MEDI1814 selectively reduces free Aβ42 in cerebrospinal fluid of non-clinical species and Alzheimer's disease patients.

Introduction: Small molecules and antibodies are being developed to lower amyloid beta (Aβ) peptides.

Methods: We describe MEDI1814, a fully human high-affinity monoclonal antibody selective for Aβ, the pathogenic self-aggregating species of Aβ.

Results: MEDI1814 reduces free Aβ without impacting Aβ in the cerebrospinal fluid of rats and cynomolgus monkeys after systemic administration.

Flexible diagnostic measures and new cut-point selection methods under multiple ordered classes.

Medical diagnosis is essentially a classification problem and usually it is done with multiple ordered classes. For example, cancer diagnosis might be "non-malignant," "early stage," or "late stage." Therefore, appropriate measures are needed to assess the accuracy of diagnostic markers under multiple ordered classes.

Issues and solutions in biomarker evaluation when subclasses are involved under binary classification.

In practice, it is common to evaluate biomarkers in binary classification settings (e.g. non-cancer vs.

Daily Time of Radiation Treatment Is Associated with Subsequent Oral Mucositis Severity during Radiotherapy in Head and Neck Cancer Patients.

Background: Limited treatment options are available for oral mucositis, a common, debilitating complication of cancer therapy. We examined the association between daily delivery time of radiotherapy and the severity of oral mucositis in patients with head and neck cancer.

Methods: We used electronic medical records of 190 patients with head and neck squamous cell carcinoma who completed radiotherapy, with or without concurrent chemotherapy, at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center (Buffalo, NY) between 2015 and 2017.

Optimal threshold selection methods under tree or umbrella ordering.

Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve is a popular tool for evaluating diagnostic accuracy of biomarkers. In ROC framework, there exist several optimal threshold selection methods for binary classification. For diseases with multi-classes, an important category of scenarios is tree or umbrella ordering in which the marker measurement for one particular class is lower or higher than those for the rest classes.

Measuring diagnostic accuracy for biomarkers under tree-ordering.

In the field of diagnostic studies for tree or umbrella ordering, under which the marker measurement for one class is lower or higher than those for the rest unordered classes, there exist a few diagnostic measures such as the naive AUC ( NAUC), the umbrella volume ( UV), and the recently proposed TAUC, i.e. area under a ROC curve for tree or umbrella ordering (TROC).