BACKGROUND A previous study had identified 45 items assessing the impact of atopic dermatitis (AD) on the whole family. From these it was intended to develop two separate scales, one assessing impact on carers and the other determining the effect on the child. METHODS The 45 items were included in three clinical trials designed to test the efficacy of a new topical treatment (pimecrolimus, El...

Diffusion MRI (dMRI) is widely used to measure microstructural features of brain white matter, but commonly used dMRI measures have limited capacity to resolve the orientation structure of complex fiber architectures. While several promising new approaches have been proposed, direct quantitative validation of these methods against relevant histological architectures remains missing. In this stu...

Advanced synchronization networks are provided with monitoring systems that allow verifying continuously, in real time, the performance achieved in timing distribution. In this paper, centralized and decentralized strategies for performance monitoring in synchronization networks are first outlined, by highlighting system architectures, advantages and drawbacks. Then, advanced algorithms for imp...

The dynamic nature of service-oriented architectures poses new challenges to system validation. Traditional testing is unable to cope with certain aspects of a service–oriented system validation, essentially because of the impossibility to test all (often unforeseen) system’s configurations. On the other hand, run–time monitoring, while able to deal with the intrinsic dynamism and adaptiveness ...

This paper describes grounded analysis (GA) as a method to discover grounded theories (GTs) be subjected to later empirical validation. The paper shows that a good instance of Requirements Engineering (RE) or Architecture Recovery (AR) is an instance of GA for the purpose of discovering the artifacts that RE or AR produces. Therefore, these artifacts are also GTs.

This paper proposes a modeling, simulation, and validation framework for large-scale technical Cyber-physical Systems of Systems with distributed management architectures. The goal of the framework, which is based on the freely available Modelica language for object-oriented heterogeneous modeling, is to reduce the (currently very large) engineering effort for distributed management architectur...

The article presents the bases of a research aimed in the long run towards the construction of an « ambient environment » for discrete mathematics, a construction which would not only facilitate a first acquaintance to this mathematical field, but would also provide an alternative approach to some transversal concepts, such as proof and modelization. First, we give some results of our study abo...

Theories from social and behavioural science can make an important contribution to the process of developing a conceptual framework for improving use of clinical practice guidelines and clinician performance. A conceptual framework for guideline dissemination and implementation is presented which draws on relevant concepts from diVusion of innovation theory, the transtheoretical model of behavi...

This report summarizes research on the development of objectively scored language and emotionality scales for a five-card, orally administered and tape- reqorded version of the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) used in the Health Examination Survey (HES) of children conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics in 1963-65. National norms for children ages 6-11 are presented for these sc...

A growing methodology, known as the systems factorial technology (SFT), is being developed to diagnose the types of information-processing architectures (serial, parallel, or coactive) and stopping rules (exhaustive or self-terminating) that operate in tasks of multidimensional perception. Whereas most previous applications of SFT have been in domains of simple detection and visual-memory searc...