The effect of smart homes on older adults with chronic conditions: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

As populations continue to age, the prevalence of multiple chronic conditions in older adults grows. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of smart homes on older patients with chronic conditions. A review and meta-analysis were conducted after searching both English and Chinese databases.

Model-independent evaluation of tumor markers and a logistic-tree approach to diagnostic decision support.

Sensitivity and specificity of using individual tumor markers hardly meet the clinical requirement. This challenge gave rise to many efforts, e.g.

Identifying a small set of marker genes using minimum expected cost of misclassification.

Objectives: This paper presents a model independent feature selection approach to identify a small subset of marker genes.

Methods And Material: An evaluation measure, minimum expected cost of misclassification (MEMC), is used to estimate the discriminative power of a feature subset without building a model. The MECM measure is combined with sequential forward search for feature selection.

Dimensionality reduction for knowledge discovery in medical claims database: application to antidepressant medication utilization study.

Data mining, through its capacity to discover knowledge embedded in large databases to improve organizational decision-making, has the potential to contribute to efficiencies and cost savings in the increasingly costly healthcare industry. One important aspect of the methods of mining medical databases includes reducing dimensionality through feature selection. Traditionally feature selection is accomplished through stepwise regression, which tends to produce an unnecessarily high number of "significant" variables.

Identification of factors predicting response to adjuvant radiation therapy in patients with positive margins after radical prostatectomy.

Purpose: Radical prostatectomy (RP) is a highly effective treatment for patients with prostate cancer. However, patients with positive surgical margins after radical prostatectomy have less than ideal outcomes with 5-year progression rates between 36% and 50%. Postoperative radiation therapy (RT) is often advocated for improving these outcomes.