BACKGROUND Prior research focusing on men who have sex with men (MSM) conducted in Buenos Aires, Argentina, used convenience samples that included mainly gay identified men. To increase MSM sample representativeness, we used Respondent Driven Sampling (RDS) for the first time in Argentina. Using RDS, under certain specified conditions, the observed estimates for the percentage of the population...

This thesis looked at how patient safety and quality of care for older hospitalised patients at-risk for delirium can be improved, specifically focusing on the effects of e-learning on the implementation of the national Frail Elderly Project (FEP). In this final chapter the main findings of this research are discussed, as well as some methodological considerations. This chapter also looks at th...

BACKGROUND Previous studies of alcohol use have recognized several trends in consumption patterns among gender and age yet few have examined ethnic differences. This study examines the intra- and inter-ethnic differences in alcohol consumption among a population of patients seen in the emergency department. METHODS This is a cross-sectional study conducted in the emergency department in a lar...

Biodiversity is important in maintaining ecosystem viability, and the availability of adequate biodiversity data is a prerequisite for the sustainable management of natural resources. As such, there is a clear need to map biodiversity at high spatial resolutions across large areas. Airborne and spaceborne optical remote sensing is a potential tool to provide such biodiversity data. The spectral...

Background: evaluation instruments, properties, selection indicators, application and validation of screening and diagnostic tests. Aim: to present some concepts concerning screening and diagnostic tests and their application according to a specific purpose. To present a few practical examples of the application of these instruments related to human communication, as well as to present validati...

OBJECTIVES Including questions about sexual health in the annual Health Survey for England (HSE) provides opportunities for regular measurement of key public health indicators, augmenting Britain's decennial National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal). However, contextual and methodological differences may limit comparability of the findings. We examine the extent of these diffe...

Reflectance retrieval is a key parameter for land cover mapping from hyperspectral imagery. However most of the inverse methods to estimate these reflectances are limited in urban areas with the use of high spatial resolution sensors because they do not take into account the 3D radiative impact of the urban environment. A recent tool, ICARE [1], is able to retrieve surface reflectance in the re...

We examined the hierarchical structure of the Childhood Anxiety Sensitivity Index (CASI) as a function of gender and examined the occurrence of gender differences in anxiety sensitivity (AS) dimensions in a large nonclinical sample of children and adolescents (N = 1698). Separate principal components analyses (PCAs) on the 18 CASI items for the total sample, boys, and girls revealed similar low...

INTRODUCTION Guidelines recommend follow-up for patients after an intensive care unit (ICU) stay. Methods for identifying patients with psychological problems after intensive care would be of value, to optimize treatment and to improve adequate resource allocation in ICU follow-up of ICU survivors. The aim of the study was to develop a predictive screening instrument, for use at ICU discharge, ...

This paper deals with the extraction of the hedgerow and copse network from hyperspectral images acquired with the Compact Airborne Spectrographic Imager (CASI). The strategy of segmentation integrates several levels of data fusion allowing a decision to be taken concerning the membership of each pixel to the hedgerow and copse network from the large set of original data. The first level leads ...