4,769 research outputs found
Telehealthcare for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
BACKGROUND: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a disease of irreversible airways obstruction in which patients often suffer exacerbations. Sometimes these exacerbations need hospital care: telehealthcare has the potential to reduce admission to hospital when used to administer care to the pateint from within their own home. OBJECTIVES: To review the effectiveness of telehealthcare for COPD compared with usual face‐to‐face care. SEARCH METHODS: We searched the Cochrane Airways Group Specialised Register, which is derived from systematic searches of the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL), MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, AMED, and PsycINFO; last searched January 2010. SELECTION CRITERIA: We selected randomised controlled trials which assessed telehealthcare, defined as follows: healthcare at a distance, involving the communication of data from the patient to the health carer, usually a doctor or nurse, who then processes the information and responds with feedback regarding the management of the illness. The primary outcomes considered were: number of exacerbations, quality of life as recorded by the St George's Respiratory Questionnaire, hospitalisations, emergency department visits and deaths. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS: Two authors independently selected trials for inclusion and extracted data. We combined data into forest plots using fixed‐effects modelling as heterogeneity was low (I(2) < 40%). MAIN RESULTS: Ten trials met the inclusion criteria. Telehealthcare was assessed as part of a complex intervention, including nurse case management and other interventions. Telehealthcare was associated with a clinically significant increase in quality of life in two trials with 253 participants (mean difference ‐6.57 (95% confidence interval (CI) ‐13.62 to 0.48); minimum clinically significant difference is a change of ‐4.0), but the confidence interval was wide. Telehealthcare showed a significant reduction in the number of patients with one or more emergency department attendances over 12 months; odds ratio (OR) 0.27 (95% CI 0.11 to 0.66) in three trials with 449 participants, and the OR of having one or more admissions to hospital over 12 months was 0.46 (95% CI 0.33 to 0.65) in six trials with 604 participants. There was no significant difference in the OR for deaths over 12 months for the telehealthcare group as compared to the usual care group in three trials with 503 participants; OR 1.05 (95% CI 0.63 to 1.75). AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS: Telehealthcare in COPD appears to have a possible impact on the quality of life of patients and the number of times patients attend the emergency department and the hospital. However, further research is needed to clarify precisely its role since the trials included telehealthcare as part of more complex packages
Ideal magnetohydrodynamic simulations of unmagnetized dense plasma jet injection into a hot strongly magnetized plasma
We present results from three-dimensional ideal magnetohydrodynamic
simulations of unmagnetized dense plasma jet injection into a uniform hot
strongly magnetized plasma, with the aim of providing insight into core fueling
of a tokamak with parameters relevant for ITER and NSTX (National Spherical
Torus Experiment). Unmagnetized dense plasma jet injection is similar to
compact toroid injection but with much higher plasma density and total mass,
and consequently lower required injection velocity. Mass deposition of the jet
into the background appears to be facilitated via magnetic reconnection along
the jet's trailing edge. The penetration depth of the plasma jet into the
background plasma is mostly dependent on the jet's initial kinetic energy, and
a key requirement for spatially localized mass deposition is for the jet's
slowing-down time to be less than the time for the perturbed background
magnetic flux to relax due to magnetic reconnection. This work suggests that
more accurate treatment of reconnection is needed to fully model this problem.
Parameters for unmagnetized dense plasma jet injection are identified for
localized core deposition as well as edge localized mode (ELM) pacing
applications in ITER and NSTX-relevant regimes.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figures and 2 tables; accepted by Nuclear Fusion (May 11,
2011
Discriminative Region Proposal Adversarial Networks for High-Quality Image-to-Image Translation
Image-to-image translation has been made much progress with embracing
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). However, it's still very challenging
for translation tasks that require high quality, especially at high-resolution
and photorealism. In this paper, we present Discriminative Region Proposal
Adversarial Networks (DRPAN) for high-quality image-to-image translation. We
decompose the procedure of image-to-image translation task into three iterated
steps, first is to generate an image with global structure but some local
artifacts (via GAN), second is using our DRPnet to propose the most fake region
from the generated image, and third is to implement "image inpainting" on the
most fake region for more realistic result through a reviser, so that the
system (DRPAN) can be gradually optimized to synthesize images with more
attention on the most artifact local part. Experiments on a variety of
image-to-image translation tasks and datasets validate that our method
outperforms state-of-the-arts for producing high-quality translation results in
terms of both human perceptual studies and automatic quantitative measures.Comment: ECCV 201
Anomalous rotational-alignment in N=Z nuclei and residual neutron-proton interaction
Recent experiments have demonstrated that the rotational-alignment for the
nuclei in the mass-80 region is considerably delayed as compared to the
neighboring nuclei. We investigate whether this observation can be
understood by a known component of nuclear residual interactions. It is shown
that the quadrupole-pairing interaction, which explains many of the delays
known in rare-earth nuclei, does not produce the substantial delay observed for
these nuclei. However, the residual neutron-proton interaction which is
conjectured to be relevant for nuclei is shown to be quite important in
explaining the new experimental data.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, final version accepted by Phys. Rev. C as a Rapid
Communicatio
Non-visualization of lung markings below hemidiaphragm in subtle subpulmonic effusion: an old sign resuscitated
To assess the lack of visibility of vascular markings under the hemidiaphragm on a frontal chest radiograph as a sign of pleural effusion, fifteen patients were collected showing this sign. Pleural effusion was diagnosed by ultrasound, comparison with previous or subsequent chest x-ray or computed tomography. Patients in the study group exhibited this sign in the absence of the classical signs of pleural effusion. In the control group, lack of visibility of blood vessels was observed in only 4.2% cases. Non-visualization of vascular markings below the hemidiaphragm should alert the interpreter to the possible presence of pleural effusion and a lateral or decubitus view or ultrasound examination may be carried out to rule out effusion
- …