BACKGROUND Chemiluminescent or enzyme-linked fluorescent immunoassays are commonly used to diagnose Clostridium difficile-associated diarrhea. METHODS The LIAISON analyzer (DiaSorin, Italy) was compared to miniVIDAS (bioMérieux, France) and, furthermore, to culture of toxigenic strains. In total, 249 native stool samples were analyzed. Sensitivities, specificities, and positive and negative p...

Staffing constraints and cross-training of laboratory staff have made it imperative that we choose laboratory instruments that not only are user friendly and easy to use but also improve the efficiency of our current systems. Therefore, evaluations of any instrument should also incorporate a component that examines whether workflow can be improved by the use of the instrument being evaluated. I...

We propose an intelligent data mining (DM) assistant that will combine planning and meta-learning to provide support to users of a virtual DM laboratory. A knowledge-driven planner will rely on a data mining ontology to plan the knowledge discovery workflow and determine the set of valid operators for each step of this workflow. A probabilistic metalearner will select the most appropriate opera...

implementation of electronic prescribing system can overcome many problems of the paper prescribing system, and provide numerous opportunities of more effective and advantageous prescribing. successful implementation of such a system requires complete and deep understanding of work content, human force, and workflow of paper prescribing. the current study was designed in order to model the curr...

intelligent wells provide the ability for monitoring and control of downhole environment of the wells. downhole monitoring is achieved through sensors while control is realized with downhole valves. recovery from intelligent wells can be improved by proper selection of candidate wells/fields and optimizing the number, location and performance of the installed interval control valves. design cri...

Distributed object technologies offer access to data and services virtually everywhere in a distributed application system and introduce a high degree of freedom in application design. In order to retain flexibility even during business process re-engineering, the explicit modelling of business process aspects separately from the application system components is desired. The most prominent tech...

In recent years, there has been a significant increase in the demand from professionals in different areas for improving the curricula regarding information security. The use of authentic case studies in teaching information security offers the potential to effectively engage students in active learning. In this paper, the authors introduce the approach of using workflow technology to compose c...

While today’s workflow management systems are well suited for the controlled execution of completely specified processes, support for dynamically changing processes is rather weak. However, new applications in the business domain and in non-traditional domains like the natural sciences or laboratory environments require support for flexibility like user interventions in workflow executions and ...

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Workflows constitute an important language to represent knowledge about processes, but also increasingly to reason on such knowledge. On the other hand, there is a limit to which time constraints between activities can be expressed. Qualitative interval algebras can model processes using finer temporal relations, but they cannot reproduce all workflow patterns. This paper defines a common groun...