Many complex systems produce outcomes having recurring, power law-like distributions over wide ranges. However, the form necessarily breaks down at extremes, whereas the Weibull distribution has been demonstrated over the full observed range. Here the Weibull distribution is derived as the asymptotic distribution of generalized first-order kinetic processes, with convergence driven by autocorre...

Although not yet employed in routine clinical practice, severity of illness scoring has become an essential tool for health services research involving ill newborns(1,2), children(3), critically ill adults(4,5), and now even adults admitted to general medicalsurgical wards(6). One way to conceptualize these scores is that they provide us with a method to learn, within a short time, from the com...

The cellular processes that unfold in critical illness involve a variety of circulating substances, that may provide clinically relevant insight into the severity and outcome. Among hormonal markers, cortisol, several thyroid-related substances, as well as natriuretic peptides are discussed in this review. Glucose and lipids constitute metabolic markers, the identification and treatment of the ...

Introduction: In recent years, the prevalence of attacks perpetrated by humans against other humans has increased worldwide. The injuries suffered by attack victims are severe and multi-organ. Iran’s neighboring countries have been the scenes of attacks in the recent past. This study assessed the type and severity of injuries sustained by victims transferred to Iran during the ...

As more and more people are living with chronic diseases, there is a greater need for patients to have access to accurate and reliable information about health in general and their own health care in particular. In this study we explored how patients suffering from chronic heart insufficiency who needed post-hospital home nursing care assessed their need for health information and their use of ...

OBJECTIVE Adult intensive care unit prognostic models have been used for predicting patient outcome for three decades. The goal of this review is to describe the different versions of the main adult intensive care unit prognostic models and discuss their potential roles. DATA SOURCE PubMed search and review of the relevant medical literature. SUMMARY The main prognostic models for assessing...

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) consist of sparse, noisy, incomplete, heterogeneous and unevenly sampled clinical data of patients. They include physiological signals, lab test results, procedural events, clinical notes. Such data can be treated as a temporal stream of events of varied types occurring at irregularly spaced time points. We focus on modeling the temporal dependencies that arise ...

Pathophysiology of aggravation and death due to heat illness includes high fever, circulatory failure and systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS), as well as disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC) and multiple organ failure. DIC and multiple organ failure are the important determinants of severity and mortality of heat