INTRODUCTION HIV care and treatment services are primarily delivered in vertical antiretroviral (ART) clinics in sub-Saharan Africa but there have been concerns over the impact on existing primary health care services. This paper presents results from a feasibility study of a fully integrated model of HIV and non-HIV outpatient services in two urban Lusaka clinics. METHODS INTEGRATION INVOLVE...

Maximum a posteriori (MAP) inference in Markov Random Fields (MRFs) is an NP-hard problem, and thus research has focussed on either finding efficiently solvable subclasses (e.g . trees), or approximate algorithms (e.g . Loopy Belief Propagation (BP) and Tree-reweighted (TRW) methods). This paper presents a unifying perspective of these approximate techniques called “Decomposition Methods”. Thes...

Assessment of decision-making capacity (DMC) can be difficult in acquired brain injury (ABI) particularly with the syndrome of organic personality disorder (OPD) (the "frontal lobe syndrome"). Clinical neuroscience may help but there are challenges translating its constructs to the decision-making abilities considered relevant by law and ethics. An in-depth interview study of DMC in OPD was und...

BACKGROUND Accurate patient identification and specimen labeling at the time of collection are crucial steps in the prevention of medical errors, thereby improving patient safety. METHODS All patient specimen identification errors that occurred in the outpatient department (OPD), emergency department (ED), and inpatient department (IPD) of a 3,800-bed academic medical center in Taiwan were do...

Background. The efficacy, safety, and cost benefit of olanzapine (OLN) when compared to aprepitant (APR) in the prevention of chemotherapy induced nausea and vomiting (CINV) in patients receiving highly emetogenic chemotherapy (HEC) were evaluated. Methods. A prospective pilot study was done in chemotherapy-naive patients receiving HEC to compare OLN versus APR along with palonosetron and dexam...

Micromachined picoliter vials in silicon dioxide with a typical depth of 6μm are filled with a liquid sample. Epi-illuminated microscopic imaging during evaporation of the liquid shows dynamic fringe patterns. These fringe patterns are caused by interference between the direct part and the reflected part of an incident plane wave (reflected from the bottom of the vial). The optical path differe...

The phase of monochromatic light directly relates to the optical path difference (OPD), but finding this connection for spectrally broadband is challenging. Due a missing concept compatibility between randomly fluctuating fields and OPD, demanding scanning only proven way highly accurate OPD measurement in white light. Here, we use self-coherence function (SCF) spatially incoherent reveal white...