Book Review: Thinking About Art

Book review for Thinking About Art, Edmund Burke Feldman, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1985

SUrvival Control Chart EStimation Software in R: the success package

Monitoring the quality of statistical processes has been of great importance, mostly in industrial applications. Control charts are widely used for this purpose, but often lack the possibility to monitor survival outcomes. Recently, inspecting survival outcomes has become of interest, especially in medical settings where outcomes often depend on risk factors of patients. For this reason many new survival control charts have been devised and existing ones have been extended to incorporate survival outcomes. The R package success allows users to construct risk-adjusted control charts for survival data. Functions to determine control chart parameters are included, which can be used even without expert knowledge on the subject of control charts. The package allows to create static as well as interactive charts, which are built using ggplot2 (Wickham 2016) and plotly (Sievert 2020).Comment: 29 pages, 10 figures, guide for the R package success, see https://cran.r-project.org/package=succes

Experimental study of highly viscous impinging jets

The objective of this research is to study the behavior of highly viscous gravity-driven jets filling a container. Matters of interest are the formation of voids in the fluid pool during the filling process and the unstable behavior of the fluid in the landing region which manifests itself as an oscillating motion. The working fluids used in this research are intended to simulate the flow behavior of molten glass. Qualitative and quantitative results are obtained in a parametric study. The fraction of voids present in the fluid pool after the filling of the container is measured for different parameter values of viscosity and mass flow rate. Likewise, frequencies of the oscillating jet are measured. Results are inconclusive with regard to a correlation between parameter settings and void fractions. As for frequencies, power law correlations are established

Hospital-based health technology assessment in Russian Federation: opportunities and prospects

The problem of rational consumption of resources in situation of limited budgets is extremely relevant for modern health care. Currently, at the state level, there is a procedure for making decisions on the inclusion of new medicines in the restrictive lists (primarily in the List of vital and essential medicines (VED)). It is important to understand that, on the one hand, medicines are not the only medical technology used in the provision of medical care, on the other hand, the existing guidelines are a view of the health system, the State and society on their appearance in real clinical practice. At the same time, conducting clinical and economic research in the hospital allows to take into account the current strategic, organizational, financial, personnel aspects of a particular medical institution. The developed organizational and methodological model of the hospital assessment of health technologies describes the organizational aspects of health technologies assessment in the hospital, as well as the actual methodology of its implementation. The created methodology adapts the world experience of hospital assessment of health care technologies to the existing legislative, administrative, and personnel aspects of the work of medical institutions in the Russian Federation. Testing of the model in hospitals St. Petersburg demonstrated the possibilities and prospects of hospital assessment of health care technologies in Russian institutions, related to information support of management decisions on the introduction of new medical technologies (medicines, medical equipment, medical devices, etc.), taking into account the current strategic, organizational, financial, personnel aspects of a particular medical institution

ВИЗНАЧЕННЯ ПРОГИНІВ ДЕРЕВ’ЯНИХ ЗГИНАЛЬНИХ ЕЛЕМЕНТІВ З УРАХУВАННЯМ НЕЛІНІЙНОСТІ ДЕФОРМУВАННЯ ДЕРЕВИНИ

Проведено аналіз літератури за даною тематикою і розроблено нову методику визначення прогинів дерев’яних згинальних елементів. Наведено розрахунок та приклади епюр, які утворюються при згині дерев’яних елементів. Проведено теоретичний аналіз та наведено отримані результати при моделюванні роботи дерев’яної балки прямокутного перерізу. Встановлено, що граничний стан для більшості дерев’яних балок, наступає раніше за другою групою – від прогину, а не від руйнування балки за несучою здатністю

Dynamic prediction of survival using multivariate functional principal component analysis: a strict landmarking approach

Statistical Scienc

The Application of Genetic Risk Scores in Rheumatic Diseases: A Perspective

\ua9 2023 by the authors.Modest effect sizes have limited the clinical applicability of genetic associations with rheumatic diseases. Genetic risk scores (GRSs) have emerged as a promising solution to translate genetics into useful tools. In this review, we provide an overview of the recent literature on GRSs in rheumatic diseases. We describe six categories for which GRSs are used: (a) disease (outcome) prediction, (b) genetic commonalities between diseases, (c) disease differentiation, (d) interplay between genetics and environmental factors, (e) heritability and transferability, and (f) detecting causal relationships between traits. In our review of the literature, we identified current lacunas and opportunities for future work. First, the shortage of non-European genetic data restricts the application of many GRSs to European populations. Next, many GRSs are tested in settings enriched for cases that limit the transferability to real life. If intended for clinical application, GRSs are ideally tested in the relevant setting. Finally, there is much to elucidate regarding the co-occurrence of clinical traits to identify shared causal paths and elucidate relationships between the diseases. GRSs are useful instruments for this. Overall, the ever-continuing research on GRSs gives a hopeful outlook into the future of GRSs and indicates significant progress in their potential applications

Inspecting the quality of care:a comparison of CUSUM methods for inter hospital performance

During the past 14 years, a clinical audit has been used in the Netherlands to provide hospitals with data on their performance in colorectal cancer care. Continuous feedback on the quality of care provided at each hospital is essential to improve patient outcomes. It is unclear which methods should be used to generate most informative output for the identification of potential quality issues. Our aim is to compare the commonly employed funnel plot with existing cumulative sum (CUSUM) methodology for the evaluation of postoperative survival and hospital stay outcomes of patients who underwent colorectal surgery in the Netherlands. Data from the Dutch ColoRectal Audit on 25367 patients in the Netherlands who underwent surgical resection for colorectal cancer in 71 hospitals between 2019 and 2021 is used to compare four methods for the detection of deviations in the quality of care. Two methods based on binary outcomes (funnel plot, binary CUSUM) and two CUSUM charts based on survival outcomes (BK-CUSUM and CGR-CUSUM) are considered. A novel approach for determining hospital specific control limits for CUSUM charts is proposed. The ability to detect deviations as well as the time until detection are compared for the four methods. Charts were constructed for the inspection of both postoperative survival and hospital stay. Methods using survival outcomes always yielded faster detection times compared to approaches employing binary outcomes. Detections between methods mostly coincided for postoperative survival. For hospital stay detections varied strongly, with methods based on survival outcomes signalling over half the hospitals. Further pros and cons as well as pitfalls of all methods under consideration are discussed. Methodology for the continuous inspection of the quality of care should be tailored to the specific outcome. Properly understanding how the mechanism of a control chart functions is crucial for the correct interpretation of results. This is particularly true for CUSUM charts, which require the choice of a parameter that greatly influences the results. When applying CUSUM charts, consideration of these issues is strongly recommended.</p