Existing prognostic methods were compared in their ability to predict mortality in intensive care unit (ICU) patients on dialysis for acute renal failure (ARF). The clinical goal of this study was to determine whether these models could identify a group of patients where dialysis would provide no benefit because of a near 100% certainty of death even with dialysis treatment. This retrospective ...

BACKGROUND Acute kidney injury (AKI) requiring renal replacement therapy (RRT) in critically ill patients results in a high hospital mortality. Outcome prediction in this selected high-risk collective is challenging due to the lack of appropriate biomarkers. The aim of this study was to identify outcome-specific biomarkers in this patient population. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Serum sampl...

Due to the growing need to timely process and derive valuable information and knowledge from data produced in the Semantic Web, RDF stream processing (RSP) has emerged as an important research domain. Of course, modern RSP have to address the volume and velocity characteristics encountered in the Big Data era. This comes at the price of designing high throughput, low latency, fault tolerant, hi...

Apache is a large-scale industrial multi-process and multi-threaded application, which uses lock-based synchronization. We report on our experience in modifying Apache to employ transactional memory instead of locks, a process we refer to as transactification; we are not aware of any previous efforts to transactify legacy software of such a large scale. Along the way, we learned some valuable l...

OBJECTIVES The intensive care environment generates a wealth of critical care data suited to developing a well-calibrated prediction tool. This study was done to develop an intensive care unit (ICU) mortality prediction model built on University of Kentucky Hospital (UKH)'s data and to assess whether the performance of various data mining techniques, such as the artificial neural network (ANN),...

The prevalence of community-acquired infection caused by methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in Taiwan has increased markedly in the past decade. This study investigated the risk factors for acquisition, the clinical features, and the outcome of community-acquired MRSA bacteremia. Data were collected from records of 86 patients with community-acquired S. aureus bacteremia admitte...

The aim of this study was to evaluate the usefulness of using Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation (APACHE) II score and Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA) score as the predictors of length of stay (LOS) in various surgical intensive care units (ICUs) and to test the hypothesis that the significance of scoring for predicting LOS is greater in specialized surgical ICUs. We scor...

INTRODUCTION The Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation (APACHE) II score is widely used in the intensive care unit (ICU) as a scoring system for research and clinical audit purposes. Physiological data for calculation of the APACHE II score are derived from the worst values in the first 24 hours after admission to the ICU. The collection of physiological data on admission only is proba...