Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.
The occurrence of two separate inborn errors of iodine metabolism in one patient has been suggested by some authors but doubted by others. The combination of two other mechanisms may explain most of these cases: one defect may be conditioned by another, or the defects may have a common underlying cause. A seemingly impeded deiodination of iodotyrosines, found together with one of the other defects in a hypothyroid patient, may be an example of the first mechanism. The second mechanism might be involved when the primary abnormality is located in the biogenesis of thyroglobulin. In the absence of normal thyroglobulin, three successive reactions could secondarily be influenced: the iodination, the »coupling« and the proteolysis. Thus, when two or more of these reactions are found to be (partially) blocked, defective thyroglobulin biogenesis should be considered as a possibility.
A case is presented in which such a defect was at first suggested by the simultaneous occurrence of circulating iodinated protein-like compounds (defective proteolysis) and the secretion of large amounts of iodide by the thyroid (hampered coupling), and was subsequently confirmed by the electrophoretic analysis of a thyroid extract which showed an absence of normal thyroglobulin. Furthermore, additional evidence is presented on a similar patient described in a previous paper. Finally, a survey is given of sixteen other patients described in the literature in whom the existence of defective thyroglobulin biogenesis was either suggested by the occurrence of two seemingly separate defects or confirmed by the absence of normal thyroglobulin.
Normalized T4 (T4N), total T3, T3 resin sponge uptake (T3U) and the response of TSH to TRH were determined in 264 patients sent for diagnosis of thyroid function. Many of these patients were diagnostic problem cases. Those with disease or medication known to invalidate the TRH test, but not those with abnormal thyroid hormone binding capacity in serum, were excluded. A free T3 index (FT3 index) was calculated as the product of total T3 and T3U. The FT3 index tended to decline with increasing age, the mean value being significantly higher in the youngest patients (12-20-years-old) than in the older age groups. In the diagnosis of hyperthyroidism, the FT3 index was superior not only to T4N but also to total T3, particularly in the presence of elevated hormone binding capacity (relatively low T3U). It is anticipated that the FT3 index will be most useful as a routine test for hyperthyroidism, especially in several (though not all) instances where the TRH test is invalidated.
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