Ten patients with respiratory failure and nocturnal hypoventilation were treated for three to nine months by nasal intermittent positive pressure ventilation. Four patients had chronic obstructive lung disease (median FEV1 19% predicted) and six restrictive chest wall disorders (median FVC 25% predicted); eight of the patients also had cardiac failure. The median daytime arterial oxygen tension...

The restriction of nondeterminism to unambiguous computations has been used as an attempt to clarify the relationship between deterministic and nondeterministic models of computation. In this paper we will consider three different, increasingly more restrictive notions of unambiguity. While all of them coincide for polynomial time bounded computation, this does not seem to happen for logarithmi...

A two-pass algorithm for compositional synthesis of modular supervisors for largescale systems of composed finite-state automata is proposed. The first pass provides an efficient method to determine whether a supervisory control problem has a solution, without explicitly constructing the synchronous composition of all components. If a solution exists, the second pass yields an over-approximatio...

OBJECTIVE The study examined factors affecting clinicians' decisions in the psychiatric emergency service about referring patients to less restrictive alternatives to inpatient care. Indicators of quality of care and the severity of the patient's condition were a particular focus. METHODS Trained mental health professionals observed the evaluations of 425 patients in seven California county g...

BACKGROUND Women seeking abortion services need to access services in a timely fashion. Quick and appropriate referrals to abortion providers are critical to this process. METHODS The objective of this study was to determine the quality and quantity of referrals for abortion services from reproductive health care facilities that do not provide abortion services. USA states were ranked by rest...

State-feedback model predictive control (MPC) of constrained discrete-time periodic affine systems is considered. The periodic systems’ states and inputs are subject to periodically time-dependent, hard, polyhedral constraints. Disturbances are additive, bounded and subject to periodically time-dependent bounds. The objective is to designMPC laws that robustly enforce constraint satisfaction in...