Stabilization of Microcirculation in Patients with Early Systemic Sclerosis with Diffuse Skin Involvement following Rituximab Treatment: An Open-label Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To the Editor: Systemic sclerosis (SSc) is a multisystemic autoimmune disease characterized by fibrosis of the skin and internal organs, generalized microvasculopathy, and antibody response against various cellular antigens. Severe organ involvement occurs early in the course of diffuse cutaneous SSc (dcSSc) and has a bad prognosis1. Survival of the first years of the disease is associated with improved outcome. Therapies that may help the patient overcome this early period seem warranted2. Rituximab (RTX) has been reported as optional therapy in SSc3,4,5. Our group reported stabilization of internal organ involvement during a 2-year followup in an open pilot study of a 2–treatment course (months 0 and 6) of RTX in patients with early dcSSc6,7. In our pilot studies, modified Rodnan skin score (mRSS) decreased significantly after RTX course. The percent of decrease in the open pilot studies was corroborated by a similar decrease in the percentage of collagen score in blindly assessed histopathological skin analyses. Because SSc is characterized by a pronounced microangiopathy over time … Address correspondence to Dr. V. Smith, Department of Rheumatology, Ghent University Hospital, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Department of Internal Medicine, Ghent University, De Pintelaan 185, B – 9000 Ghent, Belgium. E-mail: vanessa.smith{at}ugent.be
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".