Document image information systems are used more and more in government. Much redundant information in the document existed in such systems. That implies the research on the compression method based on the page-page statistical features is quite significant. Set Redundancy Compression (SRC) is such a technique that reduces the total entropy of the whole image set by utilizing the image page’s s...

The goal of comparative effectiveness research (CER) is to support evidence-based choices of treatments. Currently the majority of randomized trials for CER are designed to demonstrate superiority, which often require large sample size because the effect sizes between treatments in current use are typically small to moderate and there are usually more than two treatments to be compared. We prop...

Introduction Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) research is evolving. The quest for level-1 evidence through randomised prospective interventional trials, while useful to establish safety and efficacy, is changing to an era of big data observational studies. Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) utilises the observation of differences between treatments and centres without strict inclusion/exclusi...

This dissertation examines the connection between local government policy and changes in absolute rural poverty. Understanding this insufficiently studied relationship will help us to clarify theoretical questions on the role of the state, market and other factors in reducing poverty, as well as to identify effective policy responses to poverty. Absolute rural poverty varies throughout China, a...

BACKGROUND Randomized clinical trials, particularly for comparative effectiveness research (CER), are frequently criticized for being overly restrictive or untimely for health-care decision making. PURPOSE Our prospectively designed REsearch in ADAptive methods for Pragmatic Trials (RE-ADAPT) study is a 'proof of concept' to stimulate investment in Bayesian adaptive designs for future CER tri...

Comparative effectiveness research (CER) has received widespread attention and federal funding because of its potential to inform and improve treatment decisions. Since 2005, patients and their ophthalmologists have faced a dilemma in treating age-related macular degeneration (AMD)--the leading cause of blindness in the United States. Two closely related drugs have produced dramatic improvement...

Given that the volumes of organizational data resources are rapidly increasing, achieving and sustaining high data quality are becoming much more challenging tasks. In the face of this growing challenge, this study posits the need to introduce a robust economic thinking into the process of improving and maintaining data quality. Economic thinking requires investigating and assessing the busines...

This paper presents a comparative analysis of group interaction around two display types, shared and individual, using a ‘new media’ arts application as a way to explore the physical technology setup for an intensive care unit in a hospital. We propose this method for laboratory settings when the research questions derive from socially complex environments, but realworld interventions are not p...

Two key challenges related to conducting comparative effectiveness research are the lack of available data and the lack of rigorous techniques for efficiently and quickly testing the effectiveness of the many possible ways of implementing components of care. The confluence of two things offers the promise of overcoming these challenges: (1) the increased adoption of electronic health records (E...