Although many studies have shown beneficial effects of SDD on the incidence of respiratory tract infections, SDD did not become routine practice because mortality reduction was not demonstrated in individual trials, beneficial effects on duration of ventilation, ICU stay or hospital stay were not demonstrated, cost-efficacy had not been demonstrated, and selection of antibiotic resistance was c...

A wide variety of matrix transforms have been used for compression of image and video data. Transforms have also been used for motion estimation and quantization. One such transform is the singular-value decomposition (SVD) that relies on low rank approximations of the matrix for computational and storage efficiency. In this study, we describe the use of a variant of SVD in image and video comp...

This study employed water transparent characteristics from the Gulf and archipelago of Finland and the corresponding data sets of optical sensors at the green wavelength band to estimate Secchi disk depth (SDD). The SDD is one major optical measurement of water transparency in the study area, where the coastal waters are dominated by absorption from both dissolved and particulate organic matter...

We show new limits on the efficiency of using current techniques to make exact probabilistic inference for large classes of natural problems. In particular we show new lower bounds on knowledge compilation to SDD and DNNF forms. We give strong lower bounds on the complexity of SDD representations by relating SDD size to best-partition communication complexity. We use this relationship to prove ...

BACKGROUND Selective digestive decontamination (SDD) and selective oropharyngeal decontamination (SOD) are associated with reduced mortality and infection rates among patients in intensive care units (ICUs); however, whether SOD has a superior effect than SDD remains uncertain. Hence, we conducted a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to compare SOD with SDD in terms of clinica...

are interested in the debate on the effi cacy and safety of selective digestive decontamination (SDD) and selective oropharyngeal decontamination (SOD) raised by Schultz and Haas in their review [1]. Th e authors concluded that 'SDD and SOD are equally eff ective with respect to the prevention of mortality' [1]. Th is statement is based on the results of a Dutch randomized controlled trial [2],...

INTRODUCTION Selective digestive decontamination (SDD) appears to have a more compelling evidence base than non-antimicrobial methods for the prevention of ventilator associated pneumonia (VAP). However, the striking variability in ventilator associated pneumonia-incidence proportion (VAP-IP) among the SDD studies remains unexplained and a postulated contextual effect remains untested for. ME...

BACKGROUND Striatal dopamine activity declines with normal aging. Age-related striatal dopaminergic denervation (SDD) has been implicated in standing balance and unperturbed gait. The goal of this study was to analyze the association between the degree of SDD and the magnitude of an unexpected slip perturbation induced during gait. METHODS Fifty healthy participants aged 20-86 years old under...

We evaluated the effect of selective decontamination of the digestive tract (SDD) on the incidence of ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) and its associated morbidity and cost in a mixed population of intubated patients. Two hundred seventy-one consecutive patients admitted to the intensive care units (ICUs) of five teaching hospitals and who had an expected need for intubation exceeding 48 h...