European Respiratory Society guideline on various aspects of quality in lung cancer care.

This European Respiratory Society guideline is dedicated to the provision of good quality recommendations in lung cancer care. All the clinical recommendations contained were based on a comprehensive systematic review and evidence syntheses based on eight PICO (Patients, Intervention, Comparison, Outcomes) questions. The evidence was appraised in compliance with the GRADE (Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation) approach.

ADVANCE-1: An adapted collaborative benchmarking approach in centre-based lung cancer care.

The majority of research within lung cancer is focused on prevention, diagnosis and treatment rather than examining infrastructure or processes of lung cancer centres. Benchmarking is a systematic method for documenting and comparing processes, functions or performance of organisations against the best in the world. ADVANCE-1 is a European Respiratory Society funded pilot study with the main aim of creating a benchmarking tool that can easily document and reflect the structure and process within a lung cancer centre and its associated registry.

Classifying Image Stacks of Specular Silicon Wafer Back Surface Regions: Performance Comparison of CNNs and SVMs.

In this work, we compare the performance of convolutional neural networks and support vector machines for classifying image stacks of specular silicon wafer back surfaces. In these image stacks, we can identify structures typically originating from replicas of chip structures or from grinding artifacts such as comets or grinding grooves. However, defects like star cracks are also visible in those images.

Quantitative analysis of protein far UV circular dichroism spectra by neural networks.

A new method based on neural network theory is presented to analyze and quantify the information content of far UV circular dichroism spectra. Using a backpropagation network model with a single hidden layer between input and output, it was possible to deduce five different secondary structure fractions (helix, parallel and antiparallel beta-sheet, beta-turn and random coil) with satisfactory correlations between calculated and measured secondary structure data. We demonstrate that for each wavelength interval a specific network is suitable.

Amoxycillin in bronchitis. Comparison of two versus three daily doses.

Fifty patients with moderate or severe bronchitis were randomly allocated into groups receiving orally either 1000 mg amoxycillin twice daily or 750 mg three times daily. Overall cure rates (both 92%) and the incidence of side-effects (4% and 8%, respectively) were similar in both groups. A twice daily regimen, therefore, seems to be as effective as conventional treatment and has the advantage of being more convenient for the patient.