Surgery Duration Prediction Using Multi-Task Feature Selection.

Efficient optimization of operating room (OR) activity poses a significant challenge for hospital managers due to the complex and risky nature of the environment. The traditional "one size fits all" approach to OR scheduling is no longer practical, and personalized medicine is required to meet the diverse needs of patients, care providers, medical procedures, and system constraints within limited resources. This paper aims to introduce a scientific and practical tool for predicting surgery durations and improving OR performance for maximum benefit to patients and the hospital.

Functional Benefit and Orthotic Effect of Dorsiflexion-FES in Children with Hemiplegic Cerebral Palsy.

Functional electrical stimulation of the ankle dorsiflexor (DF-FES) may have advantages over ankle foot orthoses (AFOs) in managing pediatric cerebral palsy (CP). This study assessed the functional benefit and orthotic effect of DF-FES in children with hemiplegic CP. We conducted an open-label prospective study on children with hemiplegic CP ≥ 6 years who used DF-FES for five months.

Head and Neck Cutaneous Squamous Cell Carcinoma Clinicopathological Risk Factors according to Age and Gender: A Population-based Study.

Background: Clinicopathological risk factors for cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck (CSCCHN) are associated with local recurrence and metastasis.

Objectives: To compare the incidence and risk factors of CSCCHN by age and gender in order to help refine the clinical evaluation and treatment process.

Methods: Clinical and pathological data of all patients diagnosed with CSCCHN during 2009-2011 were obtained from a central pathology laboratory in Israel.

The Empirical Distribution of a Large Number of Correlated Normal Variables.

Motivated by the advent of high dimensional highly correlated data, this work studies the limit behavior of the empirical cumulative distribution function (ecdf) of standard normal random variables under arbitrary correlation. First, we provide a necessary and sufficient condition for convergence of the ecdf to the standard normal distribution. Next, under general correlation, we show that the ecdf limit is a random, possible infinite, mixture of normal distribution functions that depends on a number of latent variables and can serve as an asymptotic approximation to the ecdf in high dimensions.

Dose-finding designs: the role of convergence properties.

It is common for novel dose-finding designs to be presented without a study of their convergence properties. In this article we suggest that examination of convergence is a necessary quality check for dose-finding designs. We present a new convergence proof for a nonparametric family of methods called "interval designs," under certain conditions on the toxicity-frequency function F.