OBJECTIVE To assess the effectiveness of a high- vs low--intensity multidisciplinary ambulatory rehabilitation programme over 12 months for persons in the chronic phase after Guillain-Barré syndrome (pwGBS) in an Australian community cohort. METHOD A total of 79 pwGBS, recruited from a tertiary hospital, were randomized to a treatment group (n = 40) for an individualized high-intensity progra...

The frequencies of hearing impairment (HI), vision impairment (VI), or dual (hearing and vision) sensory impairment (DSI) in patients with blast-related traumatic brain injury (TBI) and their effects on functional recovery are not well documented. In this preliminary study of 175 patients admitted to a Polytrauma Rehabilitation Center, we completed hearing and vision examinations and obtained F...

BACKGROUND Rehabilitation in patients with disabilities is an important aspect of tertiary prevention. Severity of disability, evaluated by global measures of autonomy, are essential for functional outcome evaluation. AIM To determine the effectiveness of a rehabilitation programme in terms of percentage functional improvement (PFI); to verify the role of gender, age and length of stay (LOS),...

PURPOSE To describe the effects of a rehabilitation program in a neurological inpatient unit in terms of independence for activities of daily living and return to work. METHOD Retrospective study with 148 adults with stroke, traumatic brain injury (TBI), spinal cord injury, and Guillain-Barré syndrome admitted as rehabilitation inpatients within a 1-year period for hospitalization at the Inst...

This article develops an evolutional fuzzy particle swarm optimization (FPSO) learning algorithm to self extract the near optimum codebook of vector quantization (VQ) for carrying on image compression. The fuzzy particle swarm optimization vector quantization (FPSOVQ) learning schemes, combined advantages of the adaptive fuzzy inference method (FIM), the simple VQ concept and the efficient part...

Background and Objective. The purpose of this retrospective observational study was to examine the influence of severe obesity on length of stay (LOS), rehabilitation efficiency, and hospital costs post-acute rehabilitation in a population-based, tertiary care, publicly-funded regional rehabilitation center. Participants. 42 severely obese subjects (mean age 53 y; mean BMI 50.9 kg/m(2)) and 42 ...

PURPOSE The main goal of this retrospective study is to explore the predictors of success in learning clean intermittent self-catheterization (CISC) in patients over 65 years of age. The secondary goal is to assess whether in this population, the risk of failure to perform CISC is greater, compared with patients under 65 with similar pathologies. METHODS All patients older than 65 consulting ...

BACKGROUND/PURPOSE Accurate length-of-stay (LOS) estimates have an impact on medical costs for stroke patients. Most studies have reported only descriptive sample means or have provided linear-model-based estimates for LOS. This study calculated point and interval estimates by treating hospital discharge as an event, and utilizing the proportional hazards (PH) model to provide the estimation of...

Nowadays, identity-based client authentication (e.g., by username/ password) over SSL is the standard for user authentication on the Web. In particular, browser-based federated identity management (FIM) protocols prefer this technique to authenticate customers due to its user-convenience and lightweight access management. However, recent attacks known as phishing provide evidence that this auth...

Background Current knowledge about spatial neglect and its impact on rehabilitation mostly originates from stroke studies. Objective To examine the impact of spatial neglect on rehabilitation outcome in individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI). Methods The retrospective study included 156 consecutive patients with TBI (73 women; median age = 69.5 years; interquartile range = 50-81 years) a...