BACKGROUND The number of catheter related bloodstream infections (CRBSI) could be reduced and the outcome improved if specific standards in the quality of care were maintained. Therefore, the development of quality assurance (QA) procedures was commissioned to be included in the national mandatory QA programme in Germany. METHODS Indicators representing quality deficiencies and potential for ...

BACKGROUND Conventional phantom-based planar dosimetry (2D-PBD) quality assurance (QA) using gamma pass rate (GP (%)) is inadequate to reflect clinically relevant dose error in intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT), owing to a lack of information regarding patient anatomy and volumetric dose distribution. This study aimed to evaluate the dose distribution accuracy of IMRT delivery for na...

The major histocompatibility complex class Ib protein, Qa-1(b), serves as a ligand for murine CD94/NKG2A natural killer (NK) cell inhibitory receptors. The Qa-1(b) peptide-binding site is predominantly occupied by a single nonameric peptide, Qa-1 determinant modifier (Qdm), derived from the leader sequence of H-2D and L molecules. Five anchor residues were identified in this study by measuring ...

AIM To evaluate HBV quasispecies (QA) complexity in the preCore/Core regions in relation to HBeAg status, and explore QA changes under natural evolution and nucleoside analogue (NUC) treatment. METHODS Ultra-deep pyrosequencing of HBV preCore/Core regions in 30 sequential samples (baseline [diagnosis], treatment-free, and treatment-nonresponse) from 10 retrospectively selected patients groupe...

This paper examines the use of XML for modern extractionbased question answering (QA). We feel that the XML community has taken too narrow a view of structured retrieval, and that examining specific applications such as QA can give the XML retrieval community a broader view of the problems and challenges that structured retrieval faces. In our examination of QA, we argue that the next steps for...

Proper quality assurance (QA) of the radiotherapy process can be time-consuming and expensive. Many QA efforts, such as data export and import, are inefficient when done by humans. Additionally, humans can be unreliable, lose attention, and fail to complete critical steps that are required for smooth operations. In our group we have sought to break down the QA tasks into separate steps and to a...

PURPOSE VMAT involves multi-parameter modulations, thus presenting multi-dimensional challenges. Here, we present a viable approach to VMAT patient specific QA using EPID-based dosimetry for spine VMAT SRS casesMethods: Our spine VMAT SRS plans consisted of two full arcs and were optimized with 6 MV photons for a Varian Trilogy LINAC. The QA plans were computed by resetting all control points t...

Question Answering Systems (hereinafter QA systems) stand as a new alternative for Information Retrieval Systems. We conducted a study to evaluate the efficiency of QA systems as terminological sources for physicians, specialized translators, and users in general. To this end we analysed the performance of two open-domain and two restricteddomain QA systems. The research entailed a collection o...

In contrast with the booming increase of internet data, state-of-art QA (question answering) systems, otherwise, concerned data from specific domains or resources such as search engine snippets, online forums and Wikipedia in a somewhat isolated way. Users may welcome a more general QA system for its capability to answer questions of various sources, integrated from existed specialized sub-QA e...

X ray procedures which involve fluoroscopy often give significant radiation doses to patients. A valuable radiation protection procedure is the adoption of a quality assurance programme which will ensure the continual production of optimal quality images with the minimum necessary dose to the patient. Various publications exist which provide information on quality assurance (QA) and constancy c...