Narrow Results

Objective: This study aims to explore the use of machine learning algorithms for predicting disease classification. Methods: An integrated algorithm (KPLSKELM) was proposed in this study. The algorithm employed kernel principal component analysis to transform the original data into a high-dimensional feature space, thereby enhancing its linear separability. It used the sparrow search algorithm (SSA) to optimize the weight matrix and parameters of the kernel extreme learning machine (KELM). The algorithm incorporated a Gaussian perturbation search mechanism to refine the population initialization strategy so as to mitigate the issues of poor convergence rate and susceptibility to local optima in the later SSA iterations. Lévy flight perturbations were introduced during the foraging search process of the sparrow population to guide the population in moving appropriate step sizes, thereby increasing the diversity of the spatial search. The proposed method was experimentally validated using a binary classification breast cancer dataset collected by Dr. William H. Wolberg from a Wisconsin hospital in the United States and a multiclass classification dataset of electrocardiographic recordings during childbirth. Multiple metrics were adopted to evaluate the classification performance. Results: The accuracy and F1_score of the KELM model remained relatively low across different percentages of the training set, although a recall of 1.0000 was consistently achieved. Both the SSA-improved KELM and the Lévy-improved SSA-optimized KELM algorithms exhibited better performance in terms of the comprehensive metric F1_score and improved with the increase in the percentage of the training set. The KPLSKELM model outperformed others in all metrics, with accuracy, precision, recall, and F1_score approaching or reaching the highest levels when using 90% of the training set. Conclusions: The proposed method demonstrated excellent performance in various disease prediction tasks, holding high practical application value. It provided a reference for further assisting clinicians in making more precise treatment decisions.

Diver’s disease is a complication that the human body suffers from after being in a high-pressure space and then quickly entering a low-pressure space. These pressures are very harmful for the tissues of the body, especially for the brain. Decompression sickness occurs when nitrogen bubbles up in the bloodstream, caused by staying underwater too long or surfacing too quickly. Decompression sickness symptoms usually appear with a delay after diving. By processing electroencephalography, information about neurophysiological disorders can be extracted precisely. Since the diagnosis of divers’ diseases has not been dealt with using a unique model, this paper deals with the diagnosis of brain abnormalities caused by diving. In this paper, an intelligent model using the electroencephalography of divers will be presented to diagnose the brain disorders. The proposed model based on the brain function can show the connections of the divers’ brain regions using cellular neural networks. First, the effective features are extracted from the signals, and then based on the proposed architecture based on the brain, the differences in the brain connections of divers compared to non-divers are expressed. The obtained results show that there are differences in intra-regional connections of some brain regions of divers including T7, T8, O1 and O2 ($p$ < 0.05) compared to nondivers.

As a traditional Chinese alternative health care approach, acupuncture is gaining increasing attention and reputation in China and overseas. While becoming increasingly popular globally, some consumers and professionals still know little about the therapy and underlying mechanisms of acupuncture. Due to local superiority, there are large numbers of both clinical applications and mechanistic studies performed in China compared to countries overseas. Herein, this review attempts to give a comprehensive profile of the development, application, and mechanisms of acupuncture in treating major diseases. The number of clinical publications concerning acupuncture-treated neurological diseases, endocrine and metabolic diseases, circulatory diseases, respiratory diseases, etc. is first counted, and then, the application and therapeutic mechanisms of acupuncture on the predominant diseases in each category, including obesity, facial paralysis, sciatica, depression, hypertension, asthma, etc., are specifically discussed in this paper. The evolution of acupuncture tools and the rationality of acupoints are also discussed. This review not only summarizes the mechanisms of acupuncture but also provides useful information, such as specific acupoints and acupuncture procedures, for treating common diseases. Therefore, the current study provides useful information for both investigators and acupuncturists.

Hantavirus outbreaks in the American Southwest are hypothesized to be driven by episodic seasonal events of high precipitation, promoting rapid increases in virus-reservoir rodent species that then move across the landscape from high quality montane forested habitats (refugia), eventually over-running human residences and increasing disease risk. In this study, the velocities of rodents and virus diffusion wave propagation and retraction were documented and quantified in the sky-islands of northern New Mexico and related to rodent-virus relationships in refugia versus nonrefugia habitats. Deer mouse (Peromyscus maniculatus) refugia populations exhibited higher Sin Nombre Virus (SNV) infection prevalence than nonrefugia populations. The velocity of propagating diffusion waves of Peromyscus from montane to lower grassland habitats was measured at $24.6\pm 5.6$ m/day (SE), with wave retraction velocities of $28\pm 8.4$ m/day. SNV infection diffusion wave propagation velocity within a deer mouse population averaged $27.5\pm 7.8$ m/day, with a faster retraction wave velocity of $161.5\pm 80.7$ m/day. A spatio-temporal analysis of human Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome (HPS) cases during the initial 1993 epidemic revealed a positive linear relationship between the time during the epidemic and the distance of human cases from the nearest deer mouse refugium, with a landscape diffusion wave velocity of $19.6\pm 1.0$ m/day ($r^2=0.96$). These consistent diffusion propagation wave velocity results support the traveling wave component of the HPS outbreak theory and can provide information on space–time constraints for future outbreak forecasts.

It is generally, but not always, accepted that alternative food plays a stabilizing role in predator–prey interaction. Parasites, on the other hand, have the ability to change both the qualitative and quantitative dynamics of its host population. In recent times, researchers are showing growing interest in formulating models that integrate both the ecological and epidemiological aspects. The present paper deals with the effect of alternative food on a predator–prey system with disease in the predator population. We show that the system, in the absence of alternative food, exhibits different dynamics viz. stable coexistence, limit cycle oscillations, period-doubling bifurcation and chaos when infection rate is gradually increased. However, when predator consumes alternative food coupled with its focal prey, the system returns to regular oscillatory state from chaotic state through period-halving bifurcations. Our study shows that alternative food may have larger impact on the community structure and may increase population persistence.

We develop simple models for the global spread of infectious diseases, emphasizing human mobility via air travel and the variation of public health infrastructure from region to region. We derive formulas relating the total and peak number of infections in two countries to the rate of travel between them and their respective epidemiological parameters.

The Leslie–Gower predator–prey model with logistic growth in prey is here modified to include an SI parasitic infection affecting the prey population only. Thresholds are identified for the predator population to survive, and the conditions for the disease to die out naturally are given. The behavior of the system around each equilibrium is investigated, showing that the disease incidence may have a relevant influence on the dynamics of complex ecosytems, assuming at times the role of a biological control parameter.

The new idea of group defense as recently introduced by the author in the context of two interacting populations is in this paper applied to communities subject also to a disease. The system is formulated with the bare minimum of interactions among all the populations involved in order to highlight the effects of the nonlinearity describing the defense mechanism. A key parameter identified in the purely demographic model, which completely describes its outcomes, is seen here to have an important role also, in that it is dropping below a threshold prevents the disease from invading the environment and causes the healthy prey and predators to coexist via persistent oscillations.

In ecological systems, the fear of predation risk asserts a privilege to the prey species by restricting their exposure to the potential predators. It also imposes costs by constraining the exploration of optimal resources. Additional foods for predators play a pivotal role in the biological conservation programs. The predators have ability to distinguish between the susceptible and infected prey items, and they avoid the latter ones to reduce their fitness cost. A predator-prey model with disease in prey is investigated in this study with an aim to explore the effects of fear factor, additional foods and selective predation on the ecological systems. We also investigate the spatio-temporal model to incorporate the facts that the prey and predator populations perform active movements in the spatial directions for their biological relevance. Both the temporal and spatio-temporal models are analyzed through noteworthy mathematical as well as numerical techniques. Our simulation results show that the level of fear responsible for the reduction in the birth rate of susceptible prey, rate of disease transmission and the selective feeding behavior of predators have potentials to create instability in the ecosystem. In contrast, the level of fear responsible for reduction in the disease prevalence can restore stability in the ecosystem by killing the persistent oscillations. Our eco-epidemic system exhibits chaotic nature if the growth of predators due to additional food sources is very low. We find that the spatio-temporal model demonstrates different spatial patterns of the prey and predator populations in the ecosystem.

Our current research is based on the investigation of an eco-epidemiological model that solely includes illness in predators. Predators, both healthy and diseased, are thought to consume prey and breed; however, the offsprings are expected to be vulnerable. To achieve a more realistic and explicit outcome of the existing phenomena correlated with our model system, we consider that the process of disease transmission is mediated by some time lag and the intensity of disease prevalence is seasonally forced. Our simulation results show that the disease dies out for lower intensity of disease prevalence or higher rate of consumption of prey by susceptible predator. The system undergoes subcritical/supercritical Hopf bifurcation as the parameters representing the intensity of disease prevalence, consumption rate of prey by susceptible/infected predator vary. The system exhibits two types of bistabilities: the first one between stable coexistence and oscillating coexistence, and the second one between two oscillatory coexistence cycles. Moreover, we see that with gradual increase in the incubation delay, the system shows transitions from stable focus to limit cycle oscillations to period doubling oscillations to chaotic dynamics. Chaotic dynamics is also observed for the periodic changes in the intensity of disease prevalence if it takes much time for the pathogens to develop sufficiently inside body of the susceptible predators.

In this paper, we have investigated women’s malignant disease, cervical cancer, by constructing the compartmental model. An extended fractal–fractional model is used to study the disease dynamics. The points of equilibria are computed analytically and verified by numerical simulations. The key role of $R_0$ in describing the stability of the model is presented. The sensitivity analysis of $R_0$ for deciding the role of certain parameters altering the disease dynamics is carried out. The numerical simulations of the proposed numerical technique are demonstrated to test the claimed facts.

Based on the pharmaco-physiology of the aminobisphosphonates, it could be speculated that bisphosphonates could induce not only the osteopetrotic bone disease because of their selective suppression of osteoclastic activity, but also could affect directly or indirectly the endocrine system, local factors, and also the bone metabolic turnover. Consequently, the bone fragility could be rather produced by long-term aminobisphosphonate therapy. Bisphosphonate-mediated bone disease was labeled by Odvina et al. in 2005 [Odvina CV, Zerwerth JE, Rao DS et al. Severely suppressed bone turnover; a potential complication of alendronate therapy. J Clin Endocrinol Metab90: 1294–1301, 2005.] as the "severely suppressed bone turnover (SSBT)" on the metabolic turnover basis. However, such definition could contain various drug-induced bone diseases, and did not indicate any particular condition, induced by the bisphosphonate. The term "SSBT" is thought not solely to be based on its histology, and seems rather a clinical term applicable to the various drug-induced bone diseases. Therefore, the current authors attempted to characterize the bisphosphonate-mediated bone disease on the basis of the combined image and histological studies, and finally concluded that the prolonged bisphosphonate therapy could produce an atypical osteomalacic bone disease. (osteosclerosis of osteomalacia) which leads to fragility fracture. It is puzzling as to why malacia rather than petrosis develops in the skeleton.

AUSTRALIA – Second-Generation Diagnostic Achieves 98% Accuracy in Detecting Early Stage Ovarian Cancers

AUSTRALIA – New Center Brings Australian and Chinese Researchers Together to Fight Infectious Diseases

AUSTRALIA – Co-developing New Treatment Guidelines for Melanoma

AUSTRALIA – Australia Leads World's First Global Effort to Improve Genetic Disorders Diagnosis

CHINA – China Bans Illegal Food Additives to Reinforce Food Safety Control

CHINA – China Steps Up Tighter Inspection in Food Safety

CHINA – WHO and China to Do More for Chinese with Hearing Impairment

CHINA – First TCM Drug for Arrhythmia

CHINA – First Human-Human Transmission of Tick-Borne Disease Reported in China

CHINA – Bird Flu Found in Chickens in Eastern China

CHINA – First Bird Flu Death Reported for 2009, No Bird-flu Outbreak

HONG KONG – Hong Kong Alerts New Bird Flu Outbreak

INDIA – India Also Confirmed Bird Flu Incidence

INDIA – India Plans 20 More Biotech Parks for Life Sciences Research

KOREA – An Economic Share in Medical Tourism Market

JAPAN – Brain Tissues Made from Stem Cells

NEW ZEALAND – Newly Merged Research Institute Leverage Greater Synergy

NEW ZEALAND – Kiwi's Green Plastic Well-Acclaimed in International Awards

NEW ZEALAND – Sea Sponge Indigenous to NZ Could Reduce Chemo Side Effects

PHILIPPINES – Ebola-Reston Virus Jumped Species

SINGAPORE – Human Sewage, the Potential Source of Clean Energy

SINGAPORE – No More Heart-stopping Incidents for Heart Patients

SINGAPORE – China Milk Products Get All-Clear from Singapore

SINGAPORE – Discovery of New Properties in Imidazolium Salts Yield Multi Applications

SINGAPORE – S'pore Ranked World's Most Prolific for Eye Research Per Capita

SINGAPORE – Outdoor Sun Reduces Incidence of Myopia in Children

TAIWAN – University Hospital in Taiwan Collaborates with Neuralstem

VIETNAM – Return of Bird Flu, Vietnam Runs High Risk of Human Infection

VIETNAM – Conjoined Twins Successfully Separated

VIETNAM – Rise in Off-Season Dengue Fever Cases

NORTH AMERICA – Epilepsy Drugs Prescription to Carry Suicide Risk Warning

NORTH AMERICA – U.S. Doctors Succeeded Near-total Face Transplant

NORTH AMERICA – Vaccinating Pacific Girls against Cervical Cancer

NORTH AMERICA – Manipulating Love and Emotions by Spray

EUROPE – Cambridge Pips Oxford in Research

EUROPE – Adapting Car Manufacturing Technology to Produce Synthetic Bone Implants

EUROPE – Dioxin-tainted Irish Pork Products Recalled

Chinese Physician Appointed to Lead Clinical Operations of MDS Pharma Services in Asia

Swiss to Helm Takeda Pharmaceuticals Asia Private Limited as New CEO

First Asian Honored Prestigious American Award

I²R's Researcher Selected as One of the Only Two Nokia Visiting Professors for 2009

International Business Honcho Appointed as New Country CEO for Siemens Singapore

Australian Scientists Reach Breakthrough in Stem Cell Research.

Breakthrough in Disease Management of Chikungunya Fever by Singapore Researchers.

MicroRNAs Lead to Formation or Suppression of Tumors? Singapore and US Scientists Share Results.

Singapore and South Korea to Invent More New Materials.

Asian Blood Cancer Patients Respond Better with a Lower Drug Dosage.

Safer Ethical Way to Make Human Stem Cells.

"Blushing" Response from Alcohol Drinking Signals Increased Cancer Risk Among East Asians.

Interview with Frost & Sullivan — Celebrating Best Practices in Healthcare.

Interview with InterSystems Corporation — Connecting Applications, Processes and People Intelligently.

Interview with Philips Healthcare — Excellence in Medical Imaging & Radiology.

Interview with Roche Diagnostics — Cutting-Edge Clinical Diagnostics.

Benitec MOU with Biomics Biotechnologies China.

Arkema & Aussie Chemeq Sign Manufacturing Cooperation Agreement.

AstraZeneca and Mental Health Research Institute in Australia Announce Collaboration to Improve Early Detection of Alzheimer's Disease.

Avexa Gets CSIRO Investment.

Living Cell Technologies' Encapsulated Choroid Plexus Cells May Be Used To Treat Hearing Loss.

Sundia MediTech Acquires Protein Folding Technology.

Beijing Cancer Hospital Introduces Fast and Precise RapidArc Radiotherapy Cancer Treatments.

Zydus Cadila and Karo Bio's Research Collaboration has Generated Promising Lead Compounds.

ICON Acquires Veeda Laboratories Limited.

Novavax-Cadila to Conduct Swine Flu Clinical Trials.

Axygen & Astellas form JV to Develop Protein Drugs.

Rexahn, KRICT to Develop Anti-Cancer Drugs.

Japan's Largest Pharmaceutical Firm Opens Regional HQ in Singapore.

Ultrasound-Mediated Gene Therapy - Philips and Glygenix Team Up.

Vietnam Healthcare - The Next Growth Frontier?

New Ultrasound System Could Lower Number of Biopsies.

AUSTRALIA – New Test Will Help Identify Viral Cattle Disease.

AUSTRALIA – Vision CRC Technology to Control Myopia.

AUSTRALIA – Living Skin for Burns Victims.

AUSTRALIA – IVF Clinic Develops Improved Screening.

AUSTRALIA – Glaucoma Affecting 150,000 Australians.

AUSTRALIA – Bionic Eye Design to be Unveiled.

AUSTRALIA – Australian Scientists in TB Drug Breakthrough.

CHINA – China Suffering Diabetes Epidemic: Report.

CHINA – Chinese Researchers Discover First Therapeutic Hepatitis B Vaccine in the World.

CHINA – In Annual Rite, Chinese Science Showered With Riches.

HONG KONG – Swine Flu's Got New Genes On.

INDIA – Apollo Hospitals to Conduct Research in Ayurveda.

INDIA – Project to Check Heart Disease in Corporates Launched.

INDIA – Indian Scientist Develops Low-cost Cancer Detector.

INDIA – Conjoined Twins Separated After a 14-hour surgery at Delhi hospital.

JAPAN – Genetically Modified Mosquitos may Help Fight Malaria.

SINGAPORE – NUHS to Partner Harvard.

SINGAPORE – S'pore Team Develops Mobile ECG Machine.

SINGAPORE – Novel Method to Produce Precise Medical Images for Detection of Diseases.

SINGAPORE – Singapore Got S$1.2 bn Investment in BMS in 2009.

SINGAPORE – Singapore and Sweden Institutes Ink Research Collaboration on Environmental Technologies.

SINGAPORE – Simple Test for Lung Patients.

TAIWAN – Taiwan, Japan Entities Team up on Research.

VIETNAM – HCM City Public Hospitals Run Out of Recognized Vaccines.

OTHER REGIONS — NORTH AMERICA – Researchers Seek Funding to Study How Climate Change Influenced Human Evolution.

OTHER REGIONS — EUROPE – A Blood Test to Detect Breast Cancer.