Literature review and analysis of the development of health outcomes assessment instruments in Chinese medicine

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the development of health outcomes assessment instruments in Chinese medicine. METHODS: A comprehensive literature search for all published articles in China National Knowledge Infrastructure Database, Chongqing VIP Database and WANFANG Data was conducted. The studies that met the inclusion and exclusion criteria were used to extract information according to a predesigned assessment instrument. RESULTS: A total of 97 instruments for health outcome assessment in Chinese medicine were identified. Of these questionnaires, 7 were generic, 12 were condition-specific and 78 were disease-specific. All instruments were suitable for adults, children, and both men and women. These instruments aimed to evaluate the health-related quality of life, signs and symptoms as well as patient satisfaction and doctor-reported outcome. However, the descriptions were poorly constructed for some of the most basic parameters, such as the domains and items, administrative mode, response options, memory recall periods, burden evaluation, format, copyright, content validity, and other properties. CONCLUSION: The instrument development for health outcomes assessment in Chinese medicine is increasing rapidly; however, there are many limitations in current methodologies and standards, and further studies are needed. © 2013 Feng-bin Liu et al

Species composition, plant cover and diversity of recently reforested wild lands near Dabao Highway in Longitudinal Range-Gorge Region of Yunnan Province, China

Deforestation, over-cultivation and rural growth have severely damaged native vegetation of woodlands along roadsides in the Longitudinal Range-Gorge Region of Yunnan Province. This study wasconducted to evaluate the effect of different reforestation practices, which consisted of natural restoration or planting with tree seedlings that varied in species composition, coverage and diversity,on damaged roadside woodlands. Three randomly selected 10 m x 10 m plots in each reforestation practice were investigated. The results showed that the species composition, plant cover and speciesdiversity of the planted communities varied with reforestation strategies and time since planting. A higher number of species, proportion of native species and woody plants, canopy cover and speciesdiversity were found in naturally restored plots and in 3 - 4 year old plots that were planted with native plants. In the early stages of reforestation, herbs dominated the plant community in most plots, andwoody plants became more important with time after reforestation. Preliminary results suggest that plant height can be used an auxiliary indicator of plant cover to assess ecosystem function status ofthe restoration project. Also, evenness may be easier to restore than species richness. Natural restoration or reforestation with native dominant plants is a good management strategy for vegetationrestoration or improvement

Literature review and analysis of the application of health outcome assessment instruments in Chinese medicine

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the application of health assessment instruments in Chinese medicine. METHODS: According to a pre-defined search strategy, a comprehensive literature search for all articles published in China National Knowledge Infrastructure databases was conducted. The resulting articles that met the defined inclusion and exclusion criteria were used for analysis. RESULTS: A total of 97 instruments for health outcome assessment in Chinese medicine have been used in fundamental and theoretical research, and 14 of these were also used in 29 clinical trials that were randomized controlled trials, or descriptive or cross-sectional studies. In 2 152 Chinese medicine-based studies that used instruments in their methodology, more than 150 questionnaires were identified. Among the identified questionnaires, 51 were used in more than 10 articles (0.5%). Most of these instruments were developed in Western countries and few studies (4%) used the instrument as the primary evidence for their conclusions. CONCLUSION: Usage of instruments for health outcome assessment in Chinese medicine is increasing rapidly; however, current limitations include selection rationale, result interpretation and standardization, which must be addressed accordingly

Tag-Aware Recommender Systems: A State-of-the-art Survey

In the past decade, Social Tagging Systems have attracted increasing attention from both physical and computer science communities. Besides the underlying structure and dynamics of tagging systems, many efforts have been addressed to unify tagging information to reveal user behaviors and preferences, extract the latent semantic relations among items, make recommendations, and so on. Specifically, this article summarizes recent progress about tag-aware recommender systems, emphasizing on the contributions from three mainstream perspectives and approaches: network-based methods, tensor-based methods, and the topic-based methods. Finally, we outline some other tag-related works and future challenges of tag-aware recommendation algorithms.Comment: 19 pages, 3 figure

Guaranteed Cost Control Of A Markov Jump Linear Uncertain System Using A Time-Multiplied Cost Function

This paper addresses the guaranteed cost control problem of jump linear systems with norm-bounded uncertain parameters. A time-multiplied performance index is considered. The performance is calculated first and an LMI-based algorithm is developed to design a state feedback control law with constant gain matrices which robustly stabilizes the system in the mean-square quadratically stable sense

Guaranteed Cost Control Of A Markov Jump Linear Uncertain System Using A Time-Multiplied Cost Function

This paper addresses the guaranteed cost control problem of jump linear systems with norm-bounded uncertain parameters. A time-multiplied performance index is considered. The performance is calculated first and an LMI-based algorithm is developed to design a state feedback control law with constant gain matrices which robustly stabilizes the system in the mean-square quadratically stable sense

Guaranteed Cost Control Of A Markov Jump Linear Uncertain System UsingA Time-Multiplied Cost Function

This paper addresses the guaranteed cost control problem of jump linear systems with norm-bounded uncertain parameters. A time-multiplied performance index is considered. The performance is calculated first and an LMI-based algorithm is developed to design a state feedback control law with constant gain matrices which robustly stabilizes the system in the mean-square quadratically stable sense