Costs of chronic disease and an alternative to reduce these costs: case study of End Stage Renal Disease (ESRD)

An improved understanding of the costs of diseases is obtained by conducting a case study of the costs associated with end stage renal disease (ESRD). In estimating the costs of ESRD, the costs incurred by both patients and their primary unpaid caregivers are calculated. Most economic studies of the costs of diseases ignore either the patients or unpaid caregiver side, focusing on one or the other. From a theoretical standpoint, it is shown unpaid caregiving lowers the costs of diseases to society. Unpaid caregiver lowers the cost, because for unpaid caregiving to occur, the net benefits of unpaid caregiving must be lower than the net benefits of hiring a paid caregiver. Using patients and their primary caregivers at the Gambro Dialysis Center in College Station, Texas as a case study, estimated total ESRD costs range from $84,000 to$121,000 / year / case. The distribution of these costs is positively skewed. Of the total costs, approximately 2% to 25% can be attributed to unpaid caregiving. Excluding direct medical costs in total ESRD costs, unpaid caregiving is 14% to 65% of total ESRD costs. Consideration of unpaid caregiving costs is, therefore, an important component of the costs of diseases. These estimates are conservative as the costs associated with lifestyle changes and health effects are noted, but no monetary value is placed on them. Results also indicate the patients and caregivers perception of the quantity of caregiving varies. An alternative water supply system to improve the efficiency of water supply systems taking into account water pricing, marketing, and treatment costs is proposed. This system treats and supplies water differently depending on the source of the water and if the end-use of the water is a potable or non-potable use, then may reduce treatment costs. Decreased treatment costs may make more stringent water standards more affordable. More stringent water standards may cause a decrease in the risk of water-related diseases including ESRD induced by water-borne toxins. Reducing the risk of ESRD will reduce societys costs associated with chronic illnesses. Possible benefits and costs of the proposed system are discussed, but not calculated

The South Korean agri-food e-market: A comparative B2B e-commerce case study

This paper is a comparative case study for two B2B agri-food e-commerce examples and is based on the exchange process analysis. Data were collected by interviews with operators and experts. The results for this study show that the B2B e-commerce exchange process can efficiently replace the traditional process. The reduction of costs in the searching and valuation processes is a successful factor for the replacement. Also, authentication process is important key to success. However, efficient delivery is not a necessary condition.</jats:p

Phase Current Measurement Method of Dual Inverter-Motor Drive System Using a Single DC Link Current Sensor

In recent years, electric propulsion systems have become widely, used and these systems have strict limits in volume and weight. Therefore, it is necessary to reduce the weight of the inverter-motor drive system. In a typical n inverter-motor drive system, at least 2n phase current sensors are required. In order to reduce the number of phase current sensors, this paper proposes a method for measuring phase current using n DC link current sensors in a 2n inverter-motor drive system. Two phase currents per inverter-motor system are measured during one period of the switching frequency using the pulse width modulation (PWM) shift method. However, since the measured phase current contains an error component in the average current, the error component was compensated for in order to obtain a current similar to the actual phase current by using the slope and dwell time of the phase current. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified through experiments

Analysis of peer-scaffolding patterns in four phases of problem-solving in web-based instruction

2008Various peer-scaffoldings in problem-solving have been studied as effective learning strategies in web‐based instruction and on‐line discussion. The web-based environment provides a medium for sharing knowledge and resources, which help learners engage in problem-solving and interactive learning. Learners, however, easily feel isolated in web-based environments because of the tremendous amount of resources and visual information that are easily available. In this regard, it is important to seriously consider peer-scaffolding strategies as effective problem-solving strategies. The purpose of the present study is to find patterns of peerscaffolding that constitute effective problem-solving strategies in web-based instruction. Six participants registered in the major leader training program at the National Academy Educational Administrators voluntarily participated in this experiment as part of their coursework. All participants provided their scaffoldings in on-line casual discussions. To collect data from peer group problem-solving interactions in collaborative activities among the six participations, their discourses content was analyzed to nvestigate patterns of peer-scaffolding. The results of this study were as follows: First, the results showed statistically non‐significant differences in peer-scaffoldings among three dimensions: it showed the highest proportion of peer-scaffoldings in the content dimension, followed by the affection dimension, and finally the strategy dimension. Second, comparing the eight types of scaffolding, the offering praise scaffolding was related to the most important scaffoldings for making peers cooperate with each other while they solve problems. Third, considering patterns of peer-scaffolding in the strategy dimension, the maintaining direction scaffolding represents a higher proportion of the understanding phase than the assigning role-taking scaffolding. Fourth, considering patterns of peer-scaffolding in the content dimension, the offering cue scaffolding represents a higher proportion of the solving phase than the other three peer-scaffoldings. Finally, considering patterns of peer-scaffolding in the affection dimension, the inviting participation scaffolding represents a higher proportion of the understanding phase than the offering praise scaffolding. After reviewing phases, the offering praise scaffolding represented a higher proportion than the inviting participation scaffolding

Self-supervised Image Denoising with Downsampled Invariance Loss and Conditional Blind-Spot Network

There have been many image denoisers using deep neural networks, which outperform conventional model-based methods by large margins. Recently, self-supervised methods have attracted attention because constructing a large real noise dataset for supervised training is an enormous burden. The most representative self-supervised denoisers are based on blind-spot networks, which exclude the receptive field's center pixel. However, excluding any input pixel is abandoning some information, especially when the input pixel at the corresponding output position is excluded. In addition, a standard blind-spot network fails to reduce real camera noise due to the pixel-wise correlation of noise, though it successfully removes independently distributed synthetic noise. Hence, to realize a more practical denoiser, we propose a novel self-supervised training framework that can remove real noise. For this, we derive the theoretic upper bound of a supervised loss where the network is guided by the downsampled blinded output. Also, we design a conditional blind-spot network (C-BSN), which selectively controls the blindness of the network to use the center pixel information. Furthermore, we exploit a random subsampler to decorrelate noise spatially, making the C-BSN free of visual artifacts that were often seen in downsample-based methods. Extensive experiments show that the proposed C-BSN achieves state-of-the-art performance on real-world datasets as a self-supervised denoiser and shows qualitatively pleasing results without any post-processing or refinement