The anaerobic digestion of biodegradable substrates and waste is a well-known process that can be used worldwide to produce renewable fuel called biogas. At the time writing, most widespread way using biogas its direct usage in combined heat power internal combustion engines (CHP-ICEs) generate electricity heat. However, generates emissions, which turn have an impact on human health. Therefore,...

Introduction Sandwich immunoassays offer advantages in the clinical laboratory but can yield erroneously low results due to hook (prozone) effect, especially with analytes whose concentrations span several orders of magnitude such as ferritin. This study investigated a new approach to reduce the likelihood of hook effect in ferritin immunoassays by performing upfront, five-fold dilutions of all...

background: major thalassemia is an autosomal recessive disease with complications, mortality and serious pathology. today, the life expectancy of patients with major thalassemia has increased along with therapeutic advances. therefore, they need lifelong care, and caring for them would incur many costs. being aware of the patients’ costs can be effective for controlling and managing the costs ...

Young vertebrates are dependent primarily on innate immunity and maternally derived antibodies for immune defense. This reliance on innate immunity and the associated inflammatory response often leads to reduced growth rates after antigenic challenge. However, if offspring have maternal antibodies that recognize an antigen, these antibodies should block stimulation of the inflammatory response ...

Disease management (DM) promises to achieve cost savings by improving the quality of care for chronic diseases. During the past decade the Permanente Medical Group in Northern California has implemented extensive DM programs. Examining quality indicators, utilization, and costs for 1996-2002 for adults with four conditions, we find evidence of substantial quality improvement but not cost saving...

In 2011, Americans spent $45 billion out-of-pocket on retail prescription drugs (1). Some adults reduce prescription drug costs by skipping doses and delaying filling prescriptions (2). Some cost-reduction strategies used by adults have been associated with negative health outcomes. For example, adults who do not take prescription medication as prescribed have been shown to have poorer health s...

By means of two examples we show that non-singular costs can been reduced for adaptive controllers by overparameterising the estimators. The examples are for scalar and second order systems respectively. In the second example the tuning function design and the overparameterised adaptive backstepping design are compared. In both cases a system is constructed for which the overparameterised desig...

The authors report the results of a project to reemphasize high quality, hands-on laboratory courses in the engineering curriculum while reducing their costs through the application of web-based teaching tools. The project resulted in substantial gains in productivity of faculty and staff, increased utilization of laboratory space, cost reductions in equipment, and improved quality of learning ...

Correspondence to Dr Stefan Toggweiler; [email protected] During the past few years, transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) has become a mature procedure, results have become reproducible and safety has increased. Nevertheless, the overall cost for TAVI is still higher than the cost for surgical aortic valve replacement (SAVR), mainly due to the higher price of the valve. In thi...

The US public health insurance market is shifting toward reimbursement models that transfer risk away from the government and toward health insurers and healthcare providers. Instead of paying fee-for-service (FFS) to healthcare providers, Medicaid and Medicare now outsource healthcare delivery to managed care plans and the plans accept risk related to their enrollees’ healthcare costs. Previou...