Invasive ventilation is associated with both pulmonary and non-pulmonary complications. There has been a renewed interest in the use of negative pressure ventilation (NPV) for various medical conditions to minimise the complications associated with positive pressure ventilation. The routine use of NPV in an ICU setting still requires further studies and research. In this article, the authors re...

Following a meta-analysis of test accuracy studies, the translation of summary results into clinical practice is potentially problematic. The sensitivity, specificity and positive (PPV) and negative (NPV) predictive values of a test may differ substantially from the average meta-analysis findings, because of heterogeneity. Clinicians thus need more guidance: given the meta-analysis, is a test l...

The NPV technique measures the present value of the future cash flows that a project will produce. A positive NPV means that the investment should increase the value of the firm and lead to maximizing shareholder wealth. A positive NPV project provides a return that is more than enough to compensate for the required return on the investment. Thus, using NPV as a guideline for capital investment...

Although consumer financial decision making has attracted renewed attention from marketing researchers, issues of consumer decumulation of retirement wealth have remained relatively unexplored. Research on decumulation presents an interesting problem for both behavioral and quantitative marketing researchers; it is a choice problem with large stakes, multiple sources of uncertainty, and difficu...

The rationale for using NPV for project evaluation appears weaker than ever. Authoritative texts in attempting to extend NPV by the inclusion of options, strategy and games far from enriching the model present evermore loosely argued rationales that are becoming contradictory. A brief review helps to understand how this state of affairs has arisen and how future analysis might develop. As an ad...

This paper focuses on inconsistencies arising from the use of NPV and CAPM for capital budgeting. It shows that (i) CAPM capital budgeting decision-making based on disequilibrium NPV is deductively inferred by the Capital Asset Pricing Model, (ii) the use of the disequilibrium NPV is widespread in finance both as a decision rule and as a valuation tool, (iii) the disequilibrium NPV does not gua...

OBJECTIVES To determine the optimal threshold of blood and urine neutrophil gelatinase-associated lipocalin (NGAL) to predict moderate to severe acute kidney injury (AKI) and persistent moderate to severe AKI lasting at least 48 consecutive hours, as defined by an adjudication panel. METHODS A multicentre prospective observational study enrolled intensive care unit (ICU) patients and recorded...

This paper deals with resource unconstrained project scheduling problems with the objective of maximizing the net present value (NPV) of project cash flows. Here we present a heuristic algorithm named as differential procedure (Dif_AOA). In order to evaluate the efficiency of this algorithm, networks with node numbers between 10-1000 and network complexity coefficients between 1.3-6.6 have be...