between 1993-1996 seventy-three consecutive patients (33 m, 40 f, mean age 35.4) with newly diagnosed achalasia underwent one or more pneumatic dilatations with the rigiflex balloon using a protocol of graded dilatation with a fixed inflation pressure of 10 psi and constant duration of 30 seconds for all patients without using fluoroscopy. using vantrappen's classification for assessment o...

results the interobserver agreement for sonographic descriptors changed between fair and substantial. the highest agreement was detected for mass orientation (κ=0.66). the lowest agreement was found in the margin (κ=0.33). the interobserver agreement for bi-rads final category was found as fair (κ=0.35). the intraobserver agreement for sonographic descriptors changed between substantial and alm...

introduction: it is recommended that the physician apply at least a semi-quantitative segmental scoring system in myocardial perfusion spect.  we aimed to assess the agreement between automated semi-quantitative analysis using qps (quantitative perfusion spect) software and visual approach for calculation of summed stress  score (sss), summed rest score (srs) and summed difference score (sds). ...

BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVES Different algorithms have been developed to standardize the causality assessment of adverse drug reactions (ADR). Although most share common characteristics, the results of the causality assessment are variable depending on the algorithm used. Therefore, using 10 different algorithms, the study aimed to compare inter-rater and multi-rater agreement for ADR causality asse...

We study various classical secure computation problems in the context of fairness, and relate them with each other. We also systematically study fair sampling problems (i.e., inputless functionalities) and discover three levels of complexity for them. Our results include the following: – Fair exchange cannot be securely reduced to the problem of fair cointossing by an r-round protocol, except w...

An inter-rater agreement study is performed for readability assessment in Bengali. A 1-7 rating scale was used to indicate different levels of readability. We obtained moderate to fair agreement among seven independent annotators on 30 text passages written by four eminent Bengali authors. As a by product of our study, we obtained a readability-annotated ground truth dataset in Bengali.

Object: The gold standard for evaluating bone mineral density is dual energy x-ray absorptiometry (DEXA).  Prior studies have shown poor reliability using analog wrist X-rays in diagnosing osteoporosis. Our goal was to investigate if there was improved diagnostic value to visual assessment of digital hand X-rays in osteoporosis screening. We hypothesized that similar to analog counterparts, dig...