Awareness of Breast Cancer Risk Factors, Symptoms and Breast Self-Examination Among Omani Female Teachers: A cross-sectional study

Objectives: This study aimed to assess knowledge of breast cancer (BC) risk factors, warning signs and symptoms and breast self-examination (BSE) practice among Omani female teachers in Al-Dhahira Governorate. Methods: A cross-sectional sample of female teachers aged 20–50 years was collected from January to December 2018 from three wilayats (provinces) in Al-Dhahira—Ibri, Dhank and Yunqal. A questionnaire that included the Breast Cancer Awareness Scale and demographic characteristics was administered. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics, regression analysis and Pearson’s Chi-square test. Results: A total of 478 female teachers were included in the study (response rate: 72.4%). The majority of participants (60.5%) had good overall knowledge about BC while 19.9% of participants had excellent overall knowledge. Only 9% of participants demonstrating excellent knowledge of BC risk factors. More than half of the participants (56.1%) reported excellent knowledge in screening methods. Unfortunately, only 57% of the female teachers indicated practising BSE. Knowledge of BC symptoms was closely divided between excellent and good levels (45.8 and 42.5%, respectively). BSE practice was significantly (P <0.05) correlated with overall knowledge of BC and its symptoms and screening methods, but not with knowledge of BC risk factors. Conclusion: This study revealed unsatisfactory overall knowledge of BC risk factors, symptoms, screening methods and BSE practice among female Omani teachers in Al-Dhahira Governorate. These findings constitute a challenge to healthcare providers to continue developing awareness of BC and providing health information to the public.Keywords: Breast Cancer; Awareness; Knowledge; Breast Self-Examination; Risk factors; Signs and Symptoms; Oman

Harnessing the power of data and event data for Business Process Improvement

International audienceFaced with a competitive and a continuous changing environment, traditional approaches that treat a company as a closed environment are no longer appropriate. To overcome this problem of isolation and non-communication, organizations tend to increasingly use Business Process Management-BPM. Recently with the rise of new technologies such as of big data, Internet of things, Cloud computing, etc, organizations are faced with many factors and challenges that generate real changes in the traditional BPM. Among these challenges, we have the huge amount of data and event data that are continuously gathered. Such data must be adequately exploited to extract high added value that can assist the organization in its decision making process. However, traditional BPM systems present different limits, as they do not facilitate the use of knowledge extracted from this data by business processes, because they do not benefit from statistical functionalities and data analysis and manipulation techniques. Several researches have been done in this area to link event data and data analysis to BPM by using, for example, process mining or machine learning algorithms. This paper shows how data and event data are the key to get a better understanding of the functioning of business processes, and to start the journey of business process improvement towards a stateful, context-aware, and proactive business process

Granulomatous Periorificial Dermatitis in an Adult: A case report with review of literature

Granulomatous periorificial dermatitis (GPD) is a benign, self-limiting eruption that is considered a clinical variant of periorificial dermatitis, also known as perioral dermatitis. It presents primarily in prepubertal children as monomorphic scaly papules over perioral, paranasal and periorbital areas of the face with rare occurrence in adults. We report a 36-year-old Omani male patient who presented to the Dermatology Clinic at Bahla Polyclinic, Bahla, Oman, in 2018 with a papular eruption over his face for the previous six months. Based on clinical and histopathological findings the patient was diagnosed with GPD with sarcoid-like histology. He was treated effectively with oral doxycycline and topical metronidazole. This report provides a review of the literature on GPD and summarises all reported cases in adults to date.Keywords: Perioral Dermatitis; Dermatitis; Granulomas; Case Report; Oman

Clinical Outcome of Children With Antenatally Diagnosed Hydronephrosis

Fetal renal pelvis dilation is a common condition, which is observed in 1–4. 5% of pregnancies. In many cases, this finding resolves spontaneously. However, sometimes it may be a signal of significant urinary tract pathologies. The main abnormalities found after birth are uretero-pelvic junction stenosis, primary vesicoureteral reflux, megaureter, duplex kidneys, and posterior urethral valves, with uretero-pelvic junction stenosis and primary vesicoureteral reflux accounting for most of the cases. Diagnosis, management, and prognosis at short and longer term of these conditions will be reviewed in this article

Priority-based Event Management using Fuzzy Logic for an IoT-BPM Architecture

International audienceInternet of things (IoT) world is growing at a breathtaking pace. This new paradigm shift affects all the enterprise architecture layers from infrastructure to business. Organizations are nowadays faced with new challenges to keep their quality of service and competitive advantage over other rival organizations. Business Process Management (BPM) is a field among others that will be affected by this new technology. Both IoT and BPM communicate through events, and effective and efficient management of those events ensures a better communication channel between the IoT physical layer and the Business layer. However, the huge amount of those IoT generated events and sometimes the subtle difference between their criticality level, generate uncertainty regarding their priority level determination. In this paper, we propose a fuzzy logic-based event management approach to estimate the criticality level of the incoming IoT events using two fuzzy inference systems (FIS) and to manage the priority of business process instances triggered by those events. A case study is presented and the obtained results from our simulations demonstrate the benefit of our approach and allowed us to confirm the efficiency of our assumptions

Impact of COVID-19 on cardiovascular testing in the United States versus the rest of the world

Objectives: This study sought to quantify and compare the decline in volumes of cardiovascular procedures between the United States and non-US institutions during the early phase of the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the care of many non-COVID-19 illnesses. Reductions in diagnostic cardiovascular testing around the world have led to concerns over the implications of reduced testing for cardiovascular disease (CVD) morbidity and mortality. Methods: Data were submitted to the INCAPS-COVID (International Atomic Energy Agency Non-Invasive Cardiology Protocols Study of COVID-19), a multinational registry comprising 909 institutions in 108 countries (including 155 facilities in 40 U.S. states), assessing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on volumes of diagnostic cardiovascular procedures. Data were obtained for April 2020 and compared with volumes of baseline procedures from March 2019. We compared laboratory characteristics, practices, and procedure volumes between U.S. and non-U.S. facilities and between U.S. geographic regions and identified factors associated with volume reduction in the United States. Results: Reductions in the volumes of procedures in the United States were similar to those in non-U.S. facilities (68% vs. 63%, respectively; p = 0.237), although U.S. facilities reported greater reductions in invasive coronary angiography (69% vs. 53%, respectively; p < 0.001). Significantly more U.S. facilities reported increased use of telehealth and patient screening measures than non-U.S. facilities, such as temperature checks, symptom screenings, and COVID-19 testing. Reductions in volumes of procedures differed between U.S. regions, with larger declines observed in the Northeast (76%) and Midwest (74%) than in the South (62%) and West (44%). Prevalence of COVID-19, staff redeployments, outpatient centers, and urban centers were associated with greater reductions in volume in U.S. facilities in a multivariable analysis. Conclusions: We observed marked reductions in U.S. cardiovascular testing in the early phase of the pandemic and significant variability between U.S. regions. The association between reductions of volumes and COVID-19 prevalence in the United States highlighted the need for proactive efforts to maintain access to cardiovascular testing in areas most affected by outbreaks of COVID-19 infection

Evaluation et prise en charge des anomalies foetales du rein et du tractus urinaire

Doctorat en Sciences médicalesinfo:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublishe

Evaluation et prise en charge des anomalies foetales du rein et du tractus urinaire

Doctorat en Sciences médicalesinfo:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublishe

Islamic Finance : for an evolution outside the banking sector?

Les banques islamiques ont vu le jour pour se constituer comme une alternative aux banques conventionnelles. Elles sont soumises aux préceptes de la Charia qui réglemente les aspects fondamentaux de leurs opérations. Les principes de la Charia s’articulent autour de la prohibition de l’intérêt, des opérations spéculatives, du partage des pertes et des profits, et prônent plus généralement plus d’équité, de morale dans l’économie ce qui donnerait aux banques islamiques une mission toute différente de celles conventionnelles. Toutefois, la réalité de la pratique de la finance islamique semble être en décalage par rapport aux principes et objectifs qu’elle prône au point de s’interroger sur la véritable raison d’être des banques islamiques et sur l’effectivité du discours moral qu’elles défendent. Cette thèse cherche à analyser à la fois le fondement théorique de la finance islamique ainsi que les distorsions de sa pratique par les banques islamiques et ce pour mieux comprendre ce décalage, analyser ses véritables causes et conclure sur le degré de réalisme de la théorie de la finance islamique dans son ensemble.Islamic banks have emerged to form an alternative to conventional banks. They are subject to the precepts of Sharia which regulates the fundamental aspects of their operations. The principles of Sharia are articulated around the prohibition of interest and the speculative operations, the sharing of the risks and profits, and more generally advocate for equity and moral in the economy which gives the Islamic banks a mission quite different from the conventional peers. However, the reality of the practice of Islamic finance seems to be not synchronized with the principles and objectives it advocates to the point of questioning the real raison d'être of Islamic banks and the effectiveness of the moral it defends. This thesis seeks to analyze both the theoretical basis of Islamic finance as well as the distortions of the practice by Islamic banks to better understand this discrepancy, analyze its true causes and conclude on the degree of realism of the theory of Islamic finance in general