2,859 research outputs found
Measures of Health-Related Quality of Life Outcomes in Pediatric Neurosurgery: Literature Review
Background
Improving value in healthcare means optimizing outcomes and minimizing costs. The emerging pay-for-performance era requires understanding of the effect of healthcare services on health-related quality of life (HRQoL). Pediatric and surgical subspecialties have yet to fully integrate HRQoL measures into practice. The present study reviewed and characterized the HRQoL outcome measures across various pediatric neurosurgical diagnoses.
Methods
A literature review was performed by searching PubMed and Google Scholar with search terms such as “health-related quality of life” and “pediatric neurosurgery” and then including the specific pathologies for which a HRQoL instrument was found (e.g., “health-related quality of life” plus “epilepsy”). Each measurement was evaluated by content and purpose, relative strengths and weaknesses, and validity.
Results
We reviewed 68 reports. Epilepsy, brain tumor, cerebral palsy, spina bifida, hydrocephalus, and scoliosis were diagnoses found in reported studies that had used disease-specific HRQoL instruments. Information using general HRQoL instruments was also reported. Internal, test–retest, and/or interrater reliability varied across the instruments, as did face, content, concurrent, and/or construct validity. Few instruments were tested enough for robust reliability and validity. Significant variability was found in the usage of these instruments in clinical studies within pediatric neurosurgery.
Conclusions
The HRQoL instruments used in pediatric neurosurgery are currently without standardized guidelines and thus exhibit high variability in use. Clinicians should support the development and application of these methods to optimize these instruments, promote standardization of research, improve performance measures to reflect clinically modifiable and meaningful outcomes, and, ultimately, lead the national discussion in healthcare quality and patient-centered care
High-frequency performance of Schottky source/drain silicon pMOS devices
A radio-frequency performance of 85-nm gate-length p-type Schottky barrier (SB) with PtSi source/drain materials is investigated. The impact of silicidation annealing temperature on the high-frequency behavior of SB MOSFETs is analyzed using an extrinsic small-signal equivalent circuit. It is demonstrated that the current drive and the gate transconductance strongly depend on the silicidation anneal temperature, whereas the unity-gain cutoff frequency of the measured devices remains nearly unchanged
USE OF MIND/BODY SELFHEALING PRACTICE PREDICTS POSITIVE HEALTH TRANSITION IN CHRONIC FATIGUE SYNDROME: A Controlled Study
Seventy subjects diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome were randomized to a control group (N=33) or a treatment group (N :; 37). All continued usual medical care. Treatment subjects were assigned to a 9 week, 2-hours-per-week group program teaching mindfulness meditation and medical qigong practices. The outcome variable was 12-month health transition at oneyear follow-up, as defined by the SF36 12-month Health Transition score. The data yielded a classification tree with a 90% overall accuracy rate in classifYing subjects as "improvers" or non-improvers" (effect strength 80.5, experimentwise p < .05), based on SF36 Role FunctioningPhysical score at follow-up and frequency of mind/body self-healing practice. Subjects in the highest quartile of Role Functioning-Physical improved regardless of practice. For the remaining 75%, those practicing three or more days per week at follow-up were 2.7 times more likely to report positive 12-month Health Transition than those practicing less
Predictions from a stochastic polymer model for the MinDE dynamics in E.coli
The spatiotemporal oscillations of the Min proteins in the bacterium
Escherichia coli play an important role in cell division. A number of different
models have been proposed to explain the dynamics from the underlying
biochemistry. Here, we extend a previously described discrete polymer model
from a deterministic to a stochastic formulation. We express the stochastic
evolution of the oscillatory system as a map from the probability distribution
of maximum polymer length in one period of the oscillation to the probability
distribution of maximum polymer length half a period later and solve for the
fixed point of the map with a combined analytical and numerical technique. This
solution gives a theoretical prediction of the distributions of both lengths of
the polar MinD zones and periods of oscillations -- both of which are
experimentally measurable. The model provides an interesting example of a
stochastic hybrid system that is, in some limits, analytically tractable.Comment: 16 page
Is This a Joke? Detecting Humor in Spanish Tweets
While humor has been historically studied from a psychological, cognitive and
linguistic standpoint, its study from a computational perspective is an area
yet to be explored in Computational Linguistics. There exist some previous
works, but a characterization of humor that allows its automatic recognition
and generation is far from being specified. In this work we build a
crowdsourced corpus of labeled tweets, annotated according to its humor value,
letting the annotators subjectively decide which are humorous. A humor
classifier for Spanish tweets is assembled based on supervised learning,
reaching a precision of 84% and a recall of 69%.Comment: Preprint version, without referra
Teachers developing assessment for learning: impact on student achievement
While it is generally acknowledged that increased use of formative assessment (or assessment for learning) leads to higher quality learning, it is often claimed that the pressure in schools to improve the results achieved by students in externally-set tests and examinations precludes its use. This paper reports on the achievement of secondary school students who worked in classrooms where teachers made time to develop formative assessment strategies. A total of 24 teachers (2 science and 2 mathematics teachers, in each of six schools in two LEAs) were supported over a six-month period in exploring and planning their approach to formative assessment, and then, beginning in September 1999, the teachers put these plans into action with selected classes. In order to compute effect sizes, a measure of prior attainment and at least one comparison group was established for each class (typically either an equivalent class taught in the previous year by the same teacher, or a parallel class taught by another teacher). The mean effect size was 0.32
Timed Parity Games: Complexity and Robustness
We consider two-player games played in real time on game structures with
clocks where the objectives of players are described using parity conditions.
The games are \emph{concurrent} in that at each turn, both players
independently propose a time delay and an action, and the action with the
shorter delay is chosen. To prevent a player from winning by blocking time, we
restrict each player to play strategies that ensure that the player cannot be
responsible for causing a zeno run. First, we present an efficient reduction of
these games to \emph{turn-based} (i.e., not concurrent) \emph{finite-state}
(i.e., untimed) parity games. Our reduction improves the best known complexity
for solving timed parity games. Moreover, the rich class of algorithms for
classical parity games can now be applied to timed parity games. The states of
the resulting game are based on clock regions of the original game, and the
state space of the finite game is linear in the size of the region graph.
Second, we consider two restricted classes of strategies for the player that
represents the controller in a real-time synthesis problem, namely,
\emph{limit-robust} and \emph{bounded-robust} winning strategies. Using a
limit-robust winning strategy, the controller cannot choose an exact
real-valued time delay but must allow for some nonzero jitter in each of its
actions. If there is a given lower bound on the jitter, then the strategy is
bounded-robust winning. We show that exact strategies are more powerful than
limit-robust strategies, which are more powerful than bounded-robust winning
strategies for any bound. For both kinds of robust strategies, we present
efficient reductions to standard timed automaton games. These reductions
provide algorithms for the synthesis of robust real-time controllers
An Inner Gaseous Disk around the Herbig Be Star MWC 147
We present high-spectral-resolution, optical spectra of the Herbig Be star
MWC 147, in which we spectrally resolve several emission lines, including the
[O I] lines at 6300 and 6363\deg. Their highly symmetric, double-peaked line
profiles indicate that the emission originates in a rotating circumstellar
disk. We deconvolve the Doppler-broadened [O I] emission lines to obtain a
measure of emission as a function of distance from the central star. The
resulting radial surface brightness profiles are in agreement with a disk
structure consisting of a flat, inner, gaseous disk and a flared, outer, dust
disk. The transition between these components at 2 to 3 AU corresponds to the
estimated dust sublimation radius. The width of the double-peaked Mg II line at
4481\deg suggests that the inner disk extends to at least 0.10 AU, close to the
corotation radius.Comment: accepted for ApJ Letters (Oct. 2010
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