Healthcare consumers need to find, comprehend, and interpret health information before making informed decisions. Recent work by others and our own work suggest that mis-matches in representations of health information used by consumers and professionals occur at different levels of knowledge representation, such as terminology (i.e., form or surface structure and concept or meaning) and semant...

....................................................................................................... iv List of Tables and Figures......................................................................... xvi Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................................ 1 1.1 Background to this study .....................................................

The HIV/AIDS epidemic has placed increasing demands on limited paediatric intensive care services in developing countries. The decision to admit HIV infected children with Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) into the paediatric intensive care unit (PICU) has to be made on the best available evidence of outcome and the ethical principles guiding appropriate use of scarce resources. The difficul...

This paper presents a robust satisficing decision-making method for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) executing complex missions in an uncertain environment. Motivated by the info-gap decision theory, we formulate this problem as a novel robust satisficing optimization problem, of which the objective is to maximize the robustness while satisfying some desired mission requirements. Specifically, a...

 Purpose: Strategic decision-making plays an important role in organizational functions and its effectiveness. As a result, the aim of this study was to identifying and analyzing the dimensions and components of strategic decision-making for the managers of education regions. Methodology: This study in terms of purpose was applied and in terms of implementation method was mixed (qualitative an...

Patient care, like other technically complex and high risk fields, is an interdependent process carried out by teams of individuals with advanced technical training who have varying roles and decision-making responsibilities. While technical training assures proficiency at specific tasks, it does not address the potential for errors created by communicating and decision making in dynamic enviro...

Sepsis is a leading cause of mortality in intensive care units (ICUs) and costs hospitals billions annually. Treating a septic patient is highly challenging, because individual patients respond very differently to medical interventions and there is no universally agreed-upon treatment for sepsis. Understanding more about a patient’s physiological state at a given time could hold the key to effe...

in conventional dea models, decision making units (dmus) are generally assumed as a black-box while the performance of decision making sub-units (dmsus) and their importance play crucial roles in  analyzing the performance of systems which have internal processes. the present paper introduces an ideal network which have efficient processes and next purposes a new approach for evaluating importa...