OBJECTIVE The objective of the study was to improve pathology services in selected remote health centres from the Northern Territory (NT) through the implementation of a quality managed point-of-care pathology testing (POCT) service. DESIGN Study of the efficacy of the POCT service after 1 year and qualitative survey of POCT device operators. SETTING The study was set in thirty-three remote...

Asian Journal of Transfusion Science ‐ Volume 11, Issue 2, July‐December 2017 215 Figure 1: Evidence‐based use of higher pretransfusion international normalized ratio as a threshold for plasma transfusions Address for correspondence: Dr. Shamee Shastry, Department of Immunohematology and Blood Transfusion, Kasturba Medical College, Manipal University, Manipal ‐ 576 104, Karnataka, India. E‐mail...

Burn scar extraction using remote sensing data is an efficient way to precisely evaluate burn area and measure vegetation recovery. Traditional burn scar extraction methodologies have no well effect on burn scar image with blurred and irregular edges. To address these issues, this paper proposes an automatic method to extract burn scar based on Level Set Method (LSM). This method utilizes the a...

Exposure to ozone (O3) causes reduction both in the growth and yield of rice (Oriza sativa L.). Commonly used Chlorophyll fluorescent measurements are not sensitive enough for short term exposure of O3 aiming an immediate assessments. Such a conventional method typically needs exposure over a few days to detect the influence. As an alternative method, we proposed a novel non-invasive, robust, r...

This study was done to evaluate the validity and reliability of women's reproductive history questionnaire which will be used in Azar Cohort study; a cohort that is conducted by Tabriz University of Medical Science in Shabestar county for identifying risk factors of no communicable diseases. Content and face validity were evaluated by ten experts in the field and quantified as content validity ...

In this paper, exact closed-form expressions are derived for the outage probability (OP) of the maximal ratio combining (MRC) scheme in the κ-μ shadowed fading channels, in which both the independent and correlated shadowing components are considered. The scenario assumes the received desired signals are corrupted by the independent Rayleigh-faded co-channel interference (CCI) and background wh...

A novel algorithm for automatic foreground extraction based on difference of Gaussian (DoG) is presented. In our algorithm, DoG is employed to find the candidate keypoints of an input image in different color layers. Then, a keypoints filter algorithm is proposed to get the keypoints by removing the pseudo-keypoints and rebuilding the important keypoints. Finally, Normalized cut (Ncut) is used ...

BACKGROUND Previous research has suggested that daily lottery incentives could improve medication adherence. Such daily incentives include implicit reminders. However, the comparative effectiveness of reminders alone versus daily incentives has not been tested. METHODS A total of 270 patients on warfarin were enrolled in a four-arm, multi-center, randomized controlled trial comparing a daily ...

We study coherent binary direct-sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA) systems operating over frequency-selective Nakagami fading channels. In particular a performance comparison between maximal-ratio combining (MRC) and equal-gain combining (EGC) RAKE receivers is considered. For interference limited systems, perfect MRC RAKE receivers can accommodate about 5m=(5m ? 1) more users tha...