OBJECTIVE Using three risk-adjustment methods we evaluated whether co-morbidity derived from electronic hospital patient data provided significant improvement on age adjustment when predicting major outcomes following an elective total joint replacement (TJR) due to osteoarthritis. METHODS Longitudinal data from 819 elderly men who had had a TJR were integrated with hospital morbidity data (H...

Objective To evaluate the prognostic value for predicting tumor recurrence of intratumoral metabolic heterogeneity and traditional quantitative metabolic parameters on pre-treatment F-18-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography/computed tomography (18F-FDG PET/CT) in patients with locally advanced cervical cancer treated with concurrent chemoradiotherapy (CCRT). Materials and Methods N...

the study addresses performance control matrix (pcm) to determine service quality items of priority for improvement. most businesses focus on customer satisfaction when undertaking surveys of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, while generally neglecting employee satisfaction. therefore, this study develops an integrated model to improve service quality in taiwanese finance industry employees. a ...

BACKGROUND The biomarker N-terminal pro-brain natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP) predicts outcome in patients with non-ST-elevation acute coronary syndromes (NSTE-ACS). Whether NT-proBNP has incremental prognostic value beyond established risk strategies is still questionable. PURPOSE To evaluate the predictive value of NT-proBNP for 30-day mortality over and beyond the Global Registry of Acute ...

This experiment was designed to determine whether Transcendental Meditation has an effect upon the auditory frequency and amplitude discrimination thresholds. These thresholds were measured for each subject, using the ' warble ' technique, before and after twenty minutes meditation, and before and after reading a bookfor twenty minutes (the control). A significantly greater improvement was foun...

In this paper, we propose an integrated segmentation and recognition method using cascade neural network. In the proposed method, a new type of cascade neural network is developed to train the spatial dependences in connected handwritten numerals. This cascade neural network was originally extended from the multilayer feedforward neural network to improve the discrimination and generalization p...

BACKGROUND The relationship between neutrophils and outcomes post-myocardial infarction (MI) is not completely characterized. We examined the associations of neutrophil count with mortality and post-MI heart failure (HF) and their incremental value for risk discrimination in the community. METHODS AND RESULTS MI was diagnosed with cardiac pain, biomarkers, and Minnesota coding of the ECG. Neu...