AIM To measure drug adherence in children with mild asthma receiving long term prophylactic treatment. METHODS Double blind randomised placebo controlled trial. Patients received inhaled budesonide 100 microg or 200 microg daily, or placebo for 27 months. All participants were asked to inhale medication or placebo from two different Turbuhalers (morning and evening) during the study. A total ...

Selecting a partial set of sensor nodes for execution and still maintaining the system sensing coverage is an important issue in wireless sensor networks. The previous research was concentrated on the location-aware sensor networks but little attention has been devoted to the location-free environments. This paper describes an approach to determining active nodes for full coverage without locat...

A priori estimates on the length of the primal-dual path that results from a MoreauYosida approximation of the feasible set for state constrained optimal control problems are derived. These bounds depend on the regularity of the state and the dimension of the problem. Numerical results indicate that the bounds are indeed sharp and are typically attained in cases where the active set consists of...

We propose an algorithm for the segmentation of blood vessels in the kind of CT-data typical for diagnostics in a clinical environment. Due to poor quality and variance in the properties of the data sets a two level approach using implicit active contours is chosen for the task. A fast pre-segmentation using the fast marching method followed by propagation of a sparse field level set allows a r...

INTRODUCTION Timely access to cancer treatment is expected to improve patients' satisfaction and treatment outcome. A joint multidisciplinary breast cancer clinic (JMDBCC) was developed in January 2011 which aimed to accelerate access to breast cancer care. Here, we assess the efficacy of this approach. METHODS Metric data of access to care in 2010 represent the pre-JMDBCC era while those dur...

We studied a supplier selection problem, where a buyer, while facing random demand, is to decide ordering quantities from a set of suppliers with different yields and prices.We provided themathematical formulation for the buyer’s profitmaximization problem and proposed a solution method based on a combination of the active set method and the Newton search procedure. Our computational study show...

A B S T R A C T In this document, we present a language which associates type construction principles to constraint logic programming. We show that it is very appropriate for language processing, providing more uniform, expressive and efficient tools and treatments. We introduce three kinds of constraints, that we exemplify by motivational examples. Finally, we give the procedural semantics of ...

BACKGROUND Treatment of cryptosporidiosis in HIV infected children has proved difficult and unsatisfactory with no drugs having demonstrable efficacy in controlled trials except nitazoxanide. We hypothesised that a prolonged course of treatment with high dose nitazoxanide would be effective in treating cryptosporidiosis in HIV positive Zambian children. METHODS We performed a double-blind, ra...

• Recommended as a possible option for short-term treatment of radicular pain (defined as pain in dermatomal distribution with corroborative findings of radiculopathy). The purpose of an ESI is to reduce pain and inflammation, thereby facilitating progress in more active treatment programs, reduction of medication use and avoiding surgery, but this treatment alone offers no significant long-ter...

Many medical studies are carried out to investigate the size of some effect, for example the treatment effect in a controlled clinical trial or the risk of exposure to some substance in an observational study. To this end it is usual to compare groups of subjects, such as those receiving active treatment with those getting placebo or those exposed with those not exposed. The comparison is often...