Evidence-based medicine

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is "the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients". The aim of EBM is to integrate the experience of the clinician, the values of the patient, and the best available scientific information to guide decision-making about clinical management. The term was originally used to describe an approach to teaching the practice of medicine and improving decisions by individual physicians about individual patients. Background, history and definition Medicine has a long history of scientific inquiry about the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of human disease. In the 11th century AD, Avicenna, a Persian physician and philosopher, developed an approach to EBM that was mostly similar to current ideas and practises. The concept of a controlled clinical trial was first described in 1662 by Jan Baptist van Helmont in reference to the practice of bloodletti

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Stochastic Three-Composite Convex Minimization with a Linear Operator

Volkan Cevher

We develop a primal-dual convex minimization framework to solve a class of stochastic convex three-composite problem with a linear operator. We consider the cases where the problem is both convex and strongly convex and analyze the convergence of the proposed algorithm in both cases. In addition, we extend the proposed framework to deal with additional constraint sets and multiple non-smooth terms. We provide numerical evidence on graph-guided sparse logistic regression, fused lasso and overlapped group lasso, to demonstrate the superiority of our approach to the state-of-the-art.

JMLR: W&CP2018

Models of Evidence Integration in Rapid Decision Making Processes

Nicolas Marcille

Decision making is of crucial interest in many disciplines such as psychology, neuroscience, economics and machine learning. Binary perceptual decision theories relate to situations where an observer (or machine) is confronted with one of two possible noisy stimuli. For example, human readers have to decide whether a handwritten character is an n or a u; a trader has to decide whether to sell or to keep; a monkey has to decide whether dots on a screen are moving to the left or to the right. While engineering and economical decision theories focus on how to compute optimal decisions, psychology and neuroscience investigate the actual decision making process in humans and animals. Humans only need a fraction of a second to recognize objects. This astonishing speed is also evident in sports such as table tennis or soccer requiring rapid reactions to moving balls. In these tasks, the brain has to decide rapidly upon visual information available for only a hundred milliseconds or less. However, most experimental and theoretical work on decision making focuses on stationary paradigms and surprisingly few studies have taken the timing of the stimulus into account. Decisions about noisy stimuli require evidence integration over time. Traditionally, evidence integration and decision making are described as a one-stage process: a decision is made when evidence for the presence of a stimulus crosses a threshold. We will show that this model is incompatible with psychophysical experiments on feature fusion, where two visual stimuli are presented in rapid succession. Paradoxically, the second stimulus biases decisions more strongly than the first one, contrary to predictions of one-stage models and intuition. We present a two-stage model where sensory information is integrated and buffered before it starts driving the diffusion process.

EPFL2011

Potential Direct Regulators of the Drosophila yellow Gene Identified by Yeast One-Hybrid and RNAi Screens

Bart Deplancke

The regulation of gene expression controls development, and changes in this regulation often contribute to phenotypic evolution. Drosophila pigmentation is a model system for studying evolutionary changes in gene regulation, with differences in expression of pigmentation genes such as yellow that correlate with divergent pigment patterns among species shown to be caused by changes in cis- and trans-regulation. Currently, much more is known about the cis-regulatory component of divergent yellow expression than the trans-regulatory component, in part because very few trans-acting regulators of yellow expression have been identified. This study aims to improve our understanding of the trans-acting control of yellow expression by combining yeast-one-hybrid and RNAi screens for transcription factors binding to yellow cis-regulatory sequences and affecting abdominal pigmentation in adults, respectively. Of the 670 transcription factors included in the yeast-one-hybrid screen, 45 showed evidence of binding to one or more sequence fragments tested from the 5 intergenic and intronic yellow sequences from D. melanogaster, D. pseudoobscura, and D. willistoni, suggesting that they might be direct regulators of yellow expression. Of the 670 transcription factors included in the yeast-one-hybrid screen, plus another TF previously shown to be genetically upstream of yellow, 125 were also tested using RNAi, and 32 showed altered abdominal pigmentation. Nine transcription factors were identified in both screens, including four nuclear receptors related to ecdysone signaling (Hr78, Hr38, Hr46, and Eip78C). This finding suggests that yellow expression might be directly controlled by nuclear receptors influenced by ecdysone during early pupal development when adult pigmentation is forming.

Genetics Society of America2016

Randomized controlled trial

A randomized controlled trial (or randomized control trial; RCT) is a form of scientific experiment used to control factors not under direct experimental control. Examples of RCTs are clinical trial

Systematic review

A systematic review is a scholarly synthesis of the evidence on a clearly presented topic using critical methods to identify, define and assess research on the topic. A systematic review extracts an

Medicine

Medicine is the science and practice of caring for a patient, managing the diagnosis, prognosis, prevention, treatment, palliation of their injury or disease, and promoting their health. Medicine en

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