Abstract

Abstract
Skin temperature regulation is dependant of the autonomic nervous system function, which may be impaired in patients with neuropathy. Studies reporting thermographic assessment of patients with established diagnosis of Diabetic Foot (DF) are scarce but this information is completely absent in patients suffering from Transthyretin Familial Amyloid Polyneuropathy (TTR-FAP). The aim of this study is to compare skin temperature distribution in patients with DF and TTR-FAP. Thermograms of the dorsal and plantar surfaces were compared. Skin temperature was higher in the diabetic foot group and differences were statistically significant (p < 0.05) in both regions of interest.

Abstract
Purpose The quality of consumer-oriented health information on the web has been defined and evaluated in several studies. Usually it is based on evaluation criteria identified by the researchers and, so far, there is no agreed standard for the quality indicators to use. Based on such indicators, tools have been developed to evaluate the quality of web information. The HONcode is one of such tools. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of web document features on their quality, using HONcode as ground truth, with the aim of finding whether it is possible to predict the quality of a document using its characteristics. Design/methodology/approach The present work uses a set of health documents and analyzes how their characteristics (e.g. web domain, last update, type, mention of places of treatment and prevention strategies) are associated with their quality. Based on these features, statistical models are built which predict whether health-related web documents have certification-level quality. Multivariate analysis is performed, using classification to estimate the probability of a document having quality given its characteristics. This approach tells us which predictors are important. Three types of full and reduced logistic regression models are built and evaluated. The first one includes every feature, without any exclusion, the second one disregards the Utilization Review Accreditation Commission variable, due to it being a quality indicator, and the third one excludes the variables related to the HONcode principles, which might also be indicators of quality. The reduced models were built with the aim to see whether they reach similar results with a smaller number of features. Findings The prediction models have high accuracy, even without including the characteristics of Health on the Net code principles in the models. The most informative prediction model considers characteristics that can be assessed automatically (e.g. split content, type, process of revision and place of treatment). It has an accuracy of 89 percent. Originality/value This paper proposes models that automatically predict whether a document has quality or not. Some of the used features (e.g. prevention, prognosis or treatment) have not yet been explicitly considered in this context. The findings of the present study may be used by search engines to promote high-quality documents. This will improve health information retrieval and may contribute to reduce the problems caused by inaccurate information.

Abstract
Supervised learning with imbalanced domains is one of the biggest challenges in machine learning. Such tasks differ from standard learning tasks by assuming a skewed distribution of target variables, and user domain preference towards under-represented cases. Most research has focused on imbalanced classification tasks, where a wide range of solutions has been tested. Still, little work has been done concerning imbalanced regression tasks. In this paper, we propose an adaptation of the SMOTEBoost approach for the problem of imbalanced regression. Originally designed for classification tasks, it combines boosting methods and the SMOTE resampling strategy. We present four variants of SMOTEBoost and provide an experimental evaluation using 30 datasets with an extensive analysis of results in order to assess the ability of SMOTEBoost methods in predicting extreme target values, and their predictive trade-off concerning baseline boosting methods. SMOTEBoost is publicly available in a software package.

Abstract
In this study, fetal heart rate signal is used to exemplify the performance of compression and entropy based approaches in biometric identification. A total of 167 pairs of traces from real fetus are analyzed under the popular normalized compression distance, the recently proposed normalized relative compression measure and mutual information measure. The best performance was achieved with the normalized compression distance resulting in a misclassification rate of 12%. Fetal heart rate could be a relevant feature for biometric identification models, namely in multiple pregnancies. © 2018 IEEE.

Abstract
The integration of Renewable Energy Sources, mainly in distribution grids, has been changing the paradigm of power systems operation. This constitutes an opportunity to make use of flexible energy resources to support DSOs and TSOs on network operation activities. The amount of total flexibility available in the system can be quantified starting from lower voltage levels considering the implementation of demand response schemes. This work is focused on the development of an expeditious methodology to assess the total flexibility of low voltage consumers and aggregate it by means of a bottom-up approach until reaching the transmission network nodes.