BACKGROUND Infant immunisation is an effective public health intervention to reduce the morbidity and mortality of vaccine preventable diseases. However, some developing countries fail to achieve desirable vaccination coverage; Afghanistan is one such country. The present study was performed to evaluate the progress and variation in infant immunisation coverage by district and region in Afghani...

OBJECTIVE To generate and evaluate an indicator of the health system's performance in the area of maternal and reproductive health in Colombia. MATERIALS AND METHODS An indicator was constructed based on variables related to the coverage and utilization of healthcare services for pregnant and reproductive-age women. A factor analysis was performed using a polychoric correlation matrix and the...

Adoption of personalized medicine in practice has been slow, in part due to the lack of evidence of clinical benefit provided by these technologies. Coverage by insurers is a critical step in achieving widespread adoption of personalized medicine. Insurers consider a variety of factors when formulating medical coverage policies for personalized medicine, including the overall strength of eviden...

INTRODUCTION Shingles (herpes zoster) causes substantial morbidity, especially among older adults. The shingles vaccine has been recommended for people aged ≥60 years since 2006. This study assessed recent shingles vaccination at national and state levels among adults aged ≥60 years. METHODS The 2014 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System data were analyzed in 2015 to assess shingles vacc...

Area coverage is an important task for mobile robots, mainly due to its applicability in many domains, such as search and rescue. In this paper we study the problem of multi-robot coverage, in which the robots must obey a strong communication restriction: they should maintain connectivity between teammates throughout the coverage. We formally describe the Multi-Robot Connected Tree Coverage pro...

The role of growth factors in pregnancy is a rapidly expanding subject. With the advent of molecular biological techniques more and more detailed information is available to the researcher. This review does not attempt to be exhaustive in its coverage of growth factors in pregnancy, rather it tries to give a brief taste of the possible roles that they may play in pregnancy by considering three ...

An improved approach for computing the confidence regions for the optimal factor settings obtained from optimizing a general response surface model is presented. The approach has a better computational efficiency and improved accuracy compared to existing methodology. A three-factor mixture experiment was used for the performance comparison. The coverage rate properties of the resulting confide...

introduction: this in vitro study evaluated the influence of composite thickness (with or without fiber reinforcement) on fracture resistance of direct restorations in endodontically treated teeth. methods and materials: fifty-six intact human premolars were chosen and randomly divided into four groups ( n =14). after preparation of a mesio-occluso-distal (mod) cavities and cusp reduction, the ...

Assessing the quality of service of a computer system is a difficult task. A lot of work has been conducted on evaluating quality of service attributes like performance, robustness, and dependability. Two approaches used for evaluating performance and robustness are modeling and benchmarking. For evaluating dependability, modeling can be used either alone or combined with fault injection [Sie92...

Epitaxial lateral overgrowth in tandem with the first-principles calculation was employed to investigate the determining factor of a preferred orientation of GaN on SiO2-patterned m-plane sapphire substrates. We found that the (1100)-orientation is favored over the (1103)-orientation in the region with a small filling factor of SiO2, while the latter orientation becomes preferred in the region ...