Generalized Fused Lasso for Treatment Pooling in Network Meta-Analysis.

This work develops a generalized fused lasso (GFL) approach to fitting contrast-based network meta-analysis (NMA) models. The GFL method penalizes all pairwise differences between treatment effects, resulting in the pooling of treatments that are not sufficiently different. This approach offers an intriguing avenue for potentially mitigating biases in treatment rankings and reducing sparsity in networks.

Estimation and Applications of Uncertainty in Methane Emissions Quantification Technologies: A Bayesian Approach.

An accurate understanding of uncertainty is needed to properly interpret methane emission estimates from upstream oil and gas sources in a variety of contexts, from component-level measurements to yearly jurisdiction-wide inventories. To characterize measurement uncertainty, we examine controlled release (CR) data from five different technology providers including quantitative gas imaging (QOGI), tunable diode laser-absorption spectroscopy (TDLAS); and airborne near-infrared hyperspectral (NIR HS) imaging. We introduce a novel empirical method to develop probability distributions of measurements given a true emission rate using the CR data.

Using the Patient Health Questionnaire-2 to improve depression screening in head and neck cancer patients.

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine the use of the Patient Health Questionnaire-2 (PHQ-2) to screen for depression in patients undergoing treatment for head and neck cancer and to evaluate potential patient-specific risk factors that may contribute to depression.

Materials And Methods: This is a retrospective study at a tertiary-level hospital of outpatient adult patients with head and neck cancer who completed the PHQ-2/9 from 2019 to 2020. Patients were given a PHQ-2 during a surveillance visit.

It's what the community demands: Results of community-based emergency opioid overdose trainings.

Objectives: In response to a surge of drug overdoses involving polysubstance use among Atlanta service industry workers that resulted in the deaths of five people in the Atlanta area in the summer of 2021, a local community of harm reductionists and nurses organized opioid education and naloxone distribution (OEND) training sessions specifically customized for service industry workers in Atlanta. After the sessions, the nurses and harm reductionists asked attendants to participate in a study concerning their response to overdoses. The reason nurses and harm reductionists conducted the study was to determine the efficacy of OEND training adapted for those working in the service industries as well as to evaluate and possibly modify the training sessions for future use.

A Gentle Introduction to Bayesian Network Meta-Analysis Using an Automated R Package.

Network meta-analysis is an extension of standard meta-analysis. It allows researchers to build a network of evidence to compare multiple interventions that may have not been compared directly in existing publications. With a Bayesian approach, network meta-analysis can be used to obtain a posterior probability distribution of all the relative treatment effects, which allows for the estimation of relative treatment effects to quantify the uncertainty of parameter estimates, and to rank all the treatments in the network.