Prevalence of pathological FFRCT values without coronary artery stenosis in an asymptomatic marathon runner cohort

Objectives To evaluate computed tomography fractional flow reserve (FFRCT) values in distal parts of the coronaries in an asymptomatic cohort of marathon runners without any coronary stenosis for potentially false-positive values. Methods Ninety-eight asymptomatic male marathon runners (age 53 ± 7 years) were enrolled in a prospective monocentric study and underwent coronary computed tomography angiography (CCTA). CCTA data were analyzed for visual coronary artery stenosis. FFRCT was evaluated in 59 participants without coronary artery stenosis in proximal, mid, and distal coronary sections using an on-site software prototype. Results In participants without coronary artery stenosis, abnormal FFRCT values ≤ 0.8 in distal segments were found in 22 participants (37%); in 19 participants in the LAD; in 5 participants in the LCX; and in 4 participants in the RCA. Vessel diameters in participants with FFRCT values > 0.80 compared to ≤ 0.80 were 1.6 ± 0.3 mm versus 1.5 ± 0.3 mm for distal LAD (p = 0.025), 1.8 ± 0.3 mm versus 1.6 ± 0.5 mm for distal LCX (p = 0.183), and 2.0 ± 0.4 mm versus 1.5 ± 0.2 mm for distal RCA (p < 0.001). Conclusions Abnormal FFRCT values of ≤ 0.8 frequently occurred in distal coronary segments in subjects without any anatomical coronary artery stenosis. This effect is only to some degree explainable by small distal vessel diameters. Therefore, the validity of hemodynamic relevance evaluation using FFRCT in distal coronary artery segment stenosis is reduced. Key Points • Abnormal FFRCT values (≤ 0.8) occurred in over a third of the subjects in the distal LAD despite the absence of coronary artery stenosis.. • Therefore, the validity of hemodynamic relevance evaluation in distal coronary artery segment stenosis is reduced. • Decision-making based on abnormal FFRCT values in distal vessel sections should be performed with caution and only in combination with visual assessment of the grade of stenosis..

Instrument Context Relevance Evaluation, Translation, and Psychometric Testing of the Diabetes Eating Problem Survey-Revised (DEPS-R) among People with Type 1 Diabetes in China

Background: People with type 1 diabetes are susceptible to disordered eating behaviors. The American Diabetes Association recommends using the Diabetes Eating Problem Survey-Revised (DEPS-R) to screen them. There is no validated diabetes-specific screening measure in China. The objectives were to adapt DEPS-R into Mandarin Chinese and to test its psychometric properties among youths and adults with type 1 diabetes in China, respectively. Methods: This study was conducted in two phases. Phase 1 included context relevance evaluation and instrument translation. Phase 2 was psychometric testing of reliability and construct validity among 89 youths (8~17 years old) and 61 adults with type 1 diabetes. Result: The Context Relevance Index and Translation Validity Index of this instrument were good. Strong internal consistency reliability correlations and convergent validity were demonstrated among youths and adults. Discussion: The Chinese version of the DEPS-R is a valid and reliable tool for screening disordered eating behaviors in Chinese youths and adults with type 1 diabetes. The Context Relevance Index is advocated to evaluate the difference between the context in which an instrument was originally developed and the target context.

Research on Trust Mechanism based on Delegation Relationship in Sharing Economy

Trust plays a very important role in the development of sharing economy. What’s more, delegation is taken one of evaluation factors as service trust computation. However, the sharing economy based on the delegation also brings security risk. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel trust mechanism based on delegation relationship. Firstly, the paper analyzes a variety of deception which exists in the delegation relationship, then puts forward the concept of the transaction evidence and commission evidence. Secondly, by combining these two kinds of evidence, a novel method is presented. It improves computing trust value algorithm in the commission relationship by applying the evidence theory from three aspects characteristics, relevance evaluation information of evidence and user trust degree. At last, the trust mechanism is established on account of the commission relationship. The effectiveness of this trust mechanism is testified through simulation & emulation experiments.

Foreign Forensic Technologies: The Concept of Relevance

The article addresses the concept of relevance concerning foreign criminal proceedings, in particular those applying forensic technologies. The author emphasizes that the variety of parties involved in the trial leads to the anticipated pluralism of relevance evaluation. For forensic experts, the relevance assessment is determined by data describing the cognitive object, perceived by the cognizing subject in different object’s reflections.Foreign criminal systems take great interest in recognizing the importance of the concept of relevance. From examining the crime scene to a court ruling, the understanding of the argumentation process in assessing the relevance of the evidence is a part of the information control procedure that will be used to justify court decisions.

Keyphrase Graph in Text Representation for Document Similarity Measurement

To represent the text document more expressively, a kind of graph-based semantic model is proposed, in which more semantic information among keyphrases as well as the structural information of the text are incorporated. The method produces structured representations of texts by utilizing common, popular knowledge bases (e.g. DBpedia, Wikipedia) to acquire fine-grained information about concepts, entities, and their semantic relations, thus resulting in a knowledge-rich interpretation. We demonstrate the benefits of these representations in the task of document similarity measurement. Relevance evaluation between two documents is done by calculating the semantic similarity between two keyphrase graphs that represent them. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms standard baselines based on traditional document representations, and able to come close in performance to the specialized methods particularly tuned to this task on the specific dataset.