OBJECTIVES The study objective was to identify the size of different hospital financing sources for different hospital services and their impact on the uninsured. METHODS A panel dataset of 84 public general hospitals (2005-2008) with cross-section data on hospital activity and hospital revenue was created and used to calculate unit costs of different hospital services by applying multiple re...

Background Recent randomized controlled trials suggest that sufficiently high convection post-dilutional haemodiafiltration (HC-HDF) improves survival in dialysis patients, consequently this technique is increasingly being adopted. However, when performing HC-HDF, rigorous control systems of the ultrafiltration setting are required. Assessing the global ultrafiltration coefficient of the dialys...

not effi cacious if not associated with dietary restriction and P binders. In this issue of Blood Purifi cation , Bolasco et al. compared P kinetics in standard HD and on-line hemodiafi ltration with endogenous reinfusion (HFR) by using a new method to measure P levels into the dialysate. This issue is of interest because sensitivity of the common automatic analyzers is inadequate to precisely ...

In this paper, we report on an optimized union-find (UF) algorithm that can label the connected components on a 2D image efficiently by employing GPU architecture. The proposed method comprises three phases: UF-based local merge, boundary analysis, and link. The coarse labeling in local merge, which makes computation efficient because the length of the labelequivalence list is sharply suppresse...

Patients with schizophrenia and healthy control subjects underwent both neuropsychological evaluation and magnetic resonance diffusion tensor imaging, during which the cingulum bundle (CB) and the uncinate fasciculus (UF) were defined with fiber tractography and their integrity was quantified. On the basis of prior findings, it was hypothesized that neuropsychological disturbance in schizophren...

We studied the temporal patterns of tracer throughput in the out ̄ow of large (30 cm diameter by 38 cm long) undisturbed cores from the Panola Mountain Research Watershed, Georgia. Tracer breakthrough was a€ected by soil structure and rainfall intensity. Two rainfall intensities (20 and 40 mm hr71) for separate Cl7 and Br7 amended solutions were applied to two cores (one extracted from a hillslo...

Cyclic voltammetry of the non-heme diiron enzyme porcine purple acid phosphatase (uteroferrin, Uf) has been reported for the first time. Totally reversible one-electron oxidation responses (FeIII-FeII --> FeII-FeIII) are seen both in the absence and in the presence of weak competitive inhibitors phosphate and arsenate, and dissociation constants of these oxoanion complexes formed with uteroferr...

K. Janiszewski, B. Panic: Silesian University of Technology, Department of Metallurgy, Katowice, Poland Hitherto existing investigations concerning the ceramic fi lter use in the steel making processes have given good results. The obtained results of fi ltration have proved that this method may be used as an eff ective and cheap way of steel fi ltration from non-metallic inclusions. Placing fi ...

Introduction: Hospital acquired infections (HAI) are the number four cause of death in the United States at an annual cost estimated at $40 billion. With emerging scienti c data regarding the contribution of air contamination to surgical site infections (SSI), there is increased interest in considering innovative adjunctive technologies to support best air quality in operating rooms (ORs). Obje...

The impact of a urea-formaldehyde (UF) fertilizer on bacterial diversity in onion bulbs and main roots of sugar beet were examined using a 16S rRNA gene clone library. The UF fertilizer markedly increased bacterial diversity in both plants. The results of principal coordinates analysis (PCoA) revealed that nearly 30% of the variance observed in bacterial diversity in both the onion and sugar be...