We compare balanced randomization with four adaptive treatment allocation procedures in a clinical trial involving two treatments. The objective is to treat as many patients in and out of the trial ...as effectively as possible. Randomization is a satisfactory solution to the decision problem when the disease in question is at least moderately common. Adaptive procedures are more difficult to use, but might play a role in clinical research when a substantial proportion of all patients with the disease are included in the trial.
This narrative review summarizes the collective knowledge on periodontal microbiology, through a historical timeline that highlights the European contribution in the global field. The etiological ...concepts on periodontal disease culminate to the ecological plaque hypothesis and its dysbiosis-centered interpretation. Reference is made to anerobic microbiology and to the discovery of select periodontal pathogens and their virulence factors, as well as to biofilms. The evolution of contemporary molecular methods and high-throughput platforms is highlighted in appreciating the breadth and depth of the periodontal microbiome. Finally clinical microbiology is brought into perspective with the contribution of different microbial species in periodontal diagnosis, the combination of microbial and host biomarkers for this purpose, and the use of antimicrobials in the treatment of the disease.
The invisible nature of software hides system complexity, particularly for large team-oriented projects. The authors have evolved four innovative visual representations of code to help solve this ...problem: line representation; pixel representation; file summary representation; and hierarchical representation. We first describe these four visual code representations and then discuss the interaction techniques for manipulating them. We illustrate our software visualization techniques through five case studies. The first three focus on software history and static software characteristics; the last two discuss execution behavior. The software library and its implementation are then described. Finally, we briefly review some related work and compare and contrast our different techniques for visualizing software.
A key problem in software engineering is changing the code. We present a sequence of visualizations and visual metaphors designed to help engineers understand and manage the software change process. ...The principal metaphors are matrix views, cityscapes, bar and pie charts, data sheets and networks. Linked by selection mechanisms, multiple views are combined to form perspectives that both enable discovery of high-level structure in software change data and allow effective access to details of those data. Use of the views and perspectives is illustrated in two important contexts: understanding software change by exploration of software change data and management of software development. Our approach complements existing visualizations of software structure and software execution.
With the increase in the number of antibiotic resistant strains of microorganism, the search for alternative treatments of microbial infections becomes all the more important. We report a novel ...method for bacterial inactivation based on the optical excitation of the naturally occurring (endogenous) photosensitzing porphyrins by red light. In particular, the pathogenic Gram-positive porphyrin producing ATCC strains Propionibacterium acnes, Actinomyces odontolyticus and Porphyromonas gingivalis were investigated. Sensitive autofluorescence spectroscopy revealed that these bacteria naturally synthezise the fluorescent photosensitizer protoporphyrin IX. In addition, bacterial plaque samples of periodontitis patients were studied. Non-labeled fluorescent bacterial colonies were exposed to red light at 632.8 nm, 100 mW/cm2 light intensity and 360 J/cm2 energy density using a helium-neon laser. The survival rate after a single phototreatment with red light was found to be 0.58 +/- 0.09 in the case of Propionibacterium acnes, 0.30 +/- 0.04 in Actinomyces odontolyticus and 0.59 +/- 0.10 in Porphyrormonas gingivalis compared to non-exposed bacteria suspensions. No photoeffect was found for the bacterium Streptococcus mutans which exhibited no detectable porphyrin autofluorescence. Red-light exposed plaque samples of patients showed significant reduction of colony forming units by 50% as well as a pronounced photoeffect on the pigmented species Prevotella intermedia. Taken together, these results suggest the treatment with red light can be potentially employed as an therapeutic method to inactivate certain pathogenic strains of porphyrin producing bacteria without the use of external photosensitizers.
The aim of this study was to investigate the possibility of producing low concentrations of hydrogen peroxide (H
2O
2) in indoor air, when using an extra high-tension, direct-current, negative ...voltage generator. A specially designed interactive gas-phase reactor (IGPR) was used to assess in real time, the concentration of gaseous H
2O
2 in indoor air (with varying relative humidity levels), exposed to negative ionisation. The air in the IGPR was ionised by corona discharge from a carbon fibre thread emitter, charged with a variable negative voltage (−7.5–0
kV). Small negative air ion concentrations measured within the IGPR ranged from 0–21,000 ions cm
−3 of air. H
2O
2 concentrations ranged from 0.46
μg
l
−1 in ordinary air (RH∼40%) to 936
μg
l
−1 in wet air (RH∼96%). This study demonstrates that it is possible to produce and measure in real time, low concentrations of gaseous H
2O
2 in indoor air, exposed to negative air ionisation.
Visualizing network data Becker, R.A.; Eick, S.G.; Wilks, A.R.
IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics,
03/1995, Letnik:
1, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Networks are critical to modern society, and a thorough understanding of how they behave is crucial to their efficient operation. Fortunately, data on networks is plentiful; by visualizing this data, ...it is possible to greatly improve our understanding. Our focus is on visualizing the data associated with a network and not on simply visualizing the structure of the network itself. We begin with three static network displays; two of these use geographical relationships, while the third is a matrix arrangement that gives equal emphasis to all network links. Static displays can be swamped with large amounts of data; hence we introduce direct manipulation techniques that permit the graphs to continue to reveal relationships in the context of much more data. In effect, the static displays are parameterized so that interesting views may easily be discovered interactively. The software to carry out this network visualization is called SeeNet.< >
The Seesoft software visualization system allows one to analyze up to 50000 lines of code simultaneously by mapping each line of code into a thin row. The color of each row indicates a statistic of ...interest, e.g., red rows are those most recently changed, and blue are those least recently changed. Seesoft displays data derived from a variety of sources, such as version control systems that track the age, programmer, and purpose of the code (e.g., control ISDN lamps, fix bug in call forwarding); static analyses, (e.g., locations where functions are called); and dynamic analyses (e.g., profiling). By means of direct manipulation and high interaction graphics, the user can manipulate this reduced representation of the code in order to find interesting patterns. Further insight is obtained by using additional windows to display the actual code. Potential applications for Seesoft include discovery, project management, code tuning, and analysis of development methodologies.< >
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