BACKGROUND The scientific evidence-base for policies to tackle health inequalities is limited. Natural policy experiments (NPE) have drawn increasing attention as a means to evaluating the effects of policies on health. Several analytical methods can be used to evaluate the outcomes of NPEs in terms of average population health, but it is unclear whether they can also be used to assess the outc...

Epidemiology analyzes differences in states of health and disease of populations. Public Policies are established considering inequities associated with ethnicity and race. In this context, the identification of vulnerable groups for concentration of resources is relevant. Nevertheless, the lack of a clear definition of these variables might lead to biased results and interpretations. Two probl...

The analysis of microarray data is a key to understanding the influence and role of genes. Visualization is one way to support analysts in finding potentially important genes. However, most visualization tools focus on representing single genes, important gene combinations are not always easy to spot and compare with existing approaches. What we propose here is the novel idea of making gene com...

Integration of spatial data into multidimensional models leads to the concept of Spatial OLAP (SOLAP). Usually, SOLAP models exploit discrete spatial data. Few works integrate continuous field data into dimensions and measures. In this paper, we provide a multidimensional model that supports measures and dimension as continuous field data, independently of their implementation.

Data warehousing and OLAP applications must nowadays handle complex data that are not only numerical or symbolic. The XML language is well-suited to logically and physically represent complex data. However, its usage induces new theoretical and practical challenges at the modeling, storage and analysis levels; and a new trend toward XML warehousing has been emerging for a couple of years. Unfor...

What type of analyses are we to expect when we read a study that attempts to measure success or failure of a specific spine procedure? Most analyses are divided into descriptive and analytical statistics, which should be clearly described in the methods section of a study. Descriptive statistics are most frequently used to provide general information about the patients and factors that may be r...

A number of analytical methods for constituents commonly measured in distillers dried grains (DDG) are practiced in laboratories serving the agricultural sector. A large interlaboratory variability among results has been observed in the industry. Methods for moisture, crude fat, and crude fiber are empirical, thus part of this variability can be attributed to the use of different methods of ana...

Within dental-guided surgery, there has been a lack of analytical methods for optimizing the treatment of the rehabilitation concepts regarding geometrical variation. The purpose of this study is to find the source of the greatest geometrical variation contributor and sensitivity contributor with the help of virtual variation simulation of a dental drilland implant-guided surgery process using ...

We describe a control system to automatically distribute antibody-functionalized beads to addressable assay chambers within a PDMS microfluidic device. The system used real-time image acquisition and processing to manage the valve states required to sort beads with unit precision. The image processing component of the control system correctly counted the number of beads in 99.81% of images (268...