PURPOSE OF REVIEW Compared with the conventional forms of partial support, neurally adjusted ventilatory assist was repeatedly shown to improve patient-ventilator synchrony and reduce the risk of overassistance, while guaranteeing adequate inspiratory effort and gas exchange. A few animal studies also suggested the potential of neurally adjusted ventilatory assist in averting the risk of ventil...

objectives: one of the problems in the process of assessment and evaluation, especially of clinical training in rehabilitation disciplines, is the lack of an instrument with objective criteria for evaluation. considering the effects of appropriate evaluation on quality assurance of clinical training, the aim of the present study was to design a valid and reliable tool for general evaluation of ...

BACKGROUND Improving the performance of community health workers (CHWs) is a global issue. The relationship between CHWs and their community may impact their performance. In Lao People's Democratic Republic (Lao PDR), CHW are called village health volunteers (VHV). Lao PDR has a problem with VHV inactivity, especially in rural areas. This study focused on which aspects of social capital are rel...

Suppose we want to investigate to what extent some factor influences survival, as an example we might compare the experience of diabetic patients who are using metformin versus those on injected insulin as their primary treatment modality. There is some evidence that metformin has a positive influence, particularly in cancers, but the ascertainment is confounded by the fact that it is a first l...

We extend the concept of Wigner-Yanase-Dyson skew information to something we call "metric adjusted skew information" (of a state with respect to a conserved observable). This "skew information" is intended to be a non-negative quantity bounded by the variance (of an observable in a state) that vanishes for observables commuting with the state. We show that the skew information is a convex func...

We propose modifications of the Viterbi Training (VT) algorithm to estimate emission parameters in Hidden Markov Models (HMM) which are widely used in speech recognition, natural language modeling, image analysis, and bioinformatics. Our goal is to alleviate the inconsistency of VT while controlling the amount of extra computations. Specifically, we modify VT to enable it asymptotically to fix ...

Naive Bayesian classiiers utilise a simple mathematical model for induction. While it is known that the assumptions on which this model is based are frequently violated, the predictive accuracy obtained in discriminate classiication tasks is surprisingly competitive in comparison to more complex induction techniques. Adjusted probability naive Bayesian induction adds a simple extension to the n...

In 1991, the National Task Force on Health Information recommended that in order to assess the health of Canadians, the health information system should include an aggregate index of population health. This article presents such an index--Health-Adjusted Life Expectancy (HALE)--as one possibility in a range of indicators. In contrast to conventional life expectancy, which considers all years as...

It is widely recognized that the economics of distant-future events, like climate change, is critically dependent upon the choice of a discount rate. Unfortunately, it is unclear how to discount distant-future events when the future discount rate itself is unknown. In previous work, an analytically-tractable approach called ‘‘gamma discounting’’ was proposed, which gave a declining discount rat...