Inequality trends of health workforce in different stages of medical system reform (1985-2011) in China

Introduction The aim of this study was to identify whether policies in different stages of medical system reform had been effective in decreasing inequalities and increasing the density of health workers in rural areas in China between 1985 and 2011. Methods With data from China Health Statistics Yearbooks from 2004 to 2012, we measured the Gini coefficient and the Theil L index across the urban and rural areas from 1985 to 2011 to investigate changes in inequalities in the distributions of health workers, doctors, and nurses by states, regions, and urban-rural stratum and account for the sources of inequalities. Results We found that the overall inequalities in the distribution of health workers decreased to the lowest in 2000, then increased gently until 2011. Nurses were the most unequally distributed between urban-rural districts among health workers. Most of the overall inequalities in the distribution of health workers across regions were due to inequalities within the rural-urban stratum. Discussions and conclusions Different policies and interventions in different stages would result in important changes in inequality in the distribution of the health workforce. It was also influenced by other system reforms, like the urbanization, education, and employment reforms in China. The results are useful for the Chinese government to decide how to narrow the gap of the health workforce and meet its citizens’ health needs to the maximum extent

Methological quality of systematic reviews and meta-analyses on acupuncture for stroke: a review of review

Objective: To assess the methodological quality of systematic reviews and meta-analyses regarding acupuncture intervention for stroke and the primary studies within them. Methods: Two researchers searched PubMed, Cumulative index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, Embase, ISI Web of Knowledge, Cochrane, Allied and Complementary Medicine, Ovid Medline, Chinese Biomedical Literature Database, China National Knowledge Infrastructure, Wanfang and Traditional Chinese Medical Database to identify systematic reviews and meta-analyses about acupuncture for stroke published from the inception to December 2016. Review characteristics and the criteria for assessing the primary studies within reviews were extracted. The methodological quality of the reviews was assessed using adapted Oxman and Guyatt Scale. The methodological quality of primary studies was also assessed. Results: Thirty-two eligible reviews were identified, 15 in English and 17 in Chinese. The English reviews were scored higher than the Chinese reviews (P=0.025), especially in criteria for avoiding bias and the scope of search. All reviews used the quality criteria to evaluate the methodological quality of primary studies, but some criteria were not comprehensive. The primary studies, in particular the Chinese reviews, had problems with randomization, allocation concealment, blinding, dropouts and withdrawals, intent-to-treat analysis and adverse events. Conclusions: Important methodological flaws were found in Chinese systematic reviews and primary studies. It was necessary to improve the methodological quality and reporting quality of both the systematic reviews published in China and primary studies on acupuncture for stroke

Holistic Video Stitching for Street Panorama

Coordinated Science Laboratory was formerly known as Control Systems LaboratoryIn this paper, we address how to automatically generate a panorama for a street view from a long video sequence. We model the panorama as a low-rank matrix and formulate the problem as one of robust recovery of the low-rank matrix from highly incomplete, corrupted, deformed measurements (the video frames). We leverage powerful high-dimensional convex optimization tools from compressive sensing of sparse signals and low-rank matrices to solve this problem. In particular, we show how the new method can effectively remove severe occlusions or corruptions (caused by trees, cars, or reflections, etc.), and obtain clean, intrinsic street panoramas that are consistent with all frames. We also show how our method can automatically and robustly establish pixel-wise accurate registration among all the video frames. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by conducting extensive experimental comparison with other popular video stitching methods such as AutoStitch and Adobe Photoshop.National Science Foundation / NSF IIS 11-1601