BACKGROUND Health care databases provide a widely used source of data for health care research, but their accuracy remains uncertain. We analyzed data from the 1985 National DRG Validation Study, which carefully reabstracted and reassigned ICD-9-CM diagnosis and procedure codes from a national sample of 7050 medical records, to determine whether coding accuracy had improved since the Institute ...

In automated negotiation systems consisting of self-interested agents, contracts have traditionally been binding. Such contracts do not allow agents to eeciently accommodate future events. Game theory has proposed contingency contracts to solve this problem. Among computational agents, contingency contracts are often impractical due to large numbers of interdependent and unanticipated future ev...

ABSTRACT Background: In vivo measurements of applied dose during radiotherapy treatment, is important to ensure accurate dose delivery to patients. Uncertainty in dose delivery should fall within ±5% of the prescribed dose as recommended by ICRU. Assessment of dose for radiotherapy applications performed with various types of detectors. In this study, semiconductor diodes were used which have s...

Introduction: Today, temporary or permanent venous catheters are being increasingly used in patients with renal failure. It seems a necessity to be familiar with their clinical applications and complications as well as their efficacy. The aim of this study was to compare the efficacy of two catheters of 16 cm and 20 cm lengths. Methods: This research project was a descriptive, analytic study...

We discuss CM abelian varieties in characteristic zero, and in positive characteristic. An abelian variety over a finite field is a CM abelian variety, as Tate proved. Can it be CM-lifted to characteristic zero? Does there exist an abelian variety of dimension g > 3 not isogenous with the Jacobian of an algebraic curve? Can we construct algebraic curves, say over C, where the Jacobian is a

We will introduce the notion of a variety (or more generally a motive) of CM-type which gen-eralises the well known notion of abelian variety of CM-type. Just as in that particular case it will turn out that the cohomology of the variety is determined by purely combinatorial data; the type of the variety. As applications we will show that the ℓ-adic representations are given by algebraic Hecke ...