Healthcare quality managers and researchers often need to identify specific healthcare events from administrative data. In this study, we examined whether Veterans Health Administration (VHA) clinic stop and bed section codes are reliable indicators of substance use disorder (SUD) treatment as documented in clinical progress notes. For outpatient records with a progress note, SUD clinic stop co...

Definition 3 A decision tree is a binary tree T. Each internal node of T is labeled with a variable xi and each leaf is labeled with a value −1 or 1. Given an input x ∈ {−1, 1}n, the tree is evaluated as follows. Start at the root; if this is a leaf then stop. Otherwise, query the value of the variable xi. If xi = −1 then recursively evaluate the left subtree, if xi = 1 then recursively evaluat...

In this paper, we propose a new fast search algorithm for block motion estimation (BME). This algorithm employs two techniques: the center-biased technique and the two-path technique. The former is applied to stop the search procedure if the block currently being processed is stationary. Otherwise, the proposed algorithm conducts the two-path search to perform BME. The search result of the trad...

CONTEXT Approximately 50 million abortions are performed worldwide each year, and the majority of them are surgical terminations of pregnancy (STOP). Therefore, the safety of this procedure is a global public health concern. It is not known whether routine use of intraoperative ultrasound guidance improves the outcome of first trimester STOP. OBJECTIVE To investigate whether surgical terminat...