OBJECTIVES To examine the influence of sexual activity on the composition and consistency of the vaginal microbiota over time, and distribution of Gardnerella vaginalis clades in young women. METHODS Fifty-two participants from a university cohort were selected. Vaginal swabs were self-collected every 3-months for up to 12 months with 184 specimens analysed. The vaginal microbiota was charact...

OBJECTIVES To assess the diagnostic power of a new cervical consistency index (CCI) obtained using transvaginal sonography for the prediction of spontaneous preterm birth (PTB) and to establish reference ranges for this new variable. METHODS Included in this prospective cross-sectional study were 1115 singleton pregnancies at 5-36 weeks of gestation. Anteroposterior cervical diameter was meas...

BACKGROUND Accurate tumor bed delineation after breast-conserving surgery is important. However, consistency among observers on standard postoperative radiotherapy planning CT is low and volumes can be large due to seroma formation. A preoperative delineation of the tumor might be more consistent. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to determine the consistency of preoperative target volum...

background: the national institutes of health stroke scale (nihss) can objectively quantify the severity of stroke. however no information is available about psychometric properties and it’s applicability in the iranian population. objectives: the present study purposed by utilization of this instrument for neurological deficits measurement due to stroke, to determine the internal consistency r...

BACKGROUND One complication of total knee arthroplasty (TKA) is patella baja (PB). Patellar tendon shortening and joint line elevation are two main causes of PB. The purpose of this study was to determine the incidence of PB before and after TKA by measuring the patellar height and provide evidence for choosing a suitable index. METHODS In total, 256 consecutive patients who underwent primary...

Organ dysfunctions (comorbidities) were found to be associated with the outcome of treatment of a given primary disease and, in particular, cancer. In 2005, a hematopoietic cell transplantationcomorbidity index (HCT-CI) was introduced as a measure of organ dysfunctions that was suited for recipients of HCT. The HCT-CI was developed from the historical Charlson comorbidity index after introducin...

An item-fit index is a measure of how accurately a set of item responses can be predicted by the test design model. In a diagnostic assessment where items test student mastery on a cognitive model of skills, such an index is needed to determine the alignment between the item responses and skills that each item is designed to measure. In this study, we introduce the Item Consistency Index (ICI),...

The goal of this paper is to provide estimators of the tail index and extreme quantiles of a heavy-tailed random variable when it is righttruncated. The weak consistency and asymptotic normality of the estimators are established. The finite sample performance of our estimators is illustrated on a simulation study and we showcase our estimators on a real set of failure data. keywords: Asymptotic...