectiveness in retrieval ranking that was previously confirmed in a pilot study. A test collection was built including 30 seed documents and their 4702 cocited articles. Their citances and full-texts were analysed using natural language processing (NLP) and opinion mining techniques. Cocitation values, syntactical similarity and contexts similarity were used as baselines. The distributional semantic similarity and the linear and hierarchical Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) similarities served as benchmarks to evaluate the effect of the co-opinionatedness as a boosting factor on the performance of the baselines. The improvements in the rankings were measured by normalised discounted cumulative gain (nDCG). According to the findings, there existed significant differences between the nDCG mean values obtained before and after weighting the baselines by the co-opinionatedness measures. The results of the generalisability study corroborated the reliability and generalisability of the systems. Accordingly, the similarity in the opinions of the cociting papers towards their cocited articles can explain the cocitation relation in the scientific papers network and can be effectively utilised for improving the results of the cocitation-based retrieval systems.

A Protocol to Assess Adult Outcomes at 30 Years Following Preterm Birth.

Among the most intense adversity experiences for infants is premature birth. Early birth marks the beginning of a life course that broadly affects families, healthcare, education, social systems, and the survivors themselves. For many, the transition to adulthood is challenging and often hampered by cognitive, physical and mental health, and motor and independence difficulties. The aim of this study was to share a comprehensive protocol of a 10th follow-up study of premature infants in their 30s. The protocol accounts for stress during the neonatal period, the cumulative context (risk and protection) of development, biological and epigenetic mechanisms, and individual resilience. The prospective, five-group longitudinal design includes 215 term-born and preterm-born individuals with various neonatal morbidities at ages 30-35 years. Adult outcomes include health, adaptive, executive function, work, and social competence. Novel measures are four system indicators of allostatic load (AL) and epigenetics. Contextual measures include socioeconomic risk and individual resilience. All measures were selected based on coherence with constructs of the scientific aims, strong psychometrics, continuity for repeated measures, and minimal subject burden. Objective assessments include body composition imaging, exercise testing, blood and saliva collection, and actigraphy. The two-phase protocol takes approximately 8 hours. After an 11-month COVID-19 pause, participant response has been strong. As of May 2022, 75 participants have completed the full protocol, and 99 have consented to participate. When socioeconomic risk is controlled, we hypothesize that life course trajectories in physical and psychological health, adaptive function, and executive function will differ between term and preterm neonatal morbidity groups. AL will vary across groups and contribute to outcomes. We expect proximal protection and resilience to mediate the cumulative medical and socioeconomic risk and AL. Epigenome-wide DNA methylation, with estimates of age acceleration, will be examined across groups and explored in longitudinal associations with medical risk, socioeconomic status, and protection. To our knowledge, this is the only U.S. study of premature infants aged 30-35 years. With millions of preterm-born individuals reaching adulthood, the protocol incorporates molecular and genetic biomarkers in a life course developmental examination to inform the timing and content of interventions.

Participant experiences using novel home-based blood collection device for viral load testing in HIV cure trials with analytical treatment interruptions

Background: HIV cure-directed clinical trials using analytical treatment interruptions (ATIs) require participants to adhere to frequent monitoring visits for viral load tests. Novel viral load monitoring strategies are needed to decrease participant burden during ATIs. Objective: To examine acceptability of a novel home-based blood collection device for viral load testing in the context of two ongoing ATI trials in Philadelphia, PA, United States. Methods: From January 2021 to February 2022, participants completed three in-depth interviews via teleconference during their participation in an ATI: (1) within two weeks of enrollment in the device study, (2) approximately four weeks after beginning to use the device, and (3) within two weeks of the end of the ATI when ART was re-initiated. We used conventional content analysis to analyze the data. Results: We recruited 17 participants: 15 were cisgender males, 1 cisgender female, and 1 transgender woman. We observed an overall 87% success rate in drawing blood with the device from home collection and found overall high acceptance of the device. A mean of 91.5 devices per participant were used for home-based blood collection. Most PWH viewed the device as relatively convenient, painless, easy to use, and a simple solution to frequent blood draws. The main challenge encountered was the inability to completely fill up devices with blood in some cases. Most participants reported positive experiences with mailing blood samples and could see themselves using the device on a regular basis outside of ATIs. Conclusions: Our study showed participant valued the novel home-based peripheral blood collection for viral load testing in the context of ATI trials. More research will be necessary to optimize implementation of the device and to assess whether blood collected can reliably measure viral loads in the context of ATI trials.

Validitas dan Reliabilitas Perceived Future Employability Scale untuk Dewasa Muda

In this era of the 4th industrial revolution, one of the challenges we face is employment. There has been a decrease in job opportunities, while competition has also increased. The unemployment rate also continues to increase annually, especially among university graduates. Students need to be aware of how ready they are to enter the labor market after completing their studies. This study aims to test the validity and reliability of the Perceived Future Employability Scale (PFES), to identify whether the Indonesian version of the instrument is valid and reliable. PFES is expected to assist students to get an overview of how ready they are to enter the labor market, so they can prepare themselves better and know what still needs to improve. The process carried out includes a Focused Group Discussion (FGD), forward-backward translation, expert review, readability test, expert judgment, and data collection. The research design is in the form of an online questionnaire. The number of samples in this study amounted to 467 university students aged 18-30 years old. This study examined the construct validity and internal consistency reliability (Cronbach’s alpha). PFES has a strong positive correlation with the instrument that measures similar construct, and has a low negative correlation with the instrument that measures different construct. The results also indicated a high level of reliability. Thus, the Indonesian version of the PFES measuring instrument is a valid and reliable measuring instrument.

Shallow pooling for sparse labels

Recent years have seen enormous gains in core information retrieval tasks, including document and passage ranking. Datasets and leaderboards, and in particular the MS MARCO datasets, illustrate the dramatic improvements achieved by modern neural rankers. When compared with traditional information retrieval test collections, such as those developed by TREC, the MS MARCO datasets employ substantially more queries—thousands vs. dozens – with substantially fewer known relevant items per query—often just one. For example, 94% of the nearly seven thousand queries in the MS MARCO passage ranking development set have only a single known relevant passage, and no query has more than four. Given the sparsity of these relevance labels, the MS MARCO leaderboards track improvements with mean reciprocal rank (MRR). In essence, the known relevant item is treated as the “right answer” or “best answer”, with rankers scored on their ability to place this item as high in the ranking as possible. In working with these sparse labels, we have observed that the top items returned by a ranker often appear superior to judged relevant items. Others have reported the same observation. To test this observation, we employed crowdsourced workers to make preference judgments between the top item returned by a modern neural ranking stack and a judged relevant item for the nearly seven thousand queries in the passage ranking development set. The results support our observation. If we imagine a hypothetical perfect ranker under MRR, with a score of 1 on all queries, our preference judgments indicate that a searcher would prefer the top result from a modern neural ranking stack more frequently than the top result from the hypothetical perfect ranker, making our neural ranker “better than perfect”. To understand the implications for the leaderboard, we pooled the top document from available runs near the top of the passage ranking leaderboard for over 500 queries. We employed crowdsourced workers to make preference judgments over these pools and re-evaluated the runs. Our results support our concerns that current MS MARCO datasets may no longer be able to recognize genuine improvements in rankers. In future, if rankers are measured against a single answer, this answer should be the best answer or most preferred answer, and maintained with ongoing judgments. Since only the best known answer is required, this ongoing maintenance might be performed with shallow pooling. When a previously unjudged document is surfaced as the top item in a ranking, it can be directly compared with the previous best known answer.

Relevance Feedback and Deep Neural Network-Based Semantic Method for Query Expansion

Machine learning techniques have been widely used in almost every area of arts, science, and technology for the last two decades. Document analysis and query expansion also use machine learning techniques at a broad scale for information retrieval tasks. The state-of-the-art models like the Bo1 model, Bo2 model, KL divergence model, and chi-square model are probabilistic, and they work on DFR-based retrieval models. These models are much focused on term frequency and do not care about the semantic relationship among the terms. The proposed model applies the semantic method to find the semantic similarity among the terms to expand the query. The proposed method uses the relevance feedback method that selects a user-assisted most relevant document from top “ k ” initially retrieved documents and then applies deep neural network technique to select the most informative terms related to original query terms. The results are evaluated at FIRE 2011 ad hoc English test collection. The mean average precision of the proposed method is 0.3568. The proposed method also compares the state-of-the-art models. The proposed model observed 19.77% and 8.05% improvement on the mean average precision (MAP) parameter with respect to the original query and Bo1 model, respectively.

A test-based methodology for the probabilistic assessment of system resilience under random disturbances

Considering the random characteristics of the disturbances that may occur on the engineering system, this paper proposes a test-based probabilistic resilience assessment methodology. It is a sampling-based test method, including five main steps: (1) the bottom-up disturbance identification; (2) the sample size determination according to the law of large numbers and the central limit theorem; (3) the sample stratification and selection based on proportion stratified sampling method; (4) resilience test and performance data collection; and (5) probabilistic resilience assessment, consisting of point estimates and confidence intervals. Besides, two probabilistic resilience measures are defined to reflect the average and the percentile characteristics of the system resilience under random disturbances, and the traditional performance normalization method is extended to adapt to different types of parameters. A wireless DC servo motor is used to verify the effectiveness of our methodology, and this generic methodology can be further applied in other engineering systems.

Testing Frequency Matters: An Evaluation of the Diagnostic Performance of a Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) Rapid Antigen Test in US Correctional Facilities.

BackgroundThe CDC recommends serial rapid antigen assay collection within congregate facilities. Though modeling and observational studies from communities and long-term care facilities have shown serial collection provides adequate sensitivity and specificity, the accuracy within correctional facilities remains unknown.MethodsUsing Connecticut Department of Corrections (DOC) data from November 21st 2020 to June 15th 2021, we estimated the accuracy of a rapid assay, BinaxNOW, under three collection strategies, single test collection and serial collection of two and three tests separated by 1-4 days. The sensitivity and specificity of the first (including single), second, and third serially collected BinaxNOW tests were estimated relative to RT-PCRs collected within one day of the BinaxNOW test. The accuracy metrics of the testing strategies were then estimated as the sum (sensitivity) and product (specificity) of tests in each strategy.ResultsOf the 13,112 residents who contributed ≥1 BinaxNOW test during the study period, 3,825 contributed ≥1 RT-PCR paired BinaxNOW test. In relation to RT-PCR, the three-rapid antigen test strategy had a sensitivity of 95.9% (95% confidence intervals (CI): 93.6-97.5%) and specificity of 98.3% (CI: 96.7-99.1%). The sensitivity of the two- and one-rapid antigen test strategies were 88.8% and 66.8%, respectively, and the specificities were 98.5% and 99.4%, respectively. The sensitivity was higher among symptomatic residents and when RT-PCRs were collected before BinaxNOW tests.ConclusionsWe found serial antigen test collection resulted in high diagnostic accuracy. These findings support serial collection for outbreak investigation, screening, and when rapid detection is required (such as intakes or transfers).

Effect of The Volume of Banana Fiber As A Polymer Composite Amplifier With Polyester Resin Matrix On The Sound Absorption of Acoustic Materials

Research has been carried out on the banana fiber effect as a polymer composite amplifier with polyester resin matrix on the sound absorption of acoustic materials. Sound Absorber material is made with a variation in the volume of banana fiber that is different from polyester resin. The volume of banana fiber and polyester resin used is 15% Fiber: 85% Polyester Resin, 20% Fiber: 80% Polyester Resin, 25% Fiber: 25% Fiber: 75% Resin Polyester, 30% Fiber: 70% Polyester Resin, 35% Fiber: 65% Polyester Resin. So when made composite then the amount of banana fiber used and polyester resin is 100%. Research methods are carried out in the collection of banana fiber, composite manufacturing and testing of sound absorption properties using impedance tubes. The testing of coefficient sound reflection and also sound absorbance coefficient testing is done using sound level meter and signal generator by reference to principle the method of tube impedance via approach to the acoustic box. The banana fiber composite result and polyester resin are able to reflect the sound of highest which is 0.44 in a frequency 500 Hz with fiber 15%. While lowest sound reflection coefficient is 0.06 at a frequency of 8000 Hz and fiber 35%. While in the test the highest value absorbance coefficient that absorbs sound is = 0.94 at fiber volume 35%, and frequency 8000 Hz, while the lowest sound coefficient is 0.56 in fiber 15% and frequency 500 HZ

Semantic-Based Hybrid Query Reformulation for Biomedical Information Retrieval

Abstract Query reformulation is a well-known technique intended to improve the performance of Information Retrieval Systems. Among the several available techniques, Query Expansion (QE) reformulates the initial query by adding similar terms, drawn from several sources (corpus, knowledge resources), to the query terms in order to retrieve more relevant documents. Most QE methods are based on the relationships between the original query term and candidate terms (new terms) in order to select the most similar expansion terms. In this paper, we suggested a new hybrid query reformulation through QE and term re-weighting techniques. The suggested approach aimed to demonstrate the effectiveness of QE with a semantic selection of candidate terms according to the specificity of original query terms in the improvement of retrieval performance. To this end, we exploited both relationships defined by knowledge resources and the distributed semantics, recently revealed by neural network analysis. For term re-weighting, we proposed a new semantic method based on semantic similarity measure that assigns a weight to each term of the expanded query. The conducted experiments on OHSUMED and TREC 2014 CDS test collections, including long and short queries, yielded significant results that outperformed the baseline and state-of-the-art approaches.

Toward Cranfield-inspired reusability assessment in interactive information retrieval evaluation

Re-using research resources is essential for advancing knowledge and developing repeatable, empirically solid experiments in scientific fields, including interactive information retrieval (IIR). Despite recent efforts on standardizing research re-use and documentation, how to quantitatively measure the reusability of IIR resources still remains an open challenge. Inspired by the reusability evaluations on Cranfield experiments, our work proactively explores the problem of measuring IIR test collection reusability and makes threefold contributions: (1) constructing a novel usefulness-oriented framework with specific analytical methods for evaluating the reusability of IIR test collections consisting of query sets, document/page sets, and sets of task-document usefulness (tuse); (2) explaining the potential impacts of varying IIR-specific factors (e.g. search tasks, sessions, user characteristics) on test collection reusability; (3) proposing actionable methods for building reusable test collections in IIR and thereby amortizing the true cost of user-oriented evaluations. The Cranfield-inspired reusability assessment framework serves as an initial step towards accurately evaluating the reusability of IIR research resources and measuring the reproducibility of IIR evaluation results. It also demonstrates an innovative approach to integrating the insights from individual heterogeneous user studies with the evaluation techniques developed in standardized ad hoc retrieval experiments, which will facilitate the maturation of IIR fields and eventually benefits both sides of research.

Prevalence of Urinary Tract Infections Among Students Residence in Nicon Hostel, Federal Polytechnic Bida, Niger State, Nigeria

Background: Urinary tract infections (UTI) are serious health problems affecting millions of people each year. It is cause by both certain fungi, Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria and occurs in both acute and chronic forms. The most common causative agent for both uncomplicated and complicated UTIs is uropathogenic Escherichia coli (UPEC). The uropathogens include UPEC, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Staphylococcus saprophyticus, Enterococcus faecalis, group B Streptococcus (GBS), Proteus mirabilis, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Staphylococcus aureus and Candida spp. This study is based on the determining the presence or absence of bacteria in the urine sample, isolation and identification of the most prevalent bacteria associated with UTI and to identify the drug sensitivity patters of the isolates. Methods: This involves determination of sample and sample collection, urinalysis, isolation and identification of uropathogens and antibiotic sensitivity test. One hundred and ninety (190) female students residing in the hostel of the Federal Polytechnic Bida were examined for significant bacterial indicators of urinary tract infections. Results: Analysis of their clean voided, midstream urine revealed that 57 (30%) isolates were positive for bacteria while 133 (70%) were negative. The fifty-seven (57) bacterial isolates were tentatively characterized into six genera. The frequencies of occurrence of the bacterial species are in the order: Escherichia coli (35.09%), Proteus sp. (10.53%), Klebsiella sp. (19.29%), Staphylococcus sp. (22.81%), Candida sp. (21.05%) and Pseudomonas sp. (7.02%) whereas mixed culture (15.79%). A total of 57 (100%) were sensitive to ciprofloxacin, 51 (89.47%) to Pefloxacin, 41 (71.93%) to Sparfloxacin. Zinnacef, Gentamycin and streptomycin had a relatively fair activity on the isolates with sensitivities of 37 (64.91%), 30 (52.63%) and 24 (42.1%) respectively. However, bacterial isolates obtained from this survey generally showed a similar pattern of resistance to antibiotics. Conclusion: The prevalence of UTI is high among the student resident of Nicon hostel of the Federal Polytechnic Bida.

Rapidly adapting primary care sentinel surveillance across seven countries in Europe for COVID-19 in the first half of 2020: strengths, challenges, and lessons learned.

As the COVID-19 pandemic began in early 2020, primary care influenza sentinel surveillance networks within the Influenza - Monitoring Vaccine Effectiveness in Europe (I-MOVE) consortium rapidly adapted to COVID-19 surveillance. This study maps system adaptations and lessons learned about aligning influenza and COVID-19 surveillance following ECDC / WHO/Europe recommendations and preparing for other diseases possibly emerging in the future. Using a qualitative approach, we describe the adaptations of seven sentinel sites in five European Union countries and the United Kingdom during the first pandemic phase (March–September 2020). Adaptations to sentinel systems were substantial (2/7 sites), moderate (2/7) or minor (3/7 sites). Most adaptations encompassed patient referral and sample collection pathways, laboratory testing and data collection. Strengths included established networks of primary care providers, highly qualified testing laboratories and stakeholder commitments. One challenge was the decreasing number of samples due to altered patient pathways. Lessons learned included flexibility establishing new routines and new laboratory testing. To enable simultaneous sentinel surveillance of influenza and COVID-19, experiences of the sentinel sites and testing infrastructure should be considered. The contradicting aims of rapid case finding and contact tracing, which are needed for control during a pandemic and regular surveillance, should be carefully balanced.

Neural topic-enhanced cross-lingual word embeddings for CLIR

Cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) methods have quickly made the transition from translation-based approaches to semantic-based approaches. In this paper, we examine the limitations of current unsupervised neural CLIR methods, especially those leveraging aligned cross-lingual word embedding (CLWE) spaces. At the moment, CLWEs are normally constructed on the monolingual corpus of bilingual texts through an iterative induction process. Homonymy and polysemy have become major obstacles in this process. On the other hand, contextual text representation methods often fail to outperform static CLWE methods significantly for CLIR. We propose a method utilizing a novel neural generative model with Wasserstein autoencoders to learn neural topic-enhanced CLWEs for CLIR purposes. Our method requires minimal or no supervision at all. On the CLEF test collections, we perform a comparative evaluation of the state-of-the-art semantic CLWE methods along with our proposed method for neural CLIR tasks. We demonstrate that our method outperforms the existing CLWE methods and multilingual contextual text encoders. We also show that our proposed method obtains significant improvements over the CLWE methods based upon representative topical embeddings.

Prediction of the high-cost normalised discounted cumulative gain (nDCG) measure in information retrieval evaluation

Introduction. Information retrieval systems are vital to meeting daily information needs of users. The effectiveness of these systems has often been evaluated using the test collections approach, despite the high evaluation costs of this approach. Recent methods have been proposed that reduce evaluation costs through the prediction of information retrieval performance measures at the higher cut-off depths using other measures computed at the lower cut-off depths. The purpose of this paper is to propose two methods that addresses the challenge of accurately predicting the normalised discounted cumulative gain (nDCG) measure. Method. Data from selected test collections of the Text REtrieval Conference was used. The proposed methods employ the gradient boosting and linear regression models trained with topic scores of measures partitioned by TREC Tracks. Analysis. To evaluate the proposed methods, the coefficient of determination, Kendall's tau and Spearman correlations were used. Results. The proposed methods provide better predictions of the nDCG measure at the higher cut-off depths while using other measures computed at the lower cut-off depths. Conclusions. These proposed methods have shown improvement in the predictions of the nDCG measure while reducing the evaluation costs.

Abstract 4094: WAYFIND-R: Delivering a high-quality real-world data (RWD) global registry of patients diagnosed with a solid tumor and profiled with next-generation sequencing (NGS)

Abstract NGS-based, molecularly guided therapy is becoming a pivotal part of precision oncology. Rare molecular cancer subtypes pose difficulties in traditional clinical trials; however, collecting patient RWD can help elucidate the clinical utility of targeted therapies, molecular tumor boards (MTBs), and NGS-based genomic profiling. WAYFIND-R (NCT04529122) is a global registry that: 1) characterizes the treatments and clinical course of patients with cancer; 2) provides a data research platform to evaluate real-world treatment decisions and outcomes; 3) supports the design/conduct of epidemiological research and clinical trials. WAYFIND-R will provide key learnings on data quality, sharing, and privacy for contemporary disease registries. Unlike many disease registries, WAYFIND-R is global, prospective, longitudinal, generalizable (all clinically validated NGS-based tests of any panel size are permitted), and includes NGS testing and standardized data collection to enhance data quality and minimize missing data. WAYFIND-R includes adults with any type/stage of solid tumor profiled with NGS ≤3 months before enrollment. NGS details, patient sociodemographics, cancer characteristics, patient-relevant safety data, treatment decisions, and outcomes are collected at baseline and prospectively every ≥6 months. WAYFIND-R will initially operate in ~12 countries, followed by further global expansion, in academic centers, community hospitals, and private clinics with regular MTBs. By 2026, WAYFIND-R aims to enroll ~15,000 patients. A key component is the potential to explore global and local data within a secure analytics platform (also known as a trusted research environment), accessed through a visual dashboard to find treatment decisions for similar patients elsewhere. Researchers can access the patient-level dataset for correlative analyses, after independent scientific committee approval. WAYFIND-R’s methodological/operational aspects were guided by external experts and the European Medicines Agency. As of October 2021, 11 patients have been enrolled. WAYFIND-R will inform on best practice for NGS-based treatment decisions by clinicians, foster global collaborations between cancer centers (enabling robust conclusions regarding outcome data to be drawn), aid understanding of disparities in patients’ access to advanced diagnostics and therapies, and ultimately drive advances in precision oncology. Citation Format: Christophe Le Tourneau, Allan Hackshaw, Jean-Yves Blay, Jan Geissler, Clare Turnbull, Camille Perret, Olga Skatkova, Martina von Meyenn, Rodrigo Dienstmann. WAYFIND-R: Delivering a high-quality real-world data (RWD) global registry of patients diagnosed with a solid tumor and profiled with next-generation sequencing (NGS) [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2022; 2022 Apr 8-13. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2022;82(12_Suppl):Abstract nr 4094.

Diagnostic Tests for the Necessity of Weight in Regression With Survey Data

SummaryTo weight or not to weight in regression analyses with survey data has been debated in the literature. The problem is essentially a tradeoff between the bias and the variance of the regression coefficient estimator. An array of diagnostic tests for informative weights have been developed. Nonetheless, studies comparing the performance of the tests, especially for finite samples, are scarce, and the theoretical equivalence of some tests has not been investigated. Focusing on the linear regression setting, we review a collection of such tests and propose enhanced versions of some of them that require an auxiliary regression model for the weight. Further, the equivalence of two popular tests is established which has not been reported before. In contrast to existing reviews with no empirical comparison, we compare the sizes and powers of the tests in simulation studies. The reviewed tests are applied to a regression analysis of the family expenditure using the data from the China Family Panel Study.

SST2 Level at Decompensated Chronic Heart Failure in Patients with Dilated Cardiomyopathy

The purpose of the study was to evaluate the relationship between clinical and functional changes and sST2 levels in patients with dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) admitted to the hospital due to decompensated chronic heart failure (CHF). Methods and Results: The study involved 64 DCM patients with clinical signs of decompensated CHF. According to the sST2 level, the patients were divided into two groups. Group 1 included 30 patients with sST2 level <35ng/ml; Group 2 included 34 patients with sST2 level ≥35ng/ml. All patients underwent the following examinations: collection of anamnestic data, physical examination, general clinical and laboratory blood tests, 12-lead ECG, conventional 2D echocardiography in M- and B-modes, the 6MWT, and the assessment of the quality of life according to the Minnesota Living with Heart Failure Questionnaire (MLHFQ). The serum level of sST2 was determined by enzyme immunoassay using the Presage ST2 Assay. The duration of CHF was significantly longer in Group 2 than in Group 1(48.7±6.5 mth versus 29.6±7 mth P<0.05), and the number of hospitalizations per year was more frequent. Group 2 patients were characterized by lower blood pressure levels and high heart rate (P<0.05). At the same time, the 6MWT value was lower and MLHFQ score was higher in Group 2 than in Group 1 (P<0.001 in both cases). In Group 1, LVEF was significantly higher and LVM was significantly lower than in Group 2 (P<0.001). All in all, Group 2 patients had more pronounced disorders in LV systolic dysfunction. The correlation analysis revealed an inverse correlation between the sST2 level and 6MWT (r=-0.69, P<0.01), as well as LVEF (r=-0.26, P<0.01). Statistically significant direct correlations were found between the sST2evel and the size and volume of the LV cavities. Conclusion: sST2 is a clinically relevant biomarker that reflects pathophysiological processes and provides prognostic information in the setting of DCM, especially in patients with HF.