PURPOSE In patients with multiple sclerosis (MS), Double Inversion Recovery (DIR) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can be used to identify cortical lesions (CL). We sought to evaluate the reliability of CL detection on DIR longitudinally at multiple subsequent time-points applying the MAGNIMs scoring criteria for CLs. METHODS 26 MS patients received a 3T-MRI (Siemens, Skyra) with DIR at 12 ti...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE NIH Stroke Scale certification is required for participation in modern stroke clinical trials and as part of good clinical care in stroke centers. The existing training and certification videotapes, however, are more than 10 years old and do not contain an adequate balance of patient findings. METHODS After producing a new NIHSS training and demonstration DVD, we select...

In order to assess the reliability of a given characterization of a subject it is often necessary to obtain multiple readings, usually but not always from different individuals or raters. The degree of agreement among the various raters gives some indication as to the consistency of the values. If agreement is high, we feel more confident the ratings reflect the actual circumstance. If agreemen...

Cerebral microbleeds are associated with vascular disease and dementia. They can be detected on MRI and receive increasing attention. Visual rating is the current standard for microbleed detection, but is rater dependent, has limited reproducibility, modest sensitivity, and can be time-consuming. The goal of the current study is to present a tool for semi-automated detection of microbleeds that...

OBJECTIVES To evaluate rater agreement for a simple 2-category classification of subcapital hip fractures versus the 4-category Garden classification and to determine the effect of clinician experience on the level of agreement. SETTING Sunnybrook and Women's Health Sciences Centre, Toronto, a level 1 trauma centre. METHOD Eleven raters, with varying levels of clinical experience (3 fellows...

The study of TCM agreement in terms of a powerful statistical tool becomes critical in providing objective evaluations. Several previous studies have conducted on the issue of consistency of TCM, and the results have indicated that agreements are low. Traditional agreement measures only provide a single value which is not sufficient to justify if the agreement among several raters is strong or ...

PURPOSE To investigate the influence of speech sample of spontaneous conversation or sentences repetition on intra and inter-rater hypernasality reliability. METHODS One hundred and twenty audio recorded speech samples (60 containing spontaneous conversation and 60 containing repeated sentences) of individuals with repaired cleft palate±lip, both genders, aged between 6 and 52 years old (mean...

The present study tested whether empathic accuracy and physiological linkage during an emotion recognition task are facilitated by a cultural match between rater and target (cultural advantage model) or unaffected (cultural equivalence model). Participants were 161 college students of African American, Chinese American, European American, or Mexican American ethnicity. To assess empathic accura...