Attention, the intersection of cost and quality in health care

A method for assessing health care technology that models the demand on the clinician's attention exerted by patients' data (diagnostic and therapeutic) can provide a means for simultaneously reducing the cost and improving the quality of health care. The attentional demand exerted by patients' data can be measured by the amount of uncertainty in the data. Uncertainty can be expressed mathematically by the concept of entropy in information theory.     

From independence to interdependence. Creating synergistic healthcare teams

As the structure of healthcare institutions changes, nurse administrators frequently are being called on to lead interdisciplinary programs. To be successful in this new health paradigm, teams must strive to create total stakeholder satisfaction by adopting a mindset that work is interdependent, not independent, and then striving to work synergistically. The author presents 12 themes that emerged from a study investigating the essential elements of synergistic team relationships.     

Intermodality, retrospective image registration in the thorax

The purpose of this study was to develop an accurate, retrospectively applicable procedure for registering thoracic studies from different modalities in a short amount of time and with minimal operator intervention. METHODS: CT and PET studies were acquired from six patients. The pleural surfaces in both image sets were determined by segmenting based on 50% of the maximum soft-tissue value in the study. These surfaces were converted into three-dimensional volumes and used to register the CT and PET studies in three dimensions using a sum of least squares fitting approach. The registered PET study was then displayed in a hot metal scale overlayed on top of the gray scale CT study. The accuracy of the fit was evaluated through a phantom study and preliminary clinical evaluation. RESULTS: A phantom study was performed to determine the limits of this technique. The accuracy was determined to be less than 2.3 mm in the x and y direction and 3 mm in the z direction. Preliminary clinical evaluation was also performed with encouraging results. CONCLUSION: This technique accurately registers PET and CT images of the thorax, retrospectively, without the need for external fiducial markers or other a priori action.     

"Recovery of spatial alternation deficits following selective hippocampal destruction with kainic acid": Correction to Kesslak and Gage (1986).

Reports an error in "Recovery of spatial alternation deficits following selective hippocampal destruction with kainic acid" by J. Patrick Kesslak and Fred H. Gage (Behavioral Neuroscience, 1986[Apr], Vol 100[2], 280-283). In the aforementioned article, the degrees of freedom reported in the Results section are incorrect. In the sixth paragraph on page 281, the second sentence should read as follows: Results of the ANOVA indicated a significant effect for surgical treatments. F(2, 25)=25.44, p1986-21445-001.) Examined whether the sympathetic ingrowth of superior cervical ganglion (SCG) fibers sprouting into the hippocampus following kainic acid (KA) lesion of CA3 and CA4 pyramidal cells in male Sprague-Dawley rats would contribute to behavioral recovery. 31 Ss were trained on a forced-choice task. After reaching criterion performance levels, Ss received either KA (8 nM/0.4 μl) or saline injections into the hippocampus and were again tested on the forced-choice task. Half of the Ss had their SCG removed 35 days after injections, and all were again tested on the forced-choice task. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed Ss receiving KA took significantly longer to reach criterion following injections. Removal of the SCG after recovery reintroduced the performance deficit of KA-treated Ss on the alternation task; no other group showed any effect for SCG removal. Results indicate that the SCG may have a modulatory effect in behavioral recovery, although other mechanisms may also be operating. (22 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A two-stage cross correlation approach to template matching

Two-stage template matching with sum of absolute differences as the similarity measure has been developed by Vanderburg and Rosenfeld [1], [2]. This correspondence shows the development of two-stage template matching with cross correlation as the similarity measure. The threshold value of the first-stage is derived analytically and its validity is verified experimentally. Considerable speed-up over the one-stage process can be obtained by introducing only a small false dismissal probability.     

An Integrated Assessment of the Impacts of Hydrogen Economy on Transportation, Energy Use, and Air Emissions

This paper presents an analysis of the potential system-wide energy and air emissions implications of hydrogen fuel cell vehicle (H ₂-FCV) penetration into the U.S. light duty vehicle (LDV) fleet. The analysis uses the U.S. EPA MARKet ALlocation (MARKAL) technology database and model to simultaneously consider competition among alternative technologies and fuels, with a focus on the transportation and the electric sectors. Our modeled reference case suggests that economics alone would not yield H₂-FCV penetration by 2030. A parametric sensitivity analysis shows that H₂-FCV can become economically viable through reductions in H ₂-FCV costs, increases in the costs of competing vehicle technologies, and increases in oil prices. Alternative scenarios leading to H₂-FCV penetration are shown to result in very different patterns of total system energy usage depending on the conditions driving H₂-FCV penetration. Overall, the model suggests that total CO₂ emissions changes are complex, but that CO₂ emission levels tend to decrease slightly with H₂-FCV penetration. While carbon capture and sequestration technologies with H ₂ production and renewable technologies for H₂ production have the potential to achieve greater CO₂ reductions, these technologies are not economically competitive within our modeling time frame without additional drivers     

A survey on resource allocation in high performance distributed computing systems

An efficient resource allocation is a fundamental requirement in high performance computing (HPC) systems. Many projects are dedicated to large-scale distributed computing systems that have designed and developed resource allocation mechanisms with a variety of architectures and services. In our study, through analysis, a comprehensive survey for describing resource allocation in various HPCs is reported. The aim of the work is to aggregate under a joint framework, the existing solutions for HPC to provide a thorough analysis and characteristics of the resource management and allocation strategies. Resource allocation mechanisms and strategies play a vital role towards the performance improvement of all the HPCs classifications. Therefore, a comprehensive discussion of widely used resource allocation strategies deployed in HPC environment is required, which is one of the motivations of this survey. Moreover, we have classified the HPC systems into three broad categories, namely: (a) cluster, (b) grid, and (c) cloud systems and define the characteristics of each class by extracting sets of common attributes. All of the aforementioned systems are cataloged into pure software and hybrid/hardware solutions. The system classification is used to identify approaches followed by the implementation of existing resource allocation strategies that are widely presented in the literature.