The goal of small area analysis is often to demonstrate that hospital admission rates or procedure rates vary greatly among regions, suggesting the occurrence of unnecessary admissions or procedures in some regions. Recent articles have shown that such variation may be largely due to chance, even if no underlying differences exist among the small areas; thus, it is important to test if the obse...

I will describe a few basic properties of the Euler characteristic and then I use them to prove special case of a cute formula due to Bernstein-Khovanskii-Koushnirenko. 1. Basic properties of the Euler characteristic The Euler characteristic is a function χ which associates to each reasonable topological space X an integer χ(X). For us a reasonable space would be a space which admits a finite s...

Using a deidentified retrospective dataset of three cohorts of matriculated dental students, we measured the degree to which selected student attributes, the Learning Type Measure, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and Dental Admission Test subtests scores predicted passage on the National Board Dental Examination (NBDE), Parts I and II. Gender, Myers-Briggs Type Indicators, and the Dental Admis...

BACKGROUND Inconsistent results have been reported on the effect of massage therapy on the blood cortisol levels. Also, no study is available about the effect of massage done by patient's companions on the level of blood cortisol in patients hospitalized at CCU. OBJECTIVE The present study aimed to evaluate the effect of whole body massage performed by patient's companion on the level of bloo...

We develop call admission policies for statistically multiplexing prerecorded sources over a bu erless transmission link. We suppose that (1) the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements allow for a small amount of packet loss and (2) the users are permitted to begin the sources at random times and to invoke VCR actions. We develop a stochastic model which captures the random phases of the sources...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to identify muscle atrophy in critically ill patients on ventilators. A comparison was made between limb circumferences and muscle areas on the day of admission to an intensive care unit (ICU) and on the 8th day after admission. METHODS The data were collected from 30 critically ill patients using ventilators at S hospital ICU in Seoul during the period f...

We investigated the ability of neural networks to diagnose acute myocardial infarction (AMI) from laboratory data only. Several networks were trained with different combinations of data obtained at admission and within the first 12 h and 24 h after admission. The data used included the electrocardiogram (ECG) and the concentrations in serum of potassium, creatine kinase B-subunit (CKB), and lac...

In February and March 1998 I conducted a survey about Papanicolaou smear screening at the Burnaby Correctional Centre for Women (BCCW). At the time of the nursing intake interview, the admitting nurse asked every inmate being admitted to participate. Inmates who agreed to participate completed an anonymous written survey. Of the 136 inmates asked to participate, 100 (74%) completed the survey. ...

OBJECTIVE To identify and classify risk factors for venous thromboembolism (VTE) in hospitalized patients, as well as to evaluate medical practices regarding prophylaxis for the disease. METHODS An observational cross-sectional study, carried out between January and March of 2006, involving inpatients at three hospitals in the city of Manaus, Brazil. Risk stratification for VTE was based on t...