BACKGROUND The Youden index, the sum of sensitivity and specificity minus one, is an index used for setting optimal thresholds on medical tests. DISCUSSION When using this index, one implicitly uses decision theory with a ratio of misclassification costs which is equal to one minus the prevalence proportion of the disease. It is doubtful whether this cost ratio truly represents the decision m...

In past few years, distributed hash table (DHT)-based P2P systems have been proven to be a promising way to manage decentralized index information and provide efficient lookup services. However, the skewness o regarding keywords contained in a multi-keyword query causes a query load imbalance that combines both routing and response load. This imbalance means long file retrieval latency that neg...

OBJECTIVE The aim of the study was to determine the cost-effectiveness, from the third-party payer viewpoint, of galantamine compared with usual care in the treatment of mild to moderately severe Alzheimer's disease (AD). METHODS An existing Markov model was adapted to Korea to predict long-term outcomes over a 5-year time horizon and to estimate the cost-effectiveness of galantamine for the ...

We set out to evaluate a clinical foot-screening programme in terms of primary outcomes (reductions in the incidence of ulcers and lower limb amputation) and process outcomes (compliance with screening, the number of patients not completing the programme and the use of chiropody services and prescribed footwear and cost). All but 4 of 2001 patients attending a general diabetic out-patient clini...

OBJECTIVE To assess the impact of patient cost-sharing for antihypertensive medications on the proportion of days covered (PDC) by antihypertensive medications, medical utilization, and health care expenditures among commercially insured individuals assigned to different risk categories. METHODS Participants were identified from the Consolidated Health Cost Guidelines (CHCG) database (January...

Background. We investigated the effect of laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy (LSG) on morbidly obese diabetics and examined the short-term impact of LSG on diabetic medication cost. Methods. A prospective database of consecutive bariatric patients was reviewed. Morbidly obese patients with type 2 diabetes who underwent LSG were included in the study. Age, gender, body mass index (BMI), diabetic me...

A number of IT offshore outsourcing projects fall short of being successful due to cultural issues. We performed an analysis of variance on Global Outsourcing Index data of CIOInsight.com and found that while cost is significantly important in determining the index as expected, the best scenario/treatment surprisingly is low cost and high cultural risk. Furthermore, such a treatment is found to...

We used a no-arbitrage, cost-of-carry pricing model to examine whether equity spot and futures markets are cointegrated. A stock index and its futures price should be cointegrated if the cost of carry is stationary. Otherwise, the appropriate cointegrating relationship is trivariate. We found that the Standard and Poor’s 500 index, associated futures series, and interest rate are all nonstation...

Although the lost profit from lost business is quite difficult to estimate for the queuing systems with cyclic demands, this paper presents a creative and effective approach to formulate waiting cost including balking loss and reneging loss. The balking probability is defined as the balking index θ1 multiplying by the expected queue length Lq and the reneging probability is defined as the reneg...