OBJECTIVES We evaluated a large multicenter series of patients operated on for low-flow/low-gradient aortic stenosis (LF/LGAS) to stratify the operative risk, assess whether perioperative mortality has decreased over recent years, and analyze the post-operative outcome. BACKGROUND Although LF/LGAS is classically associated with a high operative risk, few data are available concerning the resu...

There is increasing international research into health and social care services for older people in need of long-term care (LTC), but problems remain with respect to acquiring robust comparative information to enable judgements to be made regarding the most beneficial and cost-effective approaches. The project 'INTERLINKS' ('Health systems and LTC for older people in Europe') funded by the EU 7...

Introduction P roviding accessible, affordable, and high-quality long-term care services to an aging population presents a growing challenge to long-term care providers. As the oldest members of the baby boom generation approach retirement, federal and state policymakers are exploring policies to care for the increasing number of elderly and to finance expanding long-term care needs. Other conc...

The result of leveraging, successfully done, is a continual reduction of both the up-front costs associated with acquiring and installing software applications as well as the long-term support costs. These cost reductions are achieved through economies of scale realized as common elements of a software application are repetitively applied and costs are prorated across a larger set of installati...

Long-term care represents a significant burden to the approximately 7 million elderly in need, their families, and the Medicaid program. Concerns exist about access, quality, cost, and the distribution of the burden of care. In this article each area is discussed, highlighting the principal issues, identifying the unique aspects that pertain to long-term care, and exploring the implications for...

Immediately after a recently fed rodent demonstrator interacts with a conspecific observer, the observer shows a substantially enhanced preference for whatever food its demonstrator ate. Here we show that (1) influence of a single, 30-min interaction with a demonstrator on an observer's food preference lasts for at least 1 month, and (2) observers interacting on 2 successive days with a demonst...

The segregation of brain fiber tractography data into distinct and anatomically meaningful clusters can help to comprehend the complex brain structure and early investigation and management of various neural disorders. We propose a novel stacked bidirectional long short-term memory(LSTM) based segmentation network, (BrainSegNet) for human brain fiber tractography data classification. We perform...

PURPOSE This paper is to distribute first results of the EU Fifth Framework Project 'Providing integrated health and social care for older persons-issues, problems and solutions' (PROCARE-http://www.euro.centre.org/procare/). The project's first phase was to identify different approaches to integration as well as structural, organisational, economic and social-cultural factors and actors that c...

Color and form are elementary stimulus encoding dimensions that have effects on the representation of visual stimuli at early processing stages. Little is known, however, about their effects on visual long-term memory. In three experiments we investigated whether color is part of the memory representation, whether color and form are bound in the memory representation, and the effect of color co...