OBJECTIVE To develop a model to produce real-time, updated forecasts of patients' intensive care unit length of stay using naturally generated provider orders. The model was designed to be integrated within a computerized decision support system to improve patient flow management. DESIGN Retrospective cohort study. SETTING Twenty-six bed pediatric intensive care unit within an urban, academ...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effect of a standardized worksheet on physicians' and nurses' perceptions of their understanding of goals of care and on patients' length of stay in an intensive care unit. METHODS A worksheet was completed daily during multidisciplinary rounds and was posted at each bedside in the medical intensive care unit at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York. Information rec...

Given r > 1, we consider the minimal volume, minimal surface area and minimal mean width of convex bodies in E that contain a unit ball, and the extreme points are of distance at least r from the centre of the unit ball; more precisely, we investigate the difference of these minimums and of the volume, surface area and mean width, respectively, of the unit ball. As r tends to one, we describe t...

OBJECTIVE To carry out a quantitative assessment in human myocardium cells of senile individuals, in right, left and septal ventricular regions. METHODS Five hearts from corpses of individuals without heart diseases, of both sexes, with age between 67 and 87 years old were used. The following parameters were assessed: myocyte unit cross section area (myoc. a(o)); myocyte unit perimeter length...

Objective: to identify the factors associated with the occurrence of adverse events in critical elderly patients admitted to intensive care unit according to demographic and clinical characteristics. Method: a retrospective cohort study was conducted in nine units of a teaching hospital. Data were collected from medical records and from monitoring of nursing shift change. We used the t-test/M...

Theoretical studies have led to the prediction that the maximal effect of a given respiratory muscle on airway opening pressure (Pao) is the product of muscle mass, the maximal active muscle tension per unit cross-sectional area, and the fractional change in muscle length per unit volume increase of the relaxed chest wall. It has previously been shown that the parasternal intercostals behave in...

A t-unit-bar representation of a graph G is an assignment of sets of at most t horizontal unit-length segments in the plane to the vertices of G so that (1) all of the segments are pairwise nonintersecting, and (2) two vertices x and y are adjacent if and only if there is a vertical channel of positive width connecting a segment assigned to x and a segment assigned to y that intersects no other...

We explore relations between various variational problems for graphs: among the functionals considered are Euler characteristic χ(G), characteristic length μ(G), mean clustering ν(G), inductive dimension ι(G), edge density (G), scale measure σ(G), Hilbert action η(G) and spectral complexity ξ(G). A new insight in this note is that the local cluster coefficient C(x) in a finite simple graph can ...

Background: central loop of the gastrocnemius-soleus H-reflex latency (T c) that looks promising in the diagnosis of S1 radiculopathy; has been investigated in a few studies and only two of them have focused on the constitutional factors affecting it. Although leg length has been shown to contribute to the T c, the role of age is controversial. More confusing, none of the previously performed s...

Purpose. To characterize indications, treatment, and length of stay in a stand-alone neurological intensive care unit with focus on comparison between ventilated and nonventilated patient. Methods. We performed a single-center retrospective cohort study of all treated patients in our neurological intensive care unit between October 2006 and December 2008. Results. Overall, 512 patients were tre...