BACKGROUND Given their clinical, research, and administrative purposes, scores on the Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation (APACHE) II should be reliable, whether calculated by health care personnel or a clinical information system. OBJECTIVE To determine reliability of APACHE II scores calculated by a clinical information system and by health care personnel before and after a multi...

Chest Physicians members (in the Chest Infections and Critical Care Network) in 2004 to elucidate which of these admission guidelines and diagnostic criteria are utilized in practice. The first questionnaire asked physicians which of the following ICU admission criteria they use: American Thoracic Society (ATS) 1993 and 2001,1 British Thoracic Society (BTS) CURB or CURB-65,1 pneumonia severity ...

INTRODUCTION We sought to determine whether higher levels of the novel biomarker growth differentiation factor-15 (GDF-15) are associated with poor outcomes and the presence of pulmonary vascular dysfunction (PVD) in patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). METHODS We conducted a retrospective cohort study in patients enrolled in the Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome Networ...

RATIONALE Time series analysis has seen limited application in the biomedical Literature. The utility of conventional and advanced time series estimators was explored for intensive care unit (ICU) outcome series. METHODS Monthly mean time series, 1993-2006, for hospital mortality, severity-of-illness score (APACHE III), ventilation fraction and patient type (medical and surgical), were genera...

BACKGROUND A number of drugs have been reported as risk factors for acute lung injury (ALI) and ARDS. However, evidence is largely limited to case reports, and there is a paucity of data on the incidence and outcome of drug-associated ALI (DALI). METHODS Using a population-based retrospective cohort study design, critically ill patients with a diagnosis of ALI were studied. These patients wer...

BACKGROUND Positive relationships between hospital volume and outcomes have been demonstrated for several surgeries and medical conditions. However, little is known about the volume-outcome relationship in patients admitted to medical ICUs. OBJECTIVE To determine the relationship between hospital volume and risk-adjusted in-hospital mortality for patients admitted to ICUs with respiratory, ne...

OBJECTIVE Survival probability predictions in critically ill patients are mainly used to measure the efficacy of intensive care unit (ICU) treatment. The available models are functions induced from data on thousands of patients. Eventually, some of the variables used for these purposes are not part of the clinical routine, and may not be registered in some patients. In this paper, we propose a ...

CONTEXT The long-term survival of patients with cirrhosis of the liver admitted to the ICU has not been described. OBJECTIVE The main objectives were to determine the 1-year and 5-year mortality rates of a cohort of patients admitted to a medical ICU (MICU), and to identify the risk factors that may predict long-term outcomes. DESIGN This is a cohort study. We used a model-building (MB) and...

OBJECTIVE This study is intended to identify predictive factors of delirium, including risk factors and prodromal symptoms. METHODS This study included sixty-five patients aged 65 years or older who had undergone hip surgery. Baseline assessments included age; gender; admission type (acute/elective); reason for surgery (fracture/replacement); C-reactive protein (CRP); Acute Physiology, Age, C...

We present hoc: a fast, scalable objects repository providing programmers with a general storage module. hoc may be used to implement DSMs as well as distributed cache subsystems. hoc is composed by a set of hot-pluggable cooperating processes that may sustain close to optimal network traffic rates. We designed an hoc-based Web cache that extends the Apache Web server and remarkably improves Ap...