This study evaluated the responsiveness of the Canadian Occupational Performance Measure (COPM), an individualized, client-centered outcome measure for the identification and evaluation of self-perceived occupational performance problems. We recruited 152 consecutive patients with various diagnoses, admitted to the outpatient clinic of two occupational therapy departments, to complete a COPM in...

BACKGROUND Indole pyruvic acid (IPA) is a versatile platform intermediate and building block for a number of high-value products in the pharmaceutical and food industries. It also has a wide range of applications, such as drugs for the nervous system, cosmetics, and luminophores. Chemical synthesis of IPA is a complicated and costly process. Moreover, through the biosynthesis route employing L-...

The optimization of etchant parameters in wet etching plays an important role in the fabrication of semiconductor devices. Wet etching of tetramethylammonium hydroxide (TMAH)/isopropyl alcohol (IPA) on silicon nanowires fabricated by AFM lithography is studied herein. TMAH (25 wt %) with different IPA concentrations (0, 10, 20, and 30 vol %) and etching time durations (30, 40, and 50 s) were in...

OBJECTIVE Chest radiographs (CXR) are an important diagnostic tool for the detection of invasive pulmonary aspergillosis (IPA) in critically ill patients, but their diagnostic value is limited by a poor sensitivity. By using advanced image processing, the aim of this study was to increase the value of chest radiographs in the diagnostic work up of neutropenic patients who are suspected of IPA. ...

Diagnosis of invasive fungal infection (IFI) remains a challenge. A retrospective study was performed on 279 patients at three French university hospitals to evaluate the performance of the (133)-D-glucan assay (BG assay; Fungitell; Associates of Cape Cod, Inc.) for the diagnosis of IFI. The results of one serum per subject were analyzed for 117 patients who had probable or proven IFI according...

Recently there has been a considerable interest in the application of Infinitesimal Perturbation Analysis (IPA) to continuous queues, where its sample derivatives (gradients) were shown to be unbiased for a large class of systems. This paper extends the investigation to a class of hybrid Petri nets, where the special algebraic structure of continuous transitions yields simple algorithms for the...

OBJECTIVE Galactomannan (GM) and (1, 3)-β-D-glucan (BG) are considered useful seromarkers for the diagnosis of invasive pulmonary aspergillosis (IPA) in patients with neutropenia. However, there is still limited data on these seromarkers for testing non-neutropenic patients who are at the risk of IPA. The aim of this study was to evaluate the value of these two serum antigen assays for the earl...