Scoring comparative assessment

Obviously, thorough comparative evaluations are of utmost importance not only for selection and application but also for improvement of scoring functions. Unfortunately practically relevant and truly unbiased comparative assessments are by no means trivial to achieve, as documented by many studies in the recent literature (cf. [156] and references therein). 

R. (2009) Comparative assessment of scoring functions on a diverse test set. Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling, 49, 1079-1093. 

Other investigators use the Z score as an additional filter or as the primary filter [18,52,4,6], and we foUow their steps. The novelty in the present protocol is the combined use of global and local Z scores to assess the accuracy of the prediction. This filtering mechanism was found to provide improved discrimination as compared with a single Z score test. 

Shafqat et al. ° previously validated the National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) assessment as a reliable method of evaluating patients with stroke symptoms at a bandwidth of 384 kbit/s comparing a bedside neurologist to a telemedicine-enabled neurologist teamed with a bedside nurse in patients with ischemic stroke and NIHSS scores ranging from 1 to 24. There was an excellent correlation between bedside and remote scores (inter-rater correlation coefficient... 

The TNF -308 polymorphism may be predictive of an individual patient s response to INF. In one study, 59 RA patients treated with INF after genotyping were classified into homozygotes for the TNF -308A allele (A/A 1.7%), heterozygotes (A/G 22%), and wild-type (G/G 76.3%) carriers of the allele. After 22 weeks of treatment with INF, the disease activity score (DAS a standardized measure of disease activity in RA) was used to assess response to INF. Patients without the A allele (81%) compared to patients with the A allele (42%) had a better response to INF as demonstrated by an improvement in the DAS (p 0.0009). Thus, this study suggested that RA patients who are carriers of the TNF=-30S G allele may have a more favorable response to INF (62). 

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