When randomized trials have addressed multiple interventions for the same health problem, network meta-analyses (NMAs) permit researchers to statistically pool data from individual studies including evidence from both direct and indirect comparisons. Grasping the significance of the results of NMAs may be very challenging. Authors may present the findings from such analyses in several numerical...

BACKGROUND In many countries, NMAs, along with other stakeholders, play a part in the regulation of physicians. The purpose of this paper is to compare and explain the level of involvement of NMAs in physician regulation in several developed countries, with a specific emphasis on Israel. METHODS The authors conducted a review of the literature on physician regulation, focusing on licensing an...

BACKGROUND Sleep-related problems are known risk factors for road accidents. However, very few studies have investigated the role played by insomnia and its components, and no data are available for a population of occupational drivers at risk, such as the truck driver category. OBJECTIVE To measure the prevalence and impact of insomnia on motor vehicle accidents (MVAs) and near-miss accident...

BACKGROUND Several indirect comparison methods, including network meta-analyses (NMAs), using individual patient data (IPD) have been developed to synthesize evidence from a network of trials. Although IPD indirect comparisons are published with increasing frequency in health care literature, there is no guidance on selecting the appropriate methodology and on reporting the methods and results....

The differential diagnosis between malignancy-related ascites (MRAs) and nonmalignant ascites (NMAs) has remained an essential problem in clinical practice. Our purpose was to determine the diagnostic value of ascitic fluid telomerase activity in discriminating these two categories compared with that of cytological examination. Twenty-five MRAs and 47 NMAs as the control group were enrolled in ...

A protocol for the collection of vector data in Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) projects is proposed. VGI is a source of crowdsourced geographic data and information which is comparable, and in some cases better, than equivalent data from National Mapping Agencies (NMAs) and Commercial Surveying Companies (CSC). However, there are many differences in how NMAs and CSC collect, analyse, ...

This paper is concerned with the issues of observer-based consensus control for a class of networked multi-agent systems with time-varying delays and random packet-dropouts. The distributed multi-agent system whose consensus control protocol is accomplished through a communication network, via which each agent can be remotely controlled, is referred to as networked multi-agent systems (NMAS). F...

We propose CONTRAST, a formal framework for comparing normative multiagent system (nMAS) specifications by computing tradeoffs among liveness (something good happens) and safety (nothing bad happens). Safety-focused specifications restrict agents’ actions to avoid undesired executions. However, such restrictions hinder liveness, particularly in situations such as medical emergencies. Moreover, ...

A major challenge in normative multiagent systems (NMAS) is how norms can be effectively applied to their entities and easily managed. These tasks are arduous because norms are usually written for general purposes, hindering a more precise regulation. In this paper, we go through an operational approach to implement regulative norms in multiagent systems. In our approach, abstract norms are emb...