BACKGROUND Empirical antifungal therapy is the standard of care for neutropenic patients with hematological malignancies who remain febrile despite broad-spectrum antibacterial treatment. Recent diagnostic improvements may ensure the early diagnosis of potentially invasive fungal disease. Reserving antifungals for this stage may achieve similar survival rates and reduce treatment toxicity and c...

We consider a scheduling problem, which we call the Scheduling and Wavelength Assignment (SWA) problem, arising in optical networks that are based on the Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) technology. We prove that the SWA problem is NP-hard for both the preemptive and the non-preemptive cases. Furthermore, we propose two eÆcient approximation algorithms. The rst is for the preemptive case ...

BACKGROUND Ethanol lock therapy (ELT) with systemic antimicrobial therapy is a promising therapy for catheter-related infection (CRI). The impact of ELT timing on treatment efficacy and costs is unknown. PROCEDURES A prospective study was conducted in the Hematology/Oncology Unit at the Children's Hospital of Michigan. Patients with suspected CRI were randomized to Preemptive ELT arm or Rescu...

Whether preemptive therapy or universal prophylaxis with ganciclovir is the optimal approach against cytomegalovirus (CMV) remains unresolved. Controversy abounds with respect to the efficacy of preemptive therapy, the reliability of preemptive therapy tools, the logistical difficulties in conducting surveillance monitoring for CMV, the cost of prophylaxis, the effect of prophylaxis on indirect...

Kidney transplantation is the most preferred treatment for end-stage renal disease because it improves not only the patient's survival compared with dialysis, but also the quality of life. Preemptive transplantation is transplantation performed prior to the initiation of renal dialysis. Recent observational studies have shown increased patient and graft survival with preemptive transplantation,...

In this chapter we present recent contributions in the field of sequential job scheduling on network machines which work in parallel; these are subject to temporary unavailability. This unavailability can be either unforeseeable (online models) or known a priori (offline models). For the online models we are mainly interested in preemptive schedules for problem formulations where the machine un...

Recipients of a partially T-cell–depleted (TCD) allogeneic stem cell transplantation (allo-SCT) developing reactivation of Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) with quantified viral DNA levels exceeding 1000 genome equivalents/milliliter (geq/mL) are at high risk for EBV–lymphoproliferative disease (EBVLPD). We studied whether preemptive therapy with rituximab prevents EBV-LPD, LPD-mortality, and abrogates...

Recipients of a partially T-cell-depleted (TCD) allogeneic stem cell transplantation (allo-SCT) developing reactivation of Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) with quantified viral DNA levels exceeding 1000 genome equivalents/milliliter (geq/mL) are at high risk for EBV-lymphoproliferative disease (EBV-LPD). We studied whether preemptive therapy with rituximab prevents EBV-LPD, LPD-mortality, and abrogate...

This paper considers three variants of last-come first-served (LCFS) preemptive service single-server queues, where customers are served under the LCFS preemptive resume (LCFS-PR), preemptive repeat-different (LCFS-PD), and preemptive repeat-identical (LCFS-PI) disciplines, respectively. These LCFS queues are fed by multiple batch Markovian arrival streams. Service times of customers from each ...

This paper is concerned with the problem of scheduling preemptive tasks subject to precedence constraints in order to minimize the maximum lateness and the makespan. The number of available parallel processors is allowed to vary in time. It is shown that when an Earliest Due Date rst algorithm provides an optimal nonpreemptive schedule for unit-execution-time (UET) tasks, then the preemptive pr...