The purpose of this study was to analyze the effects of a competitive swim season on the strength, balance, and endurance of shoulder rotator cuff muscles in young swimmers. A repeated measures design was used with 3 measurements performed during the swim season. A swimmers group (n = 20) of young men with no dry land training and a sedentary group (n = 16) of male students with the same charac...

BACKGROUND The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) proposes three main health outcomes, Impairment (I), Activity Limitation (A) and Participation Restriction (P), but good measures of these constructs are needed The aim of this study was to use both Classical Test Theory (CTT) and Item Response Theory (IRT) methods to carry out an item analysis to improve me...

In a survey of resistance to amoxicillin among clinical isolates of Proteus mirabilis, 10 TEM-type beta-lactamases were characterized: (i) the well-known penicillinases TEM-1 and TEM-2, the extended-spectrum beta-lactamases (ESBLs) TEM-3 and TEM-24, and the inhibitor-resistant TEM (IRT) TEM-44 and (ii) five novel enzymes, a penicillinase TEM-57 similar to TEM-1, an ESBL TEM-66 similar to TEM-3,...

BACKGROUND Early detection of cystic fibrosis (CF) by newborn screening (NBS) reduces the rate of avoidable complications. NBS protocols vary by jurisdiction and the cost effectiveness of these different protocols is debated. OBJECTIVE To compare the cost effectiveness of various CF NBS options. METHODS A Markov model was built to simulate the cost effectiveness of various CF-NBS options fo...

In this note we describe several of the IRT modeling features implemented in Mplus, namely the the item characteristic curves, the item information curves, the total information curve, item difficulty parameter and item discrimination parameter. Different estimators and parameterizations are considered. We also provide details on the Mplus implementation of the Partial Credit Model (PCM), the 3...

Screening for cystic fibrosis (CF) was recently added to the neonatal screening programme in the Netherlands. Four patients with renal failure whose heel prick tests were positive for CF as defined by raised levels of immunoreactive trypsinogen (IRT) and pancreatitis-associated protein (PAP) are described. Both cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) DNA analysis and sweat te...

Abstract The paper emphasizes an effective quantification of hidden damage in composite structures using ultrasonic guided wave (GW) propagation-based structural health monitoring (SHM) and artificial neural network (ANN) based active infrared thermography (IRT) analysis. In recent years, there has been increased interest a global-local approach for localization purposes. global is mainly used ...

This note provides a direct, elementary proof of the fundamental result on monotone likelihood ratio of the total score variable in unidimensional item response theory (IRT). This result is very important for practical measurement in IRT, because it justifies the use of the total score variable to order participants on the latent trait. The proof relies on a basic inequality for elementary symm...