BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE After the 2005 National Coverage Determination to reimburse carotid artery stenting (CAS) for Medicare beneficiaries, the number of CAS procedures increased and carotid endarterectomy (CEA) decreased. We evaluated trends in surgeons' past-year CEA case-volume and 30-day mortality after CEA, and their association before and after the National Coverage Determination. METH...

The gold standard endpoint in trials of locoregionally advanced nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is overall survival (OS). Using data from a phase III randomized trial, we evaluated whether progression-free survival (PFS), failure-free survival (FFS), distant failure-free survival (D-FFS) or locoregional failure-free survival (LR-FFS) could be reliable surrogate endpoints for OS. Between July 200...

Let X be a definable C manifold, Y1, Y2 definably compact definable C r submanifolds of X such that dimY1 + dimY2 < dimX and Y1 has a trivial normal bundle. We prove that there exists a definable isotopy {hp}p∈J such that h0 = idX and h1(Y1) ∩ Y2 = ∅. 2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. 14P10, 14P20, 58A05, 03C64.

Project-based learning is an essential part of a software engineer's education. The learning achieved through projects can be improved through structured interaction between more experienced students and those students encountering their rst software engineering project. In this paper, we report on our experience over three years with trials of several forms of interaction between undergraduate...

Future system development and management efforts must strive to institutionalize these gains and provide ongoing, incremental improvement in these areas. With the growth of e-commerce and further socioeconomic reliance on IT, the organizations that have achieved these gains will be well positioned to outdistance those who were less aggressive. Figure 1 depicts the silver linings and competitive...

BACKGROUND The ability of specific behaviour-change interventions to reduce HIV infection in young people remains questionable. Since January 1999, an adolescent sexual and reproductive health (SRH) intervention has been implemented in ten randomly chosen intervention communities in rural Tanzania, within a community randomised trial (see below; NCT00248469). The intervention consisted of teach...

BACKGROUND Following the release of the 2002 report of the Women's Health Initiative (WHI) trial of estrogen plus progestin, the use of menopausal hormone therapy in the United States decreased substantially. Subsequently, the incidence of breast cancer also dropped, suggesting a cause-and-effect relation between hormone treatment and breast cancer. However, the cause of this decrease remains c...

This paper presents a novel method for decomposing and localizing unaveraged single-trial magnetoencephalographic data based on the independent component analysis (ICA) approach associated with preand post-processing techniques. In the pre-processing stage, recorded single-trial raw data are 6rst decomposed into uncorrelated signals with the reduction of high-power additive noise. In the stage ...

BACKGROUND Studies have established that most regular adult smokers become addicted in their adolescent years. We investigated the incidence of and risk factors associated with initial experimental smoking among a group of school children who were followed for 8 years. METHODS We used cohort data collected as part of the Child and Adolescent Behaviors in Long-term Evolution (CABLE) study, whi...

We discuss the potential for using microfabrication techniques for laser-driven accelerator construction. We introduce microfabrication processes in general, and then describe our investigation of a particular trial process. We conclude by considering the issues microfabrication raises for possible future structures. Submitted to Tenth Advanced Accelerator Concepts Workshop (AAC 2002), June 23–...