Health technological innovation has helped to improve health care delivery and patient outcomes. However, the proliferation of health care technology has accompanied burgeoning health care costs and evoked social, ethical, legal, and political concerns. Health technology assessment (HTA) is the systematic evaluation of properties, effects and/or other impacts of health care technology. The main purpose of HTA is to inform persons of technology-related policy making in health care. There is great variation in the scope, selection of methods and level of detail in the practice of HTA. This paper will introduce the basic concepts and methods of HTA in order to help those who are interested in conducting HTA.
Random allocation to intervention groups remains the best method of ensuring that the groups being compared are similar at the onset of study and of avoiding removing selection bias between groups of patients. The success of randomization depends on two interrelated processes. First, an unpredictable allocation sequence must be generated based on a random procedure. Second, strict implementation of that sequence must be secured through an assignment mechanism called allocation concealment to prevent those involved in a trial from knowing upcoming assignments. Inadequate allocation concealment can lead to clinicians scheduling patient’s assignment and compromising the unpredictable allocation sequence.
Interstitial lung disease is the most common pulmonary complication in patients with inflammatory myopathy, with a high case fatality rate, unknown pathogenesis, and complex clinical manifestations, and the treatment is difficult. Early and timely treatment can improve the patient’s clinical symptoms and inhibit the development of the disease. The present treatment protocols can be mainly summarized as the commonly used drugs (corticosteroids, azathioprine, cyclophosphamide, mycophenolate mofetil, and intravenous immunoglobulin) and new drugs (cyclosporin A, tacrolimus, biological agents, and anti-fibrosis drug), etc. In this paper, the treatment progress of inflammatory myopathy-related interstitial lung disease and different myositis antibody-related interstitial lung disease in recent years at home and abroad is reviewed, so as to provide a basis for clinical treatment.
The feature extraction and feature selection are the important issues in pattern recognition. Based on the geometric algebra representation of vector, a new feature extraction method using blade coefficient of geometric algebra was proposed in this study. At the same time, an improved differential evolution (DE) feature selection method was proposed to solve the elevated high dimension issue. The simple linear discriminant analysis was used as the classifier. The result of the 10-fold cross-validation (10 CV) classification of public breast cancer biomedical dataset was more than 96% and proved superior to that of the original features and traditional feature extraction method.
Objective To investigate the impact of bone marrow mesenchymal stem cell transplantation on a rat model of experimental autoimmune uveitis (EAU) and analyze its immune regulatory mechanisms in vivo.Methods Eighteen Lewis rats were randomly divided into three groups: model control group, intervention group and normal control group, six animals in each group. Human retinal S-antigen peptide (HS-AgP35, 1 mg/ml) was mixed and emulsified with complete Freundprime;s adjuvant and injected into hind foot pad of rats on the first and eighth day to establish the animal model of EAU. For bone marrow mesenchymal stem cell transplantation, 1 ml of cell suspension (2times;106 cells/ml) was injected into tail vein of the intervention group rats on the first day when the emulsified S-antigen was injected. EAU manifestation, pathological change and IFN-gamma; level were evaluated and compared among those three groups after two weeks. Results No abnormal signs were found in the eyes of rats in normal control group. The manifestation grading of the intervention group (two rats at grade 0, three rats at grade 0.5, one rat at grade one) was significantly different from the model control group (one rat at grade one, one rat at grade two, three rats at grade three, one rat at grade four) (P=0.015). The retina of rats in normal control group was ordinary under light microscope. The histopathologrical grading of the intervention group (one rat at grade 0, four rats at grade 0.5,one rat at grade one) and the model control group (four rats at grade three, two rats at grade four) was also statistically different (P＜0.01). Furthermore, the IFN-gamma; level in peripheral blood of the intervention group rats declined significantly compared to the model control group (t=9.0574, P=0.01). Conclusions Bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells can inhibit EAU significantly, possibly by lowering the level of IFN－gamma;, thereby reduce the severity of uveitis and improve the condition of uveitis in rats.
Causal inference is one of the main goals of medical research. However, due to the lack of an in-depth understanding of the theory of causal inference, researchers tend to blindly use multiple statistical methods to analyse the same question to enhance the credibility of the results, which leads to problems in interpretation of the analysis results. Based on the three basic concepts of potential outcomes, causal effects, and distributive mechanisms of the causal inference counterfactual framework, this paper introduced six main target effects in causal inference and discussed their comparability to help researchers understand the principle of causal inference and correctly interpret and compare research results to avoid misleading conclusions.