5,953 research outputs found
Determining the date of diagnosis – is it a simple matter? The impact of different approaches to dating diagnosis on estimates of delayed care for ovarian cancer in UK primary care
Background Studies of cancer incidence and early management will increasingly draw on routine electronic patient records. However, data may be incomplete or inaccurate. We developed a generalisable strategy for investigating presenting symptoms and delays in diagnosis using ovarian cancer as an example. Methods The General Practice Research Database was used to investigate the time between first report of symptom and diagnosis of 344 women diagnosed with ovarian cancer between 01/06/2002 and 31/05/2008. Effects of possible inaccuracies in dating of diagnosis on the frequencies and timing of the most commonly reported symptoms were investigated using four increasingly inclusive definitions of first diagnosis/suspicion: 1. "Definite diagnosis" 2. "Ambiguous diagnosis" 3. "First treatment or complication suggesting pre-existing diagnosis", 4 "First relevant test or referral". Results The most commonly coded symptoms before a definite diagnosis of ovarian cancer, were abdominal pain (41%), urogenital problems(25%), abdominal distension (24%), constipation/change in bowel habits (23%) with 70% of cases reporting at least one of these. The median time between first reporting each of these symptoms and diagnosis was 13, 21, 9.5 and 8.5 weeks respectively. 19% had a code for definitions 2 or 3 prior to definite diagnosis and 73% a code for 4. However, the proportion with symptoms and the delays were similar for all four definitions except 4, where the median delay was 8, 8, 3, 10 and 0 weeks respectively. Conclusion Symptoms recorded in the General Practice Research Database are similar to those reported in the literature, although their frequency is lower than in studies based on self-report. Generalisable strategies for exploring the impact of recording practice on date of diagnosis in electronic patient records are recommended, and studies which date diagnoses in GP records need to present sensitivity analyses based on investigation, referral and diagnosis data. Free text information may be essential in obtaining accurate estimates of incidence, and for accurate dating of diagnoses
Design Patterns for Description-Driven Systems
In data modelling, product information has most often been handled separately
from process information. The integration of product and process models in a
unified data model could provide the means by which information could be shared
across an enterprise throughout the system lifecycle from design through to
production. Recently attempts have been made to integrate these two separate
views of systems through identifying common data models. This paper relates
description-driven systems to multi-layer architectures and reveals where
existing design patterns facilitate the integration of product and process
models and where patterns are missing or where existing patterns require
enrichment for this integration. It reports on the construction of a so-called
description-driven system which integrates Product Data Management (PDM) and
Workflow Management (WfM) data models through a common meta-model.Comment: 14 pages, 13 figures. Presented at the 3rd Enterprise Distributed
Object Computing EDOC'99 conference. Mannheim, Germany. September 199
The Reification of Patterns in the Design of Description-Driven Systems
To address the issues of reusability and evolvability in designing self-
describing systems, this paper proposes a pattern-based, object-oriented,
description-driven system architecture. The proposed architecture embodies four
pillars - first, the adoption of a multi-layered meta-modeling architecture and
reflective meta-level architecture, second, the identification of four data
modeling relationships that must be made explicit such that they can be
examined and modified dynamically, third, the identification of five design
patterns which have emerged from practice and have proved essential in
providing reusable building blocks for data management, and fourth, the
encoding of the structural properties of the five design patterns by means of
one pattern, the Graph pattern. The CRISTAL research project served as the
basis onto which the pattern-based meta-object approach has been applied. The
proposed architecture allows the realization of reusability and adaptability,
and is fundamental in the specification of self-describing data management
components.Comment: 10 pages 11 figure
Off-diagonal Interactions, Hund's Rules and Pair-binding in Hubbard Molecules
We have studied the effect of including nearest-neighbor, electron-electron
interactions, in particular the off-diagonal (non density-density) terms, on
the spectra of truncated tetrahedral and icosahedral ``Hubbard molecules,''
focusing on the relevance of these systems to the physics of doped C.
Our perturbation theoretic and exact diagonalization results agree with
previous work in that the density-density term suppresses pair-binding.
However, we find that for the parameter values of interest for the
off-diagonal terms {\em enhance} pair-binding, though not enough to offset the
suppression due to the density-density term. We also find that the critical
interaction strengths for the Hund's rules violating level crossings in
C, C and C are quite insensitive to the
inclusion of these additional interactions.Comment: 20p + 5figs, Revtex 3.0, UIUC preprint P-94-10-08
Meta-Data Objects as the Basis for System Evolution
One of the main factors driving object-oriented software development in the Web- age is the need for systems to evolve as user requirements change. A crucial factor in the creation of adaptable systems dealing with changing requirements is the suitability of the underlying technology in allowing the evolution of the system. A reflective system utilizes an open architecture where implicit system aspects are reified to become explicit first-class (meta-data) objects. These implicit system aspects are often fundamental structures which are inaccessible and immutable, and their reification as meta-data objects can serve as the basis for changes and extensions to the system, making it self- describing. To address the evolvability issue, this paper proposes a reflective architecture based on two orthogonal abstractions - model abstraction and information abstraction. In this architecture the modeling abstractions allow for the separation of the description meta-data from the system aspects they represent so that they can be managed and versioned independently, asynchronously and explicitly. A practical example of this philosophy, the CRISTAL project, is used to demonstrate the use of meta-data objects to handle system evolution
Polarized Neutron Inelastic Scattering Study of the Anisotropic Magnetic Fluctuations in the Quasi-1D Ising-like Antiferromagnet TlCoCl
Polarized neutron inelastic scattering experiments have been carried out in
the quasi-1D Ising-like antiferromagnet TlCoCl. We observed the
longitudinal magnetic fluctuation for the spin-wave
excitation continuum, which has not been observed in the unpolarized neutron
inelastic scattering experiments of the quasi-1D Ising-like antiferromagnets
CsCoCl and TlCoCl so far, together with the transverse magnetic
fluctuation . We compared both obtained intensities of
and with the perturbation theory from
the pure Ising limit by Ishimura and Shiba, and a semi-quantitative agreement
was found.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, jpsj2.cls, to be published in J. Phys. Soc. Jpn.
Vol. 75 (2006) No.
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