BACKGROUND Mechanical ventilation is one of the most important therapeutic interventions in neonatal and pediatric ICUs. Telemedicine has been shown to reliably extend pediatric intensivist expertise to facilities where expertise is limited. If reliable, telemedicine may extend the reach of pediatric respiratory therapists (RTs) to facilities where expertise does not exist or free up existing R...

Introduction The Ohkuma questionnaire is a validated screening tool originally used to detect dysphagia among patients hospitalized in Japanese nursing facilities. Objective The purpose of this study is to evaluate the reliability and validity of the adapted Greek version of the Ohkuma questionnaire. Methods Following the steps for cross-cultural adaptation, we delivered the validated Ohkuma qu...

OBJECTIVE. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the ability of two commercial strip tests and laboratory titration to detect saliva buffer capacity. MATERIALS AND METHODS. Sixty-four patients were examined. Stimulated saliva was collected and buffer capacity was determined with two different chair-side strip tests in addition to immediate transportation to the laboratory to check the buffer...

The in-plane resistivity rho and thermal conductivity kappa of single crystal Na0.7CoO2 were measured down to 40 mK. Verification of the Wiedemann-Franz law, kappa/T=L(0)/rho as T-->0, and observation of a T2 dependence of rho at low temperature establish the existence of a well-defined Fermi-liquid state. The measured value of coefficient A reveals enormous electron-electron scattering, charac...

BACKGROUND Drusen are common features in the ageing macula associated with exudative Age-Related Macular Degeneration (ARMD). They are visible in retinal images and their quantitative analysis is important in the follow up of the ARMD. However, their evaluation is fastidious and difficult to reproduce when performed manually. METHODS This article proposes a methodology for Automatic Drusen De...

This article is a survey of methods for measuring agreement among corpus annotators. It exposes the mathematics and underlying assumptions of agreement coefficients, covering Krippendorff’s alpha as well as Scott’s pi and Cohen’s kappa; discusses the use of coefficients in several annotation tasks; and argues that weighted, alpha-like coefficients, traditionally less used than kappa-like measur...

OBJECTIVE to compare Interrater reliability concerning two eye assessment methods. METHOD quasi-experimental study conducted with 324 college students including eye self-examination and eye assessment performed by the researchers in a public university. Kappa coefficient was used to verify agreement. RESULTS reliability coefficients between Interraters ranged from 0.85 to 0.95, with statist...

In this paper we propose a methodology to determine the structure of the pseudo-stoichiometric coefficient matrix kappa in a macroscopic mass balance based model. The first step consists in estimating the minimal number of reactions that must be taken into account to represent the main mass transfer within the bioreactor. This provides the dimension of kappa. Then we discuss the identifiability...