End-of-life decisions in medicine : emperical studies on practice and attitudes in the Netherlands

The role of psychiatrists in end-of-life decision-making will be described in Chapters 2 to 4 (part II). Chapter 2 deals with the experience of Dutch psychiatrists with requests for euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide made by patients under their treatment. Chapter 3 examines psychiatric consultation with regard to patients' requests for euthanasia or assisted suicide in more detail. The frequency with which psychiatrists are asked for consultation with regard to a patient's request for euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide is explored, as well as the content and implications of such consultation. In Chapter 4, the attitudes of Dutch psychiatrists towards physician-assisted death in psychiatric patients are further explored, and related to their specific characteristics. The use of potentially life-shortening drugs at the end of life is dealt with in Chapters 5 to 8 (part III), In Chapter 5, an overview of the knowledge of potentially life-shortening drugs is given in a review study. Chapter 6 presents an overview of all potentially life-shortening drugs that are used in the broad range of end-of-life decisions in medicine

Transparent and conductive polymer layers by gas plasma techniques

Polymers are widely used in a great number of applications because of their general properties such as low density, low cost, and processability. If these properties could be combined with electrical conductivity, this would open up the way to desirable applications such as flexible LCD’s and polymer electronics (cheap, lightweight, etc.). For applications requiring electrical conductivity, the choice of a suitable polymer is limited to polymers with a conjugated chemical structure such as polythiophene. Along the conjugated structures charge (i.e., electricity) is transported by charge carriers. However, the conjugated structure of conductive polymers inherently results in a non-transparent, intractable polymer, which makes them unsuitable for applications requiring transparency and conductivity (e.g., antistatic coatings on photographic films). These disadvantages can be overcome when a thin conductive polymer layer is applied on a polymer that has all desired properties for a specific application, but only lacks conductivity. A very attractive way to do this is by using the plasma technique. With this technique it is possible to modify the surface properties of a substrate, while retaining the transparency and bulk properties of the substrate material. Furthermore, it is a solvent-free, fast and versatile process. Plasma can be used to actually modify the surface top-layer (plasma treatment) of or to deposit a thin conductive layer (plasma polymerisation (PP)) on a transparent substrate. In the present study the plasma technique is used to obtain transparent and conductive polymer systems

The design and implementation of a meaning driven data query language

We present the design and implementation of a Meaning Driven Data Query Language - MDDQL - which aims at the construction of queries through system made suggestions of natural language based query terms for both scientific application domain terms and operator/operation ones. A query construction blackboard is used where query language terms are suggested to the user in its preferred natural language and in a name centered way, together with their connotation. This helps in understanding the meaning of the terms and/or operators or operations to be included in the query. Furthermore, the construction of the query turns out to be an incremental refinement of the query under construction through semantic constraints, where only those domain language terms and/or operators/operations are suggested which result into meaningful combinations of query terms as related to the scientific application domain semantics. Therefore, semantically meaningless queries can be prevented during the query construction. Such a semantics aware mechanism is not available in conventional database query languages such as SQL, where one is allowed to execute a query calculating, for example, the average of numerical data values whereas they represent the codes of categorical values. Moreover, no familiarity with the semantics of complex database schemes or interpretation of the symbols (names of classes/tables/attributes, value codes) underlying the storage model, as well as familiarity with the syntax of a database specific query language are needed by the end-user. The constructed query can be submitted to the MDDQL query interpretation and transformation engine, where the corresponding SQL-query is generated and delegated to a DBMS (e.g., Oracle, MSAccess, SQL-Server). Generation of SQL-statements addressing NF2 data models such as those provided by the object-relational Oracle DBMS is also enabled. The query result is presented in a table based form where all storage model symbols are interpreted and can be exported for the usage with statistical software packages (e.g., SPSS)

MDDQL-Stat: data querying and analysis through integration of intentional and extensional semantics

We would like to present a prototype system enabling a rather empirical than a formal approach to the problem of posing queries to a semantically rich (quality aspects, semantic distance, etc.) data integration system {G,S,M} (Global schema, Sources, Mediation) through integration not only of intensional but also of extensional semantics. While the first is provided by an alphabet Ag, as given by an ontology based global schema G, and a high level query language (conjunction/disjunction + inequalities + statistical operations), the latter enables synthesizing of data source specific and previously transformed query results according to well-defined set operations for heterogeneous, distributed data sources. Our approach contrasts with other GAV (Global-As-View) related architectures for mediation of integrated read-only views, in that it simplifies query processing while preserving flexibility when adding new data sources, despite the inherited complexity of mappings due to enhanced semantic description of data (semantic distance, quality parameters, etc.) such that statistical results and comparisons become more meaningful