Reliability of transcranial magnetic stimulation measures of afferent inhibition.

Short-latency afferent inhibition (SAI) and long-latency afferent inhibition (LAI) are well-known transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) paradigms used to probe the sensorimotor system. To date, there is a paucity of research examining the reliability of these neurophysiological measures. This information is required to validate the utility of afferent inhibition as a biomarker of neural function.

Predicting hospital and emergency department utilization among community-dwelling older adults: Statistical and machine learning approaches.

Objective: The objective of this study was to compare the performance of several commonly used machine learning methods to traditional statistical methods for predicting emergency department and hospital utilization among patients receiving publicly-funded home care services.

Study Design And Setting: We conducted a population-based retrospective cohort study of publicly-funded home care recipients in the Hamilton-Niagara-Haldimand-Brant region of southern Ontario, Canada between 2014 and 2016. Gradient boosted trees, neural networks, and random forests were tested against two variations of logistic regression for predicting three outcomes related to emergency department and hospital utilization within six months of a comprehensive home care clinical assessment.