125,577 research outputs found
Haematological malignancy: are we measuring what is important to patients? A systematic review of quality of life instruments
© 2018 The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons AttributionâNonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.The wide range of healthârelated qualityâofâlife (HRQoL) instruments used in haematology makes it challenging for haematologists and other care team members in practice to select, use and understand the scoring system and finally interpret the results. The main objectives of this study were to: (a) provide a comprehensive list of qualityâofâlife issues important to patients suffering from haematological malignancies, identified through the literature; (b) provide a list of healthârelated qualityâofâlife (HRQoL) instruments used in haematological malignancies in both daily clinical practice and research; and (c) evaluate the relevance and comprehensibility of the identified instruments in haematological malignancies. Systematic literature review of two databases, followed by addition of articles by manual searching, was carried out. The articles focusing on the primary studies, which have used semiâstructured/structured interviews or surveys to identify issues important to HM patients, and other studies describing the results of testing measurement properties, such as reliability, validity and responsiveness of the instruments currently used to evaluate the HRQoL in different HMs, were included. Fiftyâseven studies reported development and validation of 30 HRQoL instruments, which have been used in haematology. Twentyâfour studies were identified using qualitative methods to report HRQoL issues and symptoms from a patient's perspective. No identified instrument captured all the issues identified from the qualitative studies. None of the instruments reviewed appeared to have been developed for use in clinical practice and specifically for patients with HM, except MyPOS. Furthermore, measurement properties were established, largely, in clinical trial scenarios. There is a need for development of a new HRQoL instrument entirely based on involvement of patients with haematological malignancies.Peer reviewe
Specification and estimation of spatial econometric models : A discussion of alternative strategies for spatial economic modelling
The semantical insufficiency of (spatial) economic theories necessitates the making of additional assumptions â thereby introducing substantial specification uncertainty â in order to arrive at a fully specified econometric model. The traditional or current approach to econometric modelling treats specification uncertainty inadequately. This proposition is illustrated by two well-known examples from the spatial economic literature. Two alternative specification strategies for spatial economic modelling â designed to improve the current spatial econometric modelling approach â are proposed. One of these strategies is used for a specification analysis of agricultural output in Eire
Advancing functional connectivity research from association to causation
Cognition and behavior emerge from brain network interactions, such that investigating causal interactions should be central to the study of brain function. Approaches that characterize statistical associations among neural time series-functional connectivity (FC) methods-are likely a good starting point for estimating brain network interactions. Yet only a subset of FC methods ('effective connectivity') is explicitly designed to infer causal interactions from statistical associations. Here we incorporate best practices from diverse areas of FC research to illustrate how FC methods can be refined to improve inferences about neural mechanisms, with properties of causal neural interactions as a common ontology to facilitate cumulative progress across FC approaches. We further demonstrate how the most common FC measures (correlation and coherence) reduce the set of likely causal models, facilitating causal inferences despite major limitations. Alternative FC measures are suggested to immediately start improving causal inferences beyond these common FC measures
Requirements Prioritization Based on Benefit and Cost Prediction: An Agenda for Future Research
In early phases of the software cycle, requirements
prioritization necessarily relies on the specified
requirements and on predictions of benefit and cost of
individual requirements. This paper presents results of
a systematic review of literature, which investigates
how existing methods approach the problem of
requirements prioritization based on benefit and cost.
From this review, it derives a set of under-researched
issues which warrant future efforts and sketches an
agenda for future research in this area
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