PURPOSE The multicenter Collaborative Longitudinal Evaluation of Keratoconus (CLEK) Study is a prospective, observational study of 1,209 keratoconus patients. We report on the prevalence of corneal scarring in these patients. We also report on the test-retest repeatability of corneal scar documentation at the slit-lamp biomicroscope by trained clinicians and by masked photograph readers and on ...

PURPOSE This study compared the Charlson comorbidity index (CCI) information derived from chart review and administrative systems to assess the completeness and agreement between scores, evaluate the capacity to predict 30-day and 1-year mortality in intensive care unit (ICU) patients, and compare the predictive capacity with that of the Simplified Acute Physiology Score (SAPS) II model. PATI...

OBJECTIVE To assess the accuracy of emergency physicians (EPs) in the interpretation of non-contrast CT Brain (NCCT Brain) by examining the inter rater reliability between EPs and radiology specialists. METHODOLOGY A four months prospective cohort study was conducted at emergency department of King Khalid University Hospital (KKUH), Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. We studied the daily performance of ou...

INTRODUCTION This quality assurance project was designed to determine the reliability, completeness and comprehensiveness of the data entered into Niday Perinatal Database. METHODS Quality of the data was measured by comparing data re-abstracted from the patient record to the original data entered into the Niday Perinatal Database. A representative sample of hospitals in Ontario was selected ...

Researchers have criticized chance-corrected agreement statistics, particularly the Kappa statistic, as being very sensitive to raters’ classification probabilities (marginal probabilities) and to trait prevalence in the subject population. Consequently, several authors have suggested that marginal probabilities be tested for homogeneity and that any comparison between reliability studies be pr...

Recent evidence supports the positive effects of external intervention during specific sleep stages (e.g. enhanced memory consolidation and depression relief). To enable timely intervention, online automated sleep staging is required and preferably with short latency. In this paper, we propose an approach to achieve this based on the analysis of spectral features of a single electroencephalogra...

BACKGROUND: In the era of novel antiviral drugs for treatment of chronic viral hepatitis C (HCV), the diagnosis of liver cirrhosis guides both the choice of the drug regimen, duration of treatment and subsequent follow up. Transient elastography (TE) (fibroscan) is a recent, non invasive and reliable method for the diagnosis of cirrhosis in patients with chronic HCV. We aimed at demonstrating t...

OBJECTIVE To assess the reliability of the Kids' Activity and Nutrition Questionnaire (KAN-Q) as part of a tiered process for developing Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program-Education tools. METHODS The KAN-Q was administered at 2 time points to assess internal consistency using standardized values of Cronbach α and test-retest reliability using the intraclass correlation coefficient for...

For the evaluation of results from remote sensing and high-resolution spatial models it is often necessary to assess the similarity of sets of maps. This paper describes a method to compare raster maps of categorical data. The method applies fuzzy set theory and involves both fuzziness of location and fuzziness of category. The fuzzy comparison yields a map, which specifies for each cell the de...