OBJECTIVE To assess the clinical and economic impacts of the use of liquid based cytology (LBC) in the Australian average risk population from the perspective of the public health care budget. BACKGROUND Concerns over the evaluation of medical technologies in Australia, which are assessed by the Medicare Services Advisory Committee (MSAC), have been raised recently. We report on the evaluatio...

BACKGROUND In 1998 a formal process using the criteria of safety, effectiveness and cost-effectiveness (evidence based medicine) on the introduction and use of new medical procedures was implemented in Australia. As part of this process an expert panel, the Medical Services Advisory Committee (MSAC) was set up. This paper examines the effectiveness of this process based on the original criteria...

The MSAC is a stack of grids that gives rise, when biased at high voltage, to four planar gas proportional counters connected each other. In spite of the low gas gain of each counter (about 100), the final gain can easily overcome 10. Thanks to such high gain, the MSAC can detect single electrons by using fast front-end electronics to process the current arisen from the last grid when a single ...

Biological carbon sequestration by forest ecosystems plays an important role in the net balance of greenhouse gases, acting as a carbon sink for anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Nevertheless, relatively little is known about the abiotic environmental factors (including climate) that control carbon storage in temperate and boreal forests and consequently, about their potential response to climate ch...

Multiple-split air conditioning (MSAC) system has become an attractive form of air-conditioning system for smallsized commercial and residential buildings. For a common room air conditioner, the only factor affecting the performance under a fixed outdoor and indoor condition is load rate of the indoor unit. But for the MSAC system, the indoor units will have quite different working situations u...

Mechanisms are needed to foster discussion of policy choices about end-of-life care, identify areas of general agreement, and clarify possible areas of disagreement. The Maryland State Advisory Council on Quality Care at the End of Life (MSAC), created by legislation as a permanent part of Maryland government, is one such mechanism. We describe the rationale for creating the MSAC, its operation...

The Commonwealth Government constituted the Medicare Services Advisory Committee (MSAC) to implement its commitment to entrench the principles of evidence-based medicine in Australian clinical practice. With its recent review of positron emission tomography (PETReview), the Commonwealth intervened in an established MSAC process, and sanctioned the stated objective to restrict expenditure on the...

Present work is focused on the preparation of mustard stalk activated carbon (MSAC) using chemical activation with H3PO4 and exploring its properties for use in dye removal from wastewater. Adsorption variable (dosage, contact time, solution pH), pore structure, morphology, surface functional groups, equilibrium kinetics isotherm study methylene blue (MB) MSAC were investigated. The present sho...

In order to be successfully executed, collaborative tasks performed by two agents often require a cooperative strategy learned. this work, we propose constraint-based multi-agent reinforcement learning approach called constrained soft actor critic (C-MSAC) train control policies for simulated performing multi-phase tasks. Given task with n $$ phases, the first − 1 n-1 phases are treated as cons...

Transition metal (TM) single atomic catalysts (MSAC-N-C) derived from doped zeolite imidazolate frameworks (ZIF-8) are considered attractive oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) for fuel cells and metal-air batteries due to their advantages of high specific surface area, more active catalytic sites, adjustable pore size, coordination topology features. This review provides an updated overview the la...