In the United States, the pharmaceutical industry is actively devising strategies to improve the diversity of clinical trial participants. These efforts stem from a plethora of evidence indicating that various ethnic groups respond differently to a given treatment. Thus, increasing the diversity of trial participants would not only provide more robust and representative trial data but also lead to safer and more effective therapies. Further diversifying trial participants appear straightforward, but it is a complex process requiring feedback from multiple stakeholders such as pharmaceutical sponsors, regulators, community leaders, and research sites. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to describe three viable strategies that can possibly increase the diversity of clinical trial participants: (1) Diversification of the clinical research workforce. (2) Adoption of the diversity in site assessment tool, and (3) incorporation of decentralized clinical trial technologies into clinical trial designs.
Constructal theory plays a major role in the conceptual design stage of the structural system in architecture. It provides a conceptual framework for predicting the form depending on natural systems to model those systems geometrically according to the constructal law that works in two directions: the first is towards predicting the general form of the structural system, and the second is the physical application of the law in the process of detailed design of the parts of the system. The aim of this paper is to determine the mechanism adopted in the structural design according to the constructal theory, assuming that the structural design according to the constructal theory achieves
The aim of this study is to achieve the best distinguishing function of the variables which have common characteristics to distinguish between the groups in order to identify the situation of the governorates that suffer from the problem of deprivation. This allows the parties concerned and the regulatory authorities to intervene to take corrective measures. The main indicators of the deprivation index included (education, health, infrastructure, housing, protection) were based on 2010 data available in the Central Bureau of Statistics
Growth of Penicillium expansum, an ubiquitous mould found in stored fruit globallyt, was significantly restricted by exposure to 48 h cell-free supernatant of two strains of Lactobacillus plantarum (p < 0.001). In addition, the biotransformation of patulin, a toxic secondary metabolite formed by P. expansum, on exposure to L. plantarum cells and cell-free supernatant highlights the potential of this GRAS microbe as a biocontrol agent. Up to 80% of patulin was biotransformed following a 4 h incubation with 1010 cells ml−1 (37 °C) forming E- and Z-ascladiol. The formation of these products was more pronounced at elevated pH and cell density. Exposure to cell free supernatant or sonicated cells resulted in complete patulin biotransformation
... Show MoreBiomarkers to detect Alzheimer’s disease (AD) would enable patients to gain access to appropriate services and may facilitate the development of new therapies. Given the large numbers of people affected by AD, there is a need for a low-cost, easy to use method to detect AD patients. Potentially, the electroencephalogram (EEG) can play a valuable role in this, but at present no single EEG biomarker is robust enough for use in practice. This study aims to provide a methodological framework for the development of robust EEG biomarkers to detect AD with a clinically acceptable performance by exploiting the combined strengths of key biomarkers. A large number of existing and novel EEG biomarkers associated with slowing of EEG, reductio
... Show MoreLifestyle Medicine is the application of evidence-based lifestyle approaches for the prevention, treatment, and even the reversal of lifestyle-related chronic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, obesity, polycystic ovarian diseases, dementia, arthritis, and cancers
Artificial Neural networks (ANN) are powerful and effective tools in time-series applications. The first aim of this paper is to diagnose better and more efficient ANN models (Back Propagation, Radial Basis Function Neural networks (RBF), and Recurrent neural networks) in solving the linear and nonlinear time-series behavior. The second aim is dealing with finding accurate estimators as the convergence sometimes is stack in the local minima. It is one of the problems that can bias the test of the robustness of the ANN in time series forecasting. To determine the best or the optimal ANN models, forecast Skill (SS) employed to measure the efficiency of the performance of ANN models. The mean square error and
... Show MoreEnglish teachers in Iraq and other countries around the world up to this time use traditional methods to help students memorize new vocabularies. The sense of words or structure is not to be given in either the native tongue or the target language by definition, but is induced by the way the form is used in the situation. Situational Language Teaching (SLT) has recently become the needed method for improving speaking skills. It indicates the application of learning the language in actual and social exchange expressions so as to let learners do as required in classroom and non-classroom circumstances. This pilot study seeks to answer the following questions: Can SLT improve English speaking skills of target learners? How SLT contribute to th
... Show MoreTraditionally, path selection within routing is formulated as a shortest path optimization problem. The objective function for optimization could be any one variety of parameters such as number of hops, delay, cost...etc. The problem of least cost delay constraint routing is studied in this paper since delay constraint is very common requirement of many multimedia applications and cost minimization captures the need to
distribute the network. So an iterative algorithm is proposed in this paper to solve this problem. It is appeared from the results of applying this algorithm that it gave the optimal path (optimal solution) from among multiple feasible paths (feasible solutions).
This paper aimed to investigate the effect of the height-to-length ratio of unreinforced masonry (URM) walls when loaded by a vertical load. The finite element (FE) method was implemented for modeling and analysis of URM wall. In this paper, ABAQUS, FE software with implicit solver was used to model and analysis URM walls subjected to a vertical load. In order to ensure the validity of Detailed Micro Model (DMM) in predicting the behavior of URM walls under vertical load, the results of the proposed model are compared with experimental results. Load-displacement relationship of the proposed numerical model is found of a good agreement with that of the published experimental results. Evidence shows that load-displacement curve obtained fro
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