2,039 research outputs found
PSK4 COST-EFFECTIVENESS OF TOPICAL CALCIPOTRIOL/BETAMETHASONE DIPROPIONATE TWOCOMPOUND PRODUCT IN A SCOTTISH CARE MODEL
Aprovada pel gerent de l'Institut Municipal d'Hisenda el 01-07-200
How promising is phototherapy for cancer?
Oncological phototherapy, including current photodynamic therapy (PDT), developmental photoactivated chemotherapy (PACT) and photothermal therapy (PTT), shows promising photo-efficacy for superficial and internal tumours. The dual application of light and photochemotherapeutic agents allows accurate cancer targeting, low invasiveness and novel mechanisms of action. Current advances in new light sources and photoactive agents are encouraging for future development
Advance care planning in chronic kidney disease: A survey of current practice in Australia
© 2016 Asian Pacific Society of Nephrology Aim: Advance care planning (ACP) in nephrology is widely advocated but not always implemented. The aims of this study were to describe current ACP practice and identify barriers/facilitators and perceived need for health professional education and chronic kidney disease (CKD)-specific approaches. Methods: An anonymous cross-sectional survey was administered online. Nephrology health professionals in Australia and New Zealand were recruited via professional societies, email lists and nephrology conferences. Multiple regression explored the influence of respondents' attributes on extent of involvement in ACP and willingness to engage in future. Results: A total of 375 respondents included nephrologists (23%), nurses (65%), social workers (4%) and others (8%) with 54% indicated that ACP at their workplace was performed ad hoc and 61% poorly. Perceived barriers included patient/family discomfort (84%), difficulty engaging families (83%), lack of clinician expertise (83%) and time (82%), health professional discomfort (72%), cultural/language barriers (65%), lack of private space (61%) and lack of formal policy/procedures (60%). Respondents overwhelmingly endorsed the need for more dialysis-specific ACP programs (96%) and education (95%). Whilst 85% thought ACP would be optimally performed by specially trained staff, comments emphasized that all clinicians should have a working proficiency. Respondents who were more willing to engage in future ACP tended to be non-physicians (odds ratio (OR) 4.96, 95% confidence intervals (CI) 1.74â14.07) and reported a greater need for CKD-specific ACP materials (OR 10.88, 95% CI 2.38â49.79). Conclusion: Advance care planning in nephrology needs support through education and CKD-specific resources. Endorsement by nephrologists is important. A multidisciplinary approach with a gradient of ACP expertise is also recommended
Ultrafast entangling gates between nuclear spins using photo-excited triplet states
The representation of information within the spins of electrons and nuclei
has been powerful in the ongoing development of quantum computers. Although
nuclear spins are advantageous as quantum bits (qubits) due to their long
coherence lifetimes (exceeding seconds), they exhibit very slow spin
interactions and have weak polarisation. A coupled electron spin can be used to
polarise the nuclear spin and create fast single-qubit gates, however, the
permanent presence of electron spins is a source of nuclear decoherence. Here
we show how a transient electron spin, arising from the optically excited
triplet state of C60, can be used to hyperpolarise, manipulate and measure two
nearby nuclear spins. Implementing a scheme which uses the spinor nature of the
electron, we performed an entangling gate in hundreds of nanoseconds: five
orders of magnitude faster than the liquid-state J coupling. This approach can
be widely applied to systems comprising an electron spin coupled to multiple
nuclear spins, such as NV centres, while the successful use of a transient
electron spin motivates the design of new molecules able to exploit
photo-excited triplet states.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure
Skin Lesion Analyser: An Efficient Seven-Way Multi-Class Skin Cancer Classification Using MobileNet
Skin cancer, a major form of cancer, is a critical public health problem with
123,000 newly diagnosed melanoma cases and between 2 and 3 million non-melanoma
cases worldwide each year. The leading cause of skin cancer is high exposure of
skin cells to UV radiation, which can damage the DNA inside skin cells leading
to uncontrolled growth of skin cells. Skin cancer is primarily diagnosed
visually employing clinical screening, a biopsy, dermoscopic analysis, and
histopathological examination. It has been demonstrated that the dermoscopic
analysis in the hands of inexperienced dermatologists may cause a reduction in
diagnostic accuracy. Early detection and screening of skin cancer have the
potential to reduce mortality and morbidity. Previous studies have shown Deep
Learning ability to perform better than human experts in several visual
recognition tasks. In this paper, we propose an efficient seven-way automated
multi-class skin cancer classification system having performance comparable
with expert dermatologists. We used a pretrained MobileNet model to train over
HAM10000 dataset using transfer learning. The model classifies skin lesion
image with a categorical accuracy of 83.1 percent, top2 accuracy of 91.36
percent and top3 accuracy of 95.34 percent. The weighted average of precision,
recall, and f1-score were found to be 0.89, 0.83, and 0.83 respectively. The
model has been deployed as a web application for public use at
(https://saketchaturvedi.github.io). This fast, expansible method holds the
potential for substantial clinical impact, including broadening the scope of
primary care practice and augmenting clinical decision-making for dermatology
specialists.Comment: This is a pre-copyedited version of a contribution published in
Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, Hassanien A., Bhatnagar R.,
Darwish A. (eds) published by Chaturvedi S.S., Gupta K., Prasad P.S. The
definitive authentication version is available online via
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3383-9_1
Participatory analysis for adaptation to climate change in Mediterranean agricultural systems: possible choices in process design (versĂŁo Pre Print)
There is an increasing call for local measures to adapt to climate change, based on foresight analyses in collaboration with actors. However, such analyses involve many challenges, particularly because the actors concerned may not consider climate change to be an urgent concern. This paper examines the methodological choices made by three research teams in the design and implementation of participatory foresight analyses to explore agricultural and water management options for adaptation to climate change. Case studies were conducted in coastal areas of France, Morocco, and Portugal where the groundwater is intensively used for irrigation, the aquifers are at risk or are currently overexploited, and a serious agricultural crisis is underway. When designing the participatory processes, the researchers had to address four main issues: whether to avoid or prepare dialogue between actors whose relations may be limited or tense; how to select participants and get them involved; how to facilitate discussion of issues that the actors may not initially consider to be of great concern; and finally, how to design and use scenarios. In each case, most of the invited actors responded and met to discuss and evaluate a series of scenarios. Strategies were discussed at different levels, from farming practices to aquifer management. It was shown that such participatory analyses can be implemented in situations which may initially appear to be unfavourable. This was made possible by the flexibility in the methodological choices, in particular the possibility of framing the climate change issue in a broader agenda for discussion with the actors
A 10-Year Retrospective Analysis of Methyl Aminolevulinate Photodynamic Therapy Consultation at the Hospital de Braga
Photodynamic therapy (PDT) is a well-established treatment for actinic keratosis (AK), basal cell carcinoma (BCC), and Bowen's disease (BD). The object of this study was to describe the results of a retrospective analysis of patients treated with methyl aminolevulinate PDT (MAL-PDT) with red light, over the past decade at the Hospital de Braga (Braga, Portugal)
Improving response rates using a monetary incentive for patient completion of questionnaires: an observational study
Background: Poor response rates to postal questionnaires can introduce bias and reduce the statistical power of a study. To improve response rates in our trial in primary care we tested the effect of introducing an unconditional direct payment of 5 pound for the completion of postal questionnaires. Methods: We recruited patients in general practice with knee problems from sites across the United Kingdom. An evidence-based strategy was used to follow-up patients at twelve months with postal questionnaires. This included an unconditional direct payment of 5 pound to patients for the completion and return of questionnaires. The first 105 patients did not receive the 5 pound incentive, but the subsequent 442 patients did. We used logistic regression to analyse the effect of introducing a monetary incentive to increase the response to postal questionnaires. Results: The response rate following reminders for the historical controls was 78.1% ( 82 of 105) compared with 88.0% ( 389 of 442) for those patients who received the 5 pound payment (diff = 9.9%, 95% CI 2.3% to 19.1%). Direct payments significantly increased the odds of response ( adjusted odds ratio = 2.2, 95% CI 1.2 to 4.0, P = 0.009) with only 12 of 442 patients declining the payment. The incentive did not save costs to the trial - the extra cost per additional respondent was almost 50 pound. Conclusion: The direct payment of 5 pound significantly increased the completion of postal questionnaires at negligible increase in cost for an adequately powered study
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