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At least 595 records · Page 33Linked to original sources
PubMed1998

Problem-solving tools for analyzing system problems. The affinity map and the relationship diagram.

The author describes how to use two management tools, an affinity map and a relationship diagram, to define and analyze aspects of a complex problem in a system. The affinity map identifies the key influencing elements of the problem, whereas the relationship diagram helps to identify the area that is the most important element of the issue. Managers can use the tools to draw a map of problem drivers, graphically display the drivers in a diagram, and use the diagram to develop a cause-and-effect relationship.

Audiovisual Aids↗
PubMed2003

Mathematical modelling of animate and intentional motion.

Our aim is to enable a machine to observe and interpret the behaviour of others. Mathematical models are employed to describe certain biological motions. The main challenge is to design models that are both tractable and meaningful. In the first part we will describe how computer vision techniques, in particular visual tracking, can be applied to recognize a small vocabulary of human actions in a constrained scenario. Mainly the problems of viewpoint and scale invariance need to be overcome to formalize a general framework. Hence the second part of the article is devoted to the question whether a particular human action should be captured in a single complex model or whether it is more promising to make extensive use of semantic knowledge and a collection of low-level models that encode certain motion primitives. Scene context plays a crucial role if we intend to give a higher-level interpretation rather than a low-level physical description of the observed motion. A semantic knowledge base is used to establish the scene context. This approach consists of three main components: visual analysis, the mapping from vision to language and the search of the semantic database. A small number of robust visual detectors is used to generate a higher-level description of the scene. The approach together with a number of results is presented in the third part of this article.

Computers↗
PubMed1992

Portrayal of nurses in advertisements in medical and nursing journals.

This investigation examined the content of advertisements in medical and nursing journals to determine if the images of nurses reflect the roles nurses play in health care. The method used was content analysis. Thirty-five nursing journals and 48 medical journals yielded 313 different advertisements picturing nurses. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, chi-square, correlation coefficients, and interpreted for overall impressions of the portrayals. Nurses are portrayed as sex objects, ornaments and as handmaidens to physicians. The findings demonstrate a freezing of the image of nurses in the print media.

Advertising↗
PubMed1990

Hierarchies, bureaucracies and professions. The Medicare Review. Part two.

This paper is both a personal account and an analysis of the Medicare Review (part 2) that took place in 1985-6, to which I acted as Consultant Adviser. It analyses health policy issues associated with the recent inquiry to consider expanding the Medicare Scheme to include the services of some paramedical occupations. It considers what took place, the history of events leading up to the Review, the complexities of the review process and issues of implementation as well as the wider context. The paper moves from the descriptive to the analytical level to explain and interpret the review process from both a sociological and social policy point of view. The relevance of the Review to public health is twofold: the development and application of a new methodology to evaluate complementary health modalities on one hand, and the role of the Review in promoting both the legitimacy of these occupations, and, from a public policy analysis viewpoint, cost containment, on the other.

Australia↗
PubMedDate not supplied

The nature and subtlety of abnormal findings in chest radiographs.

All detected abnormal findings were recorded for 1085 consecutive chest x-ray examinations. Each finding was classified by descriptive criteria and graded for subtlety. Accuracy of interpretation was evaluated in a randomized sample of 100 cases using follow-up or multiple readers. Seventy percent of standard examinations and 93% of bedside examinations revealed abnormal findings. Pulmonary infiltrates were the most commonly detected abnormality, being present in 55% of abnormal cases. Noncalcified pulmonary nodules and pneumothoraces were each present in approximately 5% of abnormal cases. The most commonly encountered subtle findings were due to intravenous catheters, pulmonary infiltrates, pneumothoraces, rib lesions, and pulmonary nodules in descending order of frequency. It is concluded that it is reasonable to use selected examples of these findings in observer tests when evaluating new imaging modalities such as digital radiography.

Data Interpretation, Statistical↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Nursing classification systems: necessary but not sufficient for representing "what nurses do" for inclusion in computer-based patient record systems.

Our premise is that from the perspective of maximum flexibility of data usage by computer-based record (CPR) systems, existing nursing classification systems are necessary, but not sufficient, for representing important aspects of "what nurses do." In particular, we have focused our attention on those classification systems that represent nurses' clinical activities through the abstraction of activities into categories of nursing interventions. In this theoretical paper, we argue that taxonomic, combinatorial vocabularies capable of coding atomic-level nursing activities are required to effectively capture in a reproducible and reversible manner the clinical decisions and actions of nurses, and that, without such vocabularies and associated grammars, potentially important clinical process data is lost during the encoding process. Existing nursing intervention classification systems do not fulfill these criteria. As background to our argument, we first present an overview of the content, methods, and evaluation criteria used in previous studies whose focus has been to evaluate the effectiveness of existing coding and classification systems. Next, using the Ingenerf typology of taxonomic vocabularies, we categorize the formal type and structure of three existing nursing intervention classification system--Nursing Interventions Classification, Omaha System, and Home Health Care Classification. Third, we use records from home care patients to show examples of lossy data transformation, the loss of potentially significant atomic data, resulting from encoding using each of the three systems. Last, we provide an example of the application of a formal representation methodology (conceptual graphs) which we believe could be used as a model to build the required combinatorial, taxonomic vocabulary for representing nursing interventions.

Abstracting and Indexing↗
PubMed2004

Dynamic integration of gene annotation and its application to microarray analysis.

Comprehensive and structured annotations for all genes on a microarray chip are essential for the interpretation of its expression data. Currently, most chip gene annotations are one-line free text descriptions that are often partial, outdated and unsuitable for large-scale data analysis. Therefore the interpretation of microarray gene expression clusters is often limited. Although researchers can manually navigate a collection of databases for better annotations, it is only practical for limited number of genes. Existing meta-databases fail to provide comprehensive categorized annotations for hundreds of genes simultaneously. We have developed an automatic system to address this issue. GeneView system monitors various data sources, extracts gene information from a source whenever it is updated, comprehensively matches genes, and integrates them into a central database by categories, such as pathway, genetic mapping, phenotype, expression profile, domain structure, protein interaction, disease association, and references. The system consists of four major components: (1) relational database; (2) data processing; (3) user curation; (4) data query. We evaluated it by analyzing genes on cDNA and Affymetrix Oligo chips. In both cases, the system provided more accurate and comprehensive information than those provided by the vendors or the chip users, and helped identify new common functions among genes in the same expression clusters.

Cluster Analysis↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Unknown people believed to be known: the 'assoziierende Erinnerungs- fälschungen' by Kraepelin.

A male patient with epilepsy, who developed a unique form of paramnesia after an episode of zonisamide-induced psychosis is reported. The patient consistently mistook people who were quite new to him, such as staff of the hospital, for persons whom he had met long ago. However, he did not misidentify their names or other attributes, such as their occupations. This extraordinary form of misidentification does not fall into any known subcategory of misidentification syndromes. Rather, this paramnesia falls into the classical description of 'assoziierende Erinnerungsfälschungen' by Kraepelin. The neuropsychological interpretation of the reported patient is difficult. However, loss of familiarity with environmental objects due to his long sustained epileptic history is supposed to be a possible mechanism of paramnesia.

Adult↗
PubMed2001

Anatomic-electrophysiological correlations concerning the pathways for atrioventricular conduction.

The remarkable success of radiofrequency ablation in recent decades in curing atrioventricular nodal reentrant tachycardias has intensified efforts to provide a solid theoretical basis for understanding the mechanisms of atrioventricular transmission. These efforts, which were made by both anatomists and electrophysiologists, frequently resulted in seemingly controversial observations. Quantitatively and qualitatively, our understanding of the mysteries of propagation through the inhomogeneous and extremely complex atrioventricular conduction axis is much deeper than it was at the beginning of the past century. We must go back to the initial sources, nonetheless, in an attempt to provide a common ground for evaluating the morphological and electrophysiological principles of junctional arrhythmias. In this review, we provide an account of the initial descriptions, which still provide an appropriate foundation for interpreting recent electrophysiological findings.

Atrioventricular Node↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Tympanometry: application and interpretation.

The poor relationship between hearing loss and ear disease minimizes the effectiveness of audiometry as a technique for the identification of middle ear disorders. Tympanometry has been shown to be a highly sensitive technique for the identification of and differentiation between middle ear disorders. It is particularly useful in a pediatric population where ear disease is so frequently encountered. The interpretation of tympanometry on the basis of a descriptive analysis of tympanograms is proposed as opposed to a coded typing system. Descriptive analysis views the pathological effects of middle ear diseases on pressure peaks, amplitude and shape of tympanograms.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed1994

A decade of research on learning disabilities: a report card on the state of the literature.

A review of 208 studies of children with learning disabilities (LD) published in 10 major journals between 1988 and 1990 was conducted to determine the extent to which recommendations made in 1980 and 1984 regarding reporting and design of LD research have been followed. A number of problems continue to threaten the interpretability and utility of results, including imprecise subject descriptions, heterogeneous samples, and methodological weaknesses. Implications for the field are discussed and recommendations for improvement are provided.

Achievement↗
PubMed1983

Legislative aspects of hazardous waste management.

In the fall of 1976 Congress enacted the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, commonly referred to as RCRA. The objective of the statute is to create an orderly system for the generation, handling and disposal of hazardous waste by means of a comprehensive tracking and record keeping mechanism. RCRA does not regulate directly by statute so much as it delegates rule making authority to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Pursuant to its mandate to develop regulations in accordance with the broad criteria of RCRA, EPA has published extensive regulations. These regulations address hazardous waste generation, transportation, treatment, storage and handling and its final disposal. The statute also offers remedies available to both EPA and the public at large to ensure enforcement of the provisions of RCRA and the EPA regulations. Additionally, it sets guidelines for states to implement their own hazardous waste management programs. This article is intended to introduce this complicated statutory/regulatory package to scientists and health professionals. It outlines the provisions of RCRA and the EPA regulations, abbreviates early judicial decisions interpreting these provisions and sets forth a brief description of various state approaches to hazardous waste management.

Government Agencies↗
PubMed2003

Uptake of fluorine-18-fluorodeoxyglucose in pulmonary Mycobacterium avium complex infection.

Two patients showing abnormal fluorine-18-fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) uptake due to Mycobacterium avium complex (MAC) infection are presented. Intense focal FDG uptake in the lung field could have been caused by an infectious disease such as MAC. This should be considered as a possibility when FDG whole-body scans of patients with pulmonary nodules are interpreted. To our knowledge, this is the first description of an FDG-positron emission tomography (FDG-PET) image of MAC infection of the lung.

Aged↗
PubMed2004

Evidence accumulation in decision making: unifying the "take the best" and the "rational" models.

An evidence accumulation model of forced-choice decision making is proposed to unify the fast and frugal take the best (TTB) model and the alternative rational (RAT) model with which it is usually contrasted. The basic idea is to treat the TTB model as a sequential-sampling process that terminates as soon as any evidence in favor of a decision is found and the rational approach as a sequential-sampling process that terminates only when all available information has been assessed. The unified TTB and RAT models were tested in an experiment in which participants learned to make correct judgments for a set of real-world stimuli on the basis of feedback, and were then asked to make additional judgments without feedback for cases in which the TTB and the rational models made different predictions. The results show that, in both experiments, there was strong intraparticipant consistency in the use of either the TTB or the rational model but large interparticipant differences in which model was used. The unified model is shown to be able to capture the differences in decision making across participants in an interpretable way and is preferred by the minimum description length model selection criterion.

Adult↗
PubMed2003

[Classification of rotator cuff tears].

Classification of rotator cuff tears may yield useful information on diagnosis, treatment, prognosis, and evaluation of treatment results. The shape, localization, etiology, size, topography, pathology, and history of rotator cuff tears, together with the involvement of specific tendons in the occurrence of a tear may be of great value in the hand of expert interpreters. This article intends to give a brief description of rotator cuff tears by way of illustration.

Arthroscopy↗
PubMed2006

[General practitioner and mental diseases among children and adolescents].

BACKGROUND: Child and adolescent psychiatry in primary health care is scarcely investigated. The purpose of this article is to describe some aspects of the role of the general practitioner in the care of young patients with psychiatric problems. MATERIAL AND METHODS: Data were collected from four focus group interviews with 19 general practitioners. The material was analysed in a phenomenological perspective. The aim was to develop new and documented descriptions seen from the participants' point of view, interpreted within the framework of available knowledge about care for children and adolescents with psychiatric problems. RESULTS AND INTERPRETATION: The general practitioner is in a good position to provide psychiatric care for these patients because of his or her unique knowledge about the families and the local communities. They have their patients' confidence and acquired skills from their unselected practice to recognise serious and abnormal conditions. The majority of the informants did not feel sufficiently skilled in order to treat more specific child and adolescent psychiatric disorders. Some informants were actively involved in multidisciplinary networks concerning their young patients, while others were neither involved nor informed about it. In addition, local health and welfare services to a lesser extent involved these doctors. Because of this, children and adolescents who might have been assessed and treated in primary health care could be referred directly to specialists. A need for guidance and updating on relevant knowledge from the specialist health care was expressed. From the results we might assume that specialists might give some general practitioners the professional security needed in order to take on the role of medical co-coordinator of the multidisciplinary services to young patients with mental health problems.

Adolescent↗