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Heart rate variability (HRV) provides a non-invasive means of quantifying cardiac autonomic activity. It has been shown to be a powerful predictor of arrhythmia related complications in patients surviving the acute phase of myocardial infarction. This article highlights some of the important new clinical applications of this technology and provides a brief description of the technical methods involved in gathering and interpreting the data.
This short paragraph tries to identify the camel diseases compiled in the old chinese text according to modern veterinary terms. Due to the specific terminology of the camel treatise and its overall scarce symptomatology the diseases are difficult to evaluate. The majority of them obviously deal with acute infectious diseases which manifest themselves under such symptoms as high fever, depression, anorexia, cachexia, diarrhoea, general weakness, etc. But there are some diseases and ailments which can be interpreted in modern terms my means of the symptoms, descriptions and cures, e.g. mange, paradontosis and wry-neck syndrome.
BACKGROUND: Radiotherapy in cancer of the head and neck induces cutaneous and mucosal reactions. These must be carefully assessed and documentated to control the accuracy of individual treatment, the overall toxicity of particular treatment schedules, the efficacy of prophylaxis and treatment and to determine the adequate therapy of treatment sequelae depending on the severity of the reactions. The accurate classification of lesions according to internationally accepted schedules (WHO/RTOG/CTC) is indispensable for the comparison of radiotherapy treatment results and efficacy of supportive care. METHODS: While the treatment of cancer depends on tumor stage and medical circumstances of the patient and is more or less standardized, prophylaxis and treatment of side-effects is highly variable. Discussing an optimized prophylaxis and therapy of oral mucositis, the problem of accurate classification and documentation emerged. The verbal description of mucosal lesions is open to many subjective interpretations. Photographic documentation seems a suitable method to optimize the grading of toxicity. RESULTS: A photographic survey of typical lesions for each grade of toxicity is a tool to reach several aims in one step. Toxicity of an individual patient may be compared with representative photographic examples in daily routine to decide quickly on the grade of toxicity. Subjective differences due to intra- and interpersonal variability of the evaluating radiooncologist will be reduced. The efficacy of treatment can be proven by accurate documentation. Randomized clinical studies concerning prophylaxis and treatment of oral mucositis will provide more reliable results if evaluation of toxicity grading is standardized by photographs. CONCLUSIONS: Photographic documentation of lesions of the oral mucosa might be the best means to reduce interindividual subjectivity in grading. It is a valuable appendix to standard classification systems and only concerns the visible signs of mucosal lesions. However, the exact grading of mucositis is only possible with additional clinical information about pain and nutritional situation.
This paper reports on a prototype system for modeling and analyzing the expert reasoning involved in postulating enzyme kinetic mechanisms. It involves data-driven, theory-driven, and analogical components of reasoning within a generate-and-test cycle. Its central component is a set of domain-specific "filters" for matching experimentally and theoretically derived constraints. The input to the system consists of an abstracted qualitative description of an experiment and prior knowledge reported in the literature. Its output shows how the results match those expected for a set of postulated reaction mechanism models and also provides a trace of which features do or do not match each of the candidate topological models. Results, constraints, and models are all analyzed and compared to those from other, similar experiments. We deduced rules for interpreting the qualitative features of enzyme kinetic experiments from natural language descriptions in the literature and verified that the rules were correct by predicting the results for typical mechanisms. We obtained the correct behavior for all 37 states of a complex enzyme mechanism involving three substrates and three products. We tested our system on data from several published reports dealing with the enzyme hexokinase and obtained detailed listings of the differences in conclusions and interpretation reported in several journal articles. This system, which provides qualitative representations of enzyme kinetic results, should facilitate further experimentation on theory formation in enzyme kinetics and lead to more efficient experimental designs.
The organization and presentation of research data is discussed, with emphasis on tabular arrays, frequency distributions, graphs, and diagrams. Data can be summarized by using various descriptive statistics, including mean, median, mode, range, variance, and standard deviation. Basic principles of data interpretation are reviewed, including how to handle regative results.
The fetal sheep has been used to investigate a wide range of developmental and pathological processes such as the effect of severe hypoxia, asphyxia, or intrauterine infection on the brain but, until now, there has been no complete description of the normal anatomical organisation of neuronal groups to facilitate interpretation of these studies. In this paper, we describe the major nuclei of the fetal sheep brainstem based on a study of 5 fetal sheep at 140 days of gestation (G140: term is G147). Nuclei were identified with the aid of brain atlases available for other species, and from the previously published, partial descriptions available for the sheep. Fifty-five distinct nuclei were identified after Nissl (thionin) staining, and their caudal and rostral margins were defined. This paper provides an easy reference to the position of the major nuclei within the fetal sheep brainstem, and can be used as a guide for future studies examining the organisation of neuronal populations under normal and pathological conditions in this animal model.
The discrepancies between the current description of the CAMP test between Listeria monocytogenes and Rhodococcus equi in the latest edition of Bergey's Manual of Determinative Bacteriology (L. monocytogenes is described as CAMP test negative with R. equi) and routine findings (positive reactions are usually described in many laboratories) make it advisable to review the current interpretation of the CAMP test to avoid confusion among people working in microbiological laboratories. Overall, 98.4% of the L. monocytogenes strains examined in this study, regardless of their source or the intensity of their hemolytic activity, displayed a synergic hemolytic reaction (CAMP phenomenon) with R. equi, indicating that L. monocytogenes can generally be considered CAMP positive with R. equi. We propose that L. monocytogenes, together with Listeria ivanovii, should be considered CAMP test positive with R. equi (circular or racket and semicircular or shovel shapes, respectively).
INTRODUCTION: Art therapies have been established methods in oncology for many years. To what extent patients' pictures can be systematically described, and what connections to various illnesses are possibly thereby revealed, has been discussed in various specialized medical fields for over a hundred years. The following paper first presents insight into the present stand of research and then presents the results of the study. QUESTION: Are systematic analyses of pictures possible with the use of the instrument we have developed? Are pictorial differences evident within the researched group? METHOD: A previously developed instrument was submitted for expert questioning for the purpose of the study. The instrument that had been modified on the basis of these results could then be used in the study to interpret 162 pictures. Four different raters, three of whom were acquainted with neither the patients nor the pictures, interpreted these pictures independently of one another. RESULTS: The evaluation of the expert interpretations shows that this newly developed instrument is suitable for the differentiated description of patients' pictures. First important indications were drawn in regard to the pictorial differences between the two examined groups of cancer patients and patients with chronic polyarthritis. CONCLUSION: Systematic picture analyses are possible. A further analysis of the expert interpretations is necessary to clarify questions raised by the pictorial differences found in the various diagnostic groups.
With the fast growth of high-throughput strategies in Biology, there is a strong need to accelerate knowledge acquisition and organization of molecular functions. Unfortunately, although we know that there is a correlation between protein molecules and their functions, we are unable to clearly identify this link. Here, we revisit the current views of protein functions as well as their annotation, and we show that they are incompatible with unambiguous interpretations and the use of this knowledge. We describe herein a description scheme for biological processes based on elementary bricks of action that may be associated with biological molecules. To retrieve the descriptive quality found in annotations of other kinds of biological data, it was decided to develop a scheme involving four levels of abstraction: Basic Elements of Action, Biological Activities, Biological Functionalities and Biological Roles. This multi-level organization is a generic method; it allows for a description of biological processes by using a limited number of elementary bricks of action. Moreover, by using this description of biological processes, it should now be possible to clearly identify unambiguous relationships between the organization of biological processes and the structural or functional organizations of biological molecules.
Positions of the shoulder joint are commonly described in terms of degrees of humeral elevation in the principal planes. This approach is inadequate for an accurate and unambiguous description of functional arm movements that are not confined to these planes. In this paper, a general unambiguous method for describing shoulder positions is adopted and visualized in globe graphs. This facilitates the use and interpretation of the method in clinical practice. To illustrate this globe system of description, a healthy subject participated in the experiments. The shoulder position is described for several functional and standardized tasks for the upper limb with three angles: (1) the angle of the plane of elevation, (2) the angle of elevation within the plane of elevation, and (3) the angle of axial rotation. With these parameters, the position of the upper arm can be visualized as a position on a "globe" about the shoulderjoint. Although not perfect, the globe system provides the most unambiguous description of functional thoraco-humeral positions, which is easy to apply in clinical practice.
In this study 29 clinicians provided Q-sort descriptions for 36 patients' MMPI profiles prepared in the standard way or prepared according to Kincannon's (1968) Minimult or Faschingbauer's (1974) FAM. For each patient, correlations between Q sorts based on the standard profile and each short form profile were computed as a measure of interpretive similarity between the long form and short form. Correlations between Q sorts by independent raters both interpreting the long form profile served as the standard for comparison. Data analyses revealed that at least for the FAM, interpretive similarity between the short form and long form MMPI may be sufficient to warrant its clinical use for individual profile interpretation.
Research articles are an excellent tool for promoting active learning about the scientific process. One difficulty in teaching research articles is that they address a professional audience and often seek to be persuasive as well as informative. This essay discusses pedagogical strategies that are intended to help students differentiate the purely informative aspects of research articles, such as descriptions of the methods and results, from the persuasive aspects, such as interpretation of results and critical evaluation of the work of other scientists.
RATIONALE: The interpretation of dose-effect functions for self-administered drugs remains elusive. Since, for self-administered drugs, the amount of drug in an animal depends on its behavior, a mathematical theory of drug self-administration must include terms relevant to receptor theory, as well as a description of how an organism's behavior affects the amount of drug in the animal over time. OBJECTIVE: A theory was constructed in which the ability of a dose to maintain responding was described in terms of receptor theory and the function relating rate of responding to amount of drug self-administered. The main predictions of the theory were that: 1) there should be no ascending limb for drugs self-administered under ratio schedules, 2) running rate of response should not change as a function of dose and, 3) pause duration should be an exponential function of dose. RESULTS: Low doses of cocaine were either self-administered at high rates, or not at all. Run rates, though somewhat variable, did not change as an orderly function of dose. Pause duration could be well described by an exponential function. CONCLUSIONS: The theory provides an acceptable, though no doubt preliminary, description of drug self-administration.
In recent years there has been a series of studies in the field of neurolinguistics and neuropsychology investigating the comprehension and interpretation of indirect requests predominantly in right brain-damaged individuals. Although the findings of these studies seem to suggest that indirect requests may be perceived, comprehended, judged, or interpreted differently by some right brain-damaged individuals, until today no coherent picture pertaining to the description of the phenomenon under investigation has emerged. One reason for this dissatisfying situation may be that the features contributing to the interpretation of a request in terms of its level of directness have not been sufficiently investigated. In addition, the stimuli on which the experiments were based are not always clear-cut or specific if viewed within the framework of pragmatic theory. The article provides an introduction to some aspects of pragmatic theory and discusses five major studies on request comprehension in brain-damaged patients with reference to the components relevant to the realization of requests. Finally, suggestions concerning future research are made.
Over the past several decades, physical therapists have demonstrated an increasing responsiveness to the profession's obligation to generate objective evidence for examination and intervention strategies employed in physical therapy practice. This trend is evident, not only in the increasing number of journals that are publishing physical therapy research, but in the growing sophistication of research design and analytic options used by investigators. At the same time, physical therapists are held increasingly accountable for adopting an evidence-based approach to practice. The result for many of us is a growing concern about our ability to interpret study findings. The ability to independently weigh the importance to our own practice of evidence reported in a study requires that we understand the strengths and potential weaknesses of the sample, design, and analyses being used. The odds ratio (OR) is one of the analytic measures that has only recently appeared in the physical therapy literature. Because the OR may be unfamiliar to physical therapists, the goal of this paper is to provide a description of the simple OR and a discussion of its uses, interpretation, and potential limitations.
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This Letter presents a derivation of the relationship between the quantum and classical descriptions of angular momentum polarization. The results involve an "uncertainty broadening" term that directly expresses the restrictions imposed by the uncertainty principle. It is argued that neglect of this term can lead to error in the interpretation of theoretical or experimental angular momentum polarization data. Functions that take the uncertainty broadening into account, appropriate for use in quantum or quasiclassical descriptions of spatial distributions of angular momenta, are defined.
Substituted benzamidines are competitive inhibitors of trypsin and thrombin. The aim of this work is to find an interpretation for the relation between chemical structure of the inhibitors and the activity on the both enzymes by quantum chemical methods. For the description of the electrostatic interaction between inhibitor and enzyme the molecular electrostatic potential (MEP) was used. The interpretation took place with the help of a simple model of reactive groups in the enzyme. The obtained results were discussed and compared with those resulting from CNDO/2--reactivity indices. The application of the MEP shows its advantage to investigations of enzyme-inhibitor interactions.