Digital photographs are often used in treatment monitoring for home care of less advanced pressure ulcers. We investigated assessment agreement when stage III and IV pressure ulcers in individuals with spinal cord injury were evaluated in person and with the use of digital photographs. Two wound-care nurses assessed 31 wounds among 15 participants. One nurse assessed all wounds in person, while...

BACKGROUND This study was designed to measure inter-observer variation between thoracic radiologists in the diagnosis of diffuse parenchymal lung disease (DPLD) using high resolution computed tomography (HRCT) and to identify areas of difficulty where expertise, in the form of national panels, would be of particular value. METHODS HRCT images of 131 patients with DPLD (from a tertiary referra...

Digital photographs are often used in treatment monitoring for home care of less advanced pressure ulcers. We investigated assessment agreement when stage III and IV pressure ulcers in individuals with spinal cord injury were evaluated in person and with the use of digital photographs. Two wound-care nurses assessed 31 wounds among 15 participants. One nurse assessed all wounds in person, while...

Newborns with peripheral nerve lesions involving the upper extremity are difficult to evaluate. The reliability of the Active Movement Scale (AMS), a tool for assessing motor function in infants with obstetrical brachial plexus palsy (OBPP), was examined in 2 complementary studies. Part A was an interrater reliability study in which 63 infants younger than 1 year with OBPP were independently ev...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Vascular dementia (VaD) is thought to be the most common cause of dementia after Alzheimer's disease. The commonly used International Workshop of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) and the Association Internationale pour la Recherche et l'Enseignement en Neurosciences (AIREN) criteria for VaD necessitate evidence of vascular disease on CT ...

AIM The aim of the study was to evaluate the reliability of a panel of orthodontists for accepting new patient referrals based on clinical photographs. SAMPLE Eight orthodontists from Greater Manchester, Lancashire, Chester, and Derbyshire observed clinical photographs of 40 consecutive new patients attending the orthodontic department, Hope Hospital, Salford. METHOD They recorded whether o...

BACKGROUND Billing data, such as Medicare claims, are a potential data source for evaluative studies of new digital mammography technologies, such as digital mammography and computer-aided detection (CAD). OBJECTIVE To assess the internal validity of procedure codes on Medicare claims for screening mammography interpreted with either digital mammography or CAD. STUDY DESIGN We assessed agre...

INTRODUCTION It has become common to use scales to measure the degree of involvement of facial paralysis in phonoaudiological clinics. OBJECTIVE To analyze the inter- and intra-rater agreement of the scales of degree of facial paralysis and to elicit point of view of the appraisers regarding their use. METHODS Cross-sectional observational clinical study of the Chevalier and House & Brackma...

OBJECTIVES To study the determinants of health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in Irish patients with diabetes using the Centres for Disease Controls' (CDC's) 'Unhealthy Days' summary measure and to assesses the agreement between this generic HRQoL measure and the disease-specific Audit of Diabetes Dependant Quality of Life (ADDQoL) measure. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Data were analysed from...

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to compare the agreement between spectral domain optical coherence tomography (SD OCT) and time domain stratus OCT (TD OCT) in evaluating macular morphology alterations in wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD). METHODS This retrospective study was performed on 77 eyes of 77 patients with primary or recurring subfoveal choroidal neovascularization seco...