PURPOSE The increasing incidence of thyroid cancer worldwide has drawn attention to the needs for assessing and managing health-related quality of life (HRQoL) of thyroid cancer survivors. We conducted this study to validate the Korean version of the thyroid cancer-specific quality of life (THYCA-QoL) questionnaire. METHODS Data obtained from 227 thyroid cancer survivors were analyzed using s...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the reliability of direct observation for measuring intrapartum care and compare this method with clinical audits using objective criteria based on patients' medical charts. DESIGN Cross-sectional study, data collected by two independent evaluators. SETTING Hospital in Dakar, Senegal. PARTICIPANTS Thirty consecutive intrapartum care episodes provided by midwives and ...

The behaviour of the mean Euler–Poincaré characteristic and mean Betti’s numbers in the Griffiths’ model on Z2 (the Q-states Ising model) as functions of the temperature is investigated through intensive Monte Carlo simulations. We also consider these quantities for each color a in the state space SQ = {−Q,−Q+2, . . . , Q} of the model. We find that these topological invariants show a sharp tra...

Statistical process control is a method of monitoring product in its development process using statistical techniques with the presumption that the products produced under identical process condition shall not always be alike with respect to some quality characteristic(s). However, if the observed variations are with in the tolerable limits statistical process control (SPC) methods would pass t...

Stroke is one of the most important causes of death in the world and the leading cause of serious, long-term disability. There is an urgent need for better techniques to diagnose patients at risk of stroke based on the measurements of the intima media thickness (IMT) and the segmentation of the atherosclerotic carotid plaque. The objective of this work was to carry out a comparative evaluation ...

In a paper published in the International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry (Sanchez-Arenas et al. 2014), Sanchez-Arenas et al. concern themselves with the reliability of the EQ-5D-3L, which they refer to solely as the EQ-5D. They investigate both the reliability of the five single dimensions and the reliability of the whole instrument. Sanchez-Arenas et al. report that they have determined the r...

BACKGROUND The Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy-Leukemia (FACT-Leu) scale, a leukemia-specific instrument for determining the health-related quality of life (HRQOL) in patients with leukemia, had been developed and validated, but there have been no reports on the development of a simplified Chinese version of this scale. This is a new exploration to analyze the reliability of the HRQOL m...

The behaviour of the mean Euler–Poincaré characteristic and mean Betti’s numbers in the Ising model with arbitrary spin on Z2 as functions of the temperature is investigated through intensive Monte Carlo simulations. We also consider these quantities for each color a in the state space SQ = {−Q,−Q + 2, . . . , Q} of the model. We find that these topological invariants show a sharp transition at...