Sifting Through the Embers

Triaging suicidal patients: sifting through the evidence.

The triaging of individuals who present to general hospital emergency departments with suicidal thoughts and behaviours is especially challenging and fraught with uncertainty. Although the suicide literature is vast, and risk factor research has a long history, there is a dearth of articles that address the "point of care" factors that need to be considered in triaging a suicidal patient. In or...

Sifting through the first evidence for inflation

Treating Pain in an Established Patient: Sifting Through the Guidelines.

The CDC Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain, published last March, provided major steps toward bringing the medical community together to address the opioid epidemic in the U.S. However, the Guideline focuses primarily on treatment of new inductions into opioid therapy for pain. Physicians may have difficulty figuring out how to apply the CDC's recommendations to patients who are...

Sifting through Images with Multinomial Relevance Feedback

This paper presents the theory, design principles, implementation and performance results of a content-based image retrieval system based on multinomial relevance feedback. The system relies on an interactive search paradigm in which at each round a user is presented with a set of k images and is required to select one that is closest to their target. Performance is measured by the number of ro...

Re: Colorectal cancer screening: sifting through the evidence.

In his editorial, Dr. Levin (1) states that “the report by Mandel et al. substantiates the important and clear finding that screening of men and women more than 50 years of age for colorectal cancer can save lives.” However, the article by Mandel et al. (2) clearly demonstrates that overall mortality was unaffected by screening. The cumulative allcause mortality in the annually screened group w...