OBJECTIVE To assess the survival outcomes of oral cavity squamous cell carcinoma (OCSCC) by differing geographical location. METHODS Demographic, pathologic, treatment, and survival data was obtained from OCSCC patients from 1998-2010 in Alberta, Canada. 554 patients were included from 660 OCSCC patients. Overall, disease-specific, and disease-free survivals were estimated with Kaplan-Meier a...

OBJECTIVE Natural disasters exacerbate risks of hazardous environmental exposures and adverse health consequences. The present study determined the proportion of previously identified lead industrial sites in urban locations that are at high risk for dispersal of toxic chemicals by natural disasters. METHODS Geographic analysis from publicly available data identified former lead smelting plan...

Quantifying urban heat island effect often requires the observation of air temperature distribution over the whole city. Satellite or aircraft mounted radiometers, car mounted temperature sensors and GPS loggers or fixed point monitoring have been employed in previous studies for urban heat island effect analysis. Above methods often are very expensive, labour intensive and have its own limitat...

BACKGROUND This reports the initial phase of a study to quantify the spatial pattern of cigarette butt waste in an urban environment. METHODS Geographic Information Systems (GIS) was used to create a weighted overlay analysis model which was then applied to the locations of businesses where cigarettes are sold or are likely to be consumed and venues where higher concentrations of butts may be...

Daily weather conditions for an entire city are usually represented by a single weather station, often located at a nearby airport. This resolution of atmospheric data fails to recognize the microscale climatic variability associated with land use decisions across and within urban neighborhoods. This study uses heat index, a measure of the combined effects of temperature and humidity, to assess...

Well-established fine-scale urban mobility models today depend on detailed but cumbersome and expensive travel surveys for their calibration. Not much is known, however, about the set of mechanisms needed to generate complete mobility profiles if only using passive datasets with mostly sparse traces of individuals. In this study, we present a mechanistic modeling framework (TimeGeo) that effect...

Diarrhea is a major cause of childhood morbidity and mortality in developing countries, and the majority of infections are of viral etiology. We aimed to compare the etiological prevalence of the major enteric viruses in an urban and a rural setting in southern Vietnam. We simultaneously screened fecal specimens from 362 children in Ho Chi Minh City and Dong Thap province that were hospitalized...

The Urban spatial structure is affected by spatial interactions among various activity locations, and land uses in the city over the transportation system. Each city has its unique circulation pattern of passengers and freight due to its unique geographic conditions and the distribution of locations of economic activities. In that sense, it is claimed in this chapter per the authors that urban ...

Social media data are increasingly used as the source of research in a variety of domains. A typical example is urban analytics, which aims at solving urban problems by analyzing data from different sources including social media. The potential value of social media data in tourism studies, which is one of the key topics in urban research, however has been much less investigated. This paper see...

INTRODUCTION While it is well recognized that rural background medical students are more likely to enter rural practice than urban background, students' research shows that 34% to 67% of rural doctors have urban backgrounds. This article explores the factors influencing urban background medical students' interest in rural practice. METHOD The study used a qualitative design employing focus gr...