OBJECTIVES To measure the strength of agreement between the concepts and records retrieved from a computerized patient database, in response to physician-derived questions, using a semantic terminological model for clinical findings with those concepts and records excerpted clinically by manual identification. The performance of the semantic terminological model is also compared with the more e...

Design: A clinical database (Diabeta) of 106,000 patient problem record entries containing 2,625 unique concepts in an clinical academic department was used to compare semantic, free-text, ICD-10, and hierarchic data retrieval against a gold standard in response to a battery of 47 clinical questions. Measurements: The performance of concept and record retrieval expressed as mean detection rate,...

background: the biolimus-eluting stent (bes), with a biodegradable polymer, has not been previously compared with the everolimus-eluting stent (ees), as a second-generation drug-eluting stent (des).we sought to compare the 1-year outcome between the promus ™ stent (ees type) and the biomatrix ™ stent (bes type). methods: from march 2008 to september 2011, all patients treated with the promus™ s...

The objective of this study was to assess the feasibility of stereotactic radiotherapy for early stage lung cancer using photon beams from a Varian Clinac accelerator operated without a flattening filter. Treatment plans were generated for 10 lung cancer patients with isolated lesions less than 3 cm in diameter. For each patient, two plans were generated, one with and one without the flattening...

This research aims to explore the local environmental costs of an increase in the speed limit on Dutch motorways by means of the Contingent Valuation method. Sixty-five households from the villages of Breukelen and Loenen aan de Vecht participated in this study. Results show that mean household distance to the motorway, presence of chronic respiratory diseases, and traffic noise annoyance are t...

There is a lack of public acceptance of genetically modified (GM) food products in Europe. Using a dichotomous choice contingent valuation methodology, we find that willingness to accept (WTA) for GM food in Norway is positively affected (i.e. a greater discount is required) by higher levels of self-reported risk perceptions toward GM-food and preferences for domestically produced food. The est...

This paper presents a consistent Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) residuals-based test of functional form for time series models. By relating two moments we deliver a vector moment condition in which at least one element must be nonzero if the model is misspecified. The test will never fail to detect misspecification of any form for large samples, and is asymptotically chi-squared under the ...

In order to investigate the issues in measurement of value of travel time savings (VTTS), the willingness-to-accept (WTA) for the private car owner is studied by using surveyed data. It is convincing that trip purpose, trip length, time savings, cost savings, income, and allowance from employee have effects on the WTA. Moreover, influences of these variables are not the same for different trip ...

Goodness of fit of the distribution function governing the time to occurrence of a recurrent event is considered. We develop a chi-squared type of test (henceforward called R test) based on a nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator (NPMLE) of the inter-event time distribution for recurrent events. The test compares a parametric null to the NPMLE over k partitions of a calendar time over the ...