OBJECTIVE Cleaning products may cause work-related asthma, but information regarding the specific exposures involved is scarce. We aimed to determine the associations between asthma and occupational exposure to cleaning agents in hospital workers. METHODS Analyses were conducted in 179 (136 women) hospital workers and a reference population of 545 subjects (18-79 years) from the French case-c...

BACKGROUND Retrospective exposure assessment in community-based studies is largely reliant on questionnaire information. Expert assessment is often used to assess lifetime occupational exposures, but these assessments generally lack transparency and are very time-consuming. We explored the agreement between a rule-based assessment approach and case-by-case expert assessment of occupational expo...

Improper application of an ergonomic analysis tool increases the likelihood of high-risk jobs not being detected, thus jeopardising worker’s health. Likewise, significant time and cost may be incurred by redesigning jobs improperly identified as high risk. Utah Intelligent Data Driven Ergonomic Assessment System (IDDEAS) is an expert system that aggregates the outputs of multiple analysis tools...

SYNTELTM is a novel knowledge representation language that provides traditional features of expert system shells within a pure functional programming paradigm. However, it differs sharply from existing functional languages in many ways, ranging from its ability to deal with uncertainty to its evaluation procedures. A very flexible userinterface definition facility is tightly integrated with the...

IN THIS PAPER, WE INVESTIGATED TWO QUESTIONS (1) can measurements of anthropometric and physiological attributes substitute for expert assessment of adolescent basketball players, and (2) how much does the quantitative assessment of a player vary among experts? The first question is relevant to the potential simplification of the player selection process. The second question pertains directly t...

BACKGROUND & AIMS Because of the lack of objective tests to diagnose drug-induced liver injury (DILI), causality assessment is a matter of debate. Expert opinion is often used in research and industry, but its test-retest reliability is unknown. To determine the test-retest reliability of the expert opinion process used by the Drug-Induced Liver Injury Network (DILIN). METHODS Three DILIN hep...

This paper reviews methods and tools of spatial analysis, their integration and application to coastal zone management. Following a definition of the coastal zone and a short description of its peculiarities and unique management problems, the paper first describes the major tools for spatial analysis, and in particular, GIS and remote sensing, spatially distributed simulation modeling and opti...