Ninety-eight percent of 51 polled medical editors felt that published research articles should be available to the public on the World Wide Web at no charge, after a mean time from publication of 1.4 years for viewing and 1.9 years for printing. Public libraries or other government institutions could be allowed to assume the responsibility of housing and distributing the electronically stored a...

Patients with chronic diseases frequently show a marked deterioration in their quality of life (QoL). This paper was aimed at investigating on both the prevalence psychological disorders and impact QoL patients renal failure. The survey conducted 155 patients, aged 77±11 years, 104/51 M/F, failure conservative treatment (stages IV-V) referring to Nephrology Unit Mauriziano Hospital, Turin. 13 t...

BACKGROUND Despite the numerous guidelines on the diagnosis and treatment of asthma, there are data that indicate that general pediatrician's knowledge of the disease and its preferred treatment is limited, which may influence the quality of care given to asthmatic children. The purpose of this study was to describe pediatrician's knowledge of spacers and of concepts of chilhood asthma, as well...

Quantitative scaling into percent signal change is helpful to detect and eliminate “bad” results with abnormal extreme values. While cognitive effects give signal changes on the order of 1% (and larger in the visual and auditory cortices), signal variations of over 10% may arise from motion and other artifacts in the data. Thus, a quantitative check on measured effect size can be used to screen...

This paper describes the development of a prototype that takes in an analog National Television System Committee video signal generated by a video camera and data acquired by a microcontroller and display them in real-time on a digital panel. An 8051 microcontroller is used to acquire power dissipation by the display panel, room temperature, and camera zoom level. The paper describes the major ...

For reasons of phantom material reproducibility, the absorbed dose protocols of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM) (TG-51) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) (TRS-398) have made the use of liquid water as a phantom material for reference dosimetry mandatory. In this work we provide a formal framework for the measurement of absorbed dose to water using ioniz...