Rekrutering revisited:De kandidaatstelling voor de gemeenteraadsverkiezingen van 2010 vergeleken met 2006

In 2006 is voor het eerst op structurele wijze onderzoek gedaan naar de wijze waarop de kandidaatstelling bij de politieke partijen voor de gemeenteraadsverkiezingen is verlopen en wat voor omstandigheden daarbij een rol speelden.10 In 2010 is die studie herhaald. Aan de hand van een schriftelijke en digitale enquête onder ruim 2000 plaatselijke afdelingen van de in de Tweede Kamer zitting hebbende partijen alsmede de bijna 900 in de gemeenteraden vertegenwoordigde lokale politieke groeperingen is opnieuw de rekrutering van lokale politici onderzocht. De centrale vraag in zowel 2006 als in 2010 was in welke mate partijen problemen hebben ondervonden bij de werving en selectie van kandidaatraadsleden en -wethouders,en wat hiervan de voornaamste oorzaken zijn. In dit rapport wordt hiervan verslag gedaan. Eerst zal kort de ontwikkeling van het ledental van de landelijke en lokale partijen aan de orde komen. Daarna wordt ingegaan op de mate waarin afdelingen en lokale politieke groeperingen moeilijkheden hebben ondervonden bij de kandidaatstelling, en aan welke factoren zij dat wijten. Vervolgens wordt kort ingegaan op de kandidaatstelling van vrouwen, jongeren en allochtonen. Ten slotte komt de rekrutering van wethouders aan bod. Een verantwoording van de gehanteerde onderzoeksmethoden en de respons is opgenomen in de bijlage

Teveel van het goede?: De staat van het burgemeestersambt anno 2020 [eindrapport]

The Legitimacy and Effectiveness of Law & Governance in a World of Multilevel Jurisdiction

Automatic centerline extraction of coronary arteries in coronary computed tomographic angiography

Coronary computed tomographic angiography (CCTA) is a non-invasive imaging modality for the visualization of the heart and coronary arteries. To fully exploit the potential of the CCTA datasets and apply it in clinical practice, an automated coronary artery extraction approach is needed. The purpose of this paper is to present and validate a fully automatic centerline extraction algorithm for coronary arteries in CCTA images. The algorithm is based on an improved version of Frangi’s vesselness filter which removes unwanted step-edge responses at the boundaries of the cardiac chambers. Building upon this new vesselness filter, the coronary artery extraction pipeline extracts the centerlines of main branches as well as side-branches automatically. This algorithm was first evaluated with a standardized evaluation framework named Rotterdam Coronary Artery Algorithm Evaluation Framework used in the MICCAI Coronary Artery Tracking challenge 2008 (CAT08). It includes 128 reference centerlines which were manually delineated. The average overlap and accuracy measures of our method were 93.7% and 0.30 mm, respectively, which ranked at the 1st and 3rd place compared to five other automatic methods presented in the CAT08. Secondly, in 50 clinical datasets, a total of 100 reference centerlines were generated from lumen contours in the transversal planes which were manually corrected by an expert from the cardiology department. In this evaluation, the average overlap and accuracy were 96.1% and 0.33 mm, respectively. The entire processing time for one dataset is less than 2 min on a standard desktop computer. In conclusion, our newly developed automatic approach can extract coronary arteries in CCTA images with excellent performances in extraction ability and accuracy

Emergency medical services evaluations for chest pain during first COVID-19 lockdown in Hollands-Midden, the Netherlands

Objective To assess whether the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020 had negative indirect health effects, as people seem to have been reluctant to seek medical care. Methods All emergency medical services (EMS) transports for chest pain or out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) in the Dutch region Hollands-Midden (population served > 800,000) were evaluated during the initial 6 weeks of the COVID-19 lockdown and during the same time period in 2019. The primary endpoint was the number of evaluated chest pain patients in both cohorts. In addition, the number of EMS evaluations of ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) and OHCA were assessed. Results During the COVID-19 lockdown period, the EMS evaluated 927 chest pain patients (49% male, age 62 +/- 17 years) compared with 1041 patients (51% male, 63 +/- 17 years) in the same period in 2019, which corresponded with a significant relative risk (RR) reduction of 0.88 (95% confidence interval (CI) 0.81-0.96). Similarly, there was a significant reduction in the number of STEMI patients (RR 0.52, 95% CI 0.32-0.85), the incidence of OHCA remained unchanged (RR 1.23, 95% CI 0.83-1.83). Conclusion During the first COVID-19 lockdown, there was a significant reduction in the number of patients with chest pain or STEMI evaluated by the EMS, while the incidence of OHCA remained similar. Although the reason for the decrease in chest pain and STEMI consultations is not entirely clear, more attention should be paid to the importance of contacting the EMS in case of suspected cardiac symptoms in possible future lockdowns.Cardiolog