Satisfaction of needs and Patient's Expectations of Hospital Care

There is an increasing interest in eliciting feedback from patients to highlight aspects of care that need improvement and to monitor performance and quality of care. Hospitals increasingly need to adopt a patient-centred attitude. Traditionally, assessments have ignored the reports of patients in preference to technical and physiological reports of outcome. Healthcare systems have sought to achieve a balance in services that offer not only clinically effective and evidence based care, but which are also judged by patients as acceptable and beneficial. Questionnaires that ask patients to rate their care in terms of how satisfied they are tend to elicit very positive ratings, which are not sensitive to problems with the specific processes that affect the quality of care delivery. A more valid approach is to ask patients to report in detail on thei

Satisfaction of needs and Patient's Expectations of Hospital Care

There is an increasing interest in eliciting feedback from patients to highlight aspects of care that need improvement and to monitor performance and quality of care. Hospitals increasingly need to adopt a patient-centred attitude. Traditionally, assessments have ignored the reports of patients in preference to technical and physiological reports of outcome. Healthcare systems have sought to achieve a balance in services that offer not only clinically effective and evidence based care, but which are also judged by patients as acceptable and beneficial. Questionnaires that ask patients to rate their care in terms of how satisfied they are tend to elicit very positive ratings, which are not sensitive to problems with the specific processes that affect the quality of care delivery. A more valid approach is to ask patients to report in detail on thei

A Sustainable Multi-objective Optimization Model for Design of Supply Chain Under Uncertain Products Demands and Products Prices: a Real Case of Dairy Industry

Dairy production has a significant environmental impact related with wastewater and air pollution. In addition, it is a large consumer of water and energy. The most effective way to improve its sustainability is through analysis of the food-water-energy nexus, which can be done by optimizing all activities in the supply chain (SC) from the raw materials to the end user while meeting environmental, economic and social criteria. However, the presence of uncertainties regarding the main parameters of the SC would lead to problems related to the implementation of processes and the operating the system as a whole. To solve these problems an implementation of models for optimal design of dairy SCs that handle these uncertainties is needed. The present study proposes an extended version of already developed mixed integer non-linear programming (MINLP) approach to optimal design of a sustainable SC for the production of different dairy products according different recipes under uncertain products demands and products prices. The model has taken into account economic, environmental and social aspects. The obtained results show that the increase in the uncertainty level leads to an increase of values of economic, environmental and social costs as well as the profit, with the standard deviation of the same being the highest at the lowest level of uncertainty, while at the others it is preserved relatively constant. The number of workers employed by the supply centers, dairies and markets is kept constant regardless of the variation in the level of uncertainty of products demands and products prices

Robust Optimization of Sustainable Dairy Supply Chain with Products Demands Uncertainty and Environmental Impact Consideration

Milk and milk products are an important part of the daily menu of millions of people around the world. Increasing the efficiency and competitiveness of this type of production is related to the implementation of the strategy of sustainable management of supply chains, which cover all processes from raw materials, through production to end users. The presence of fluctuations in the product demands on the markets also influences the sustainable operation of considered supply chain activities. The present study proposes an application of already developed robust optimization approach for optimal design of a sustainable dairy supply chain operating under uncertain products demands on a new case study from Bulgaria which include three milk suppliers, two dairies and three markets. The considered supply chain is related with a production of different dairy products according to different recipes while satisfying environmental and economic criteria defined in terms of costs. The latter is associated with the generated wastewater from dairy production and CO2 emissions due to the energy consumed and transportation. Several optimization problems have been formulated and solved under nominal data for the product demands and four uncertainties levels - 0.25, 0.5, 0.75 and 1. The obtained optimal values of the economic and environmental costs show that the optimization approach implementation results in sustainable solutions that do not change significantly with an increase in the uncertainty level of consideration of the product demands

Lycopene: total-scale literature landscape analysis of a valuable nutraceutical with numerous potential applications in the promotion of human and animal health

Lycopene intake from tomatoes and other food sources has multiple potential health benefits. This report aimed to evaluate the current research literature on lycopene concerning human and animal health. The electronic Web of Science Core Collection database was searched with (lycopene*) AND (health* OR illness* OR disease* OR medic* OR pharma* OR drug* OR therap*). The resulted 3972 papers were analyzed with the aid of bibliometric software. Besides the United States, the lycopene papers received global contributions, particularly from China, Italy, India, and Spain. Examples of frequently mentioned chemicals/chemical classes were carotenoid, beta carotene, alpha carotene, beta cryptoxanthin, and alpha tocopherol. Examples of frequently mentioned medical conditions were prostate cancer, cardiovascular disease, and obesity. Published scientific articles reveal the diverse potential of lycopene in prompting human and animal health, and the knowledge on the bioactivities of this phytoche(undefined)info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

An algorithm and application to efficiently analyse DNA fibre data

AbstractThe duplication of genetic information (DNA replication) is central to life. Numerous control mechanisms ensure the exact course of the process during each cell division. Disturbances of DNA replication have severe consequences for the affected cell, and current models link them to cancer development. One of the most accurate methods for studying DNA replication is labelling newly synthesised DNA molecules with halogenated nucleotides, followed by immunofluorescence and microscopy detection, known as DNA fibre labelling. The method allows the registration of the activity of single replication complexes by measuring the length of the “trace” left by each of them. The major difficulty of the method is the labor-intensive analysis, which requires measuring the lengths of a large number of labelled fragments. Recently, the interest in this kind of image analysis has grown rapidly. In this project we have developed an algorithm and a lightweight Java application to automatically analyse single DNA molecule images that we have named “DNA size finder”. DNA size finder significantly simplified the analysis of the experimental data while increasing reliability by the standardised measurement of a greater number of DNA molecules. It is freely available and does not require any paid platforms or services to be used. We hope that the application will facilitate both the study of DNA replication control and the effects of various compounds used in human activity on the process of DNA replication

Inverted Sparse Discriminant Preserving Projection for Face Recognition

Image classification and face recognition has been a popular subject matter for the last several decades. Images are usually handled as transformed as vectors which makes their classification a dimensionality reduction task. Some of the well-known algorithms in the area, such as the Sparsity Preserving Projection (SPP), create new theoretical concepts families, while other successfully modify or combine useful properties of the former ones. Compiled algorithms like Sparse Discriminant Preserving Projections (SDPP) employ the properties of the Sparse Representation (SR) as in their objective functions they include a supervised modification of the sparse weight matrix that considers the intra-class relations. By examining the construction of the SDPP algorithm and by providing some arguments on the supervised SR, in this paper we propose a new subspace learning algorithm, called Inverted Sparse Discriminant Preserving Projection (ISDPP). Likewise SDPP, ISDPP integrates supervised SR with the Fisher’s criterion. In contrast to SDPP, ISDPP incorporates a between-class SR with the Fischer’s within-class scatter matrix. A preliminary round of experiments support the initiative and provide an expectation for possible superior performance of the proposed ISDPP that is confirmed in the next round of empirical examinations

Additiv hergestellter Drehklemmhalter

Additive Fertigungsverfahren ermöglichen die Herstellung innovativer Werkzeugsysteme mit erhöhter Funktionsintegration. Die vorliegende Arbeit liefert wichtige Erkenntnisse in Bezug auf additiv gefertigte Drehklemmhalter. Zum einen wird der Einfluss der Wärmebehandlung auf das Werkstoffgefüge und schlussendlich auf die Schwingfestigkeitseigenschaften untersucht. Zum anderen wird der Einfluss additiv hergestellter Zweistoffdüsen in Bezug auf das resultierende Freistrahlverhalten experimentell ermittelt. Additive manufacturing processes allow producing innovative tool systems associated with increased functional integration. This work provides important insights on additively manufactured turning tool holders. Firstly, it investigates how heat treatment affects both material structure and fatigue properties. Secondly, it determines experimentally how additively produced two-fluid nozzles influence the resulting open jet formation