OBJECTIVE Occupational therapists, as members of early intervention (El) teams, are responsible for contributing to equitable decision making regarding service eligibility. Because the two editions of the Peabody Developmental Motor Scales (PDMS) are often used in this process, it is important to study these measures. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the implications of using...

Lung cancer risk prediction models are considered more accurate than the eligibility criteria based on age and smoking in identification of high-risk individuals for screening. We externally validated four lung cancer risk prediction models (Bach, Spitz, LLP, and PLCO(M2012)) among 20,700 ever smokers in the EPIC-Germany cohort. High-risk subjects were identified using the eligibility criteria ...

We exploit the existence of substantial variation in state policies toward public health insurance for children between 1990 and 2002 to estimate the economic and political determinants of state eligibility levels. Controlling for state and year effects, eligibility levels are not significantly associated with either the percentage of uninsured children in the state or the eligibility policy of...

BACKGROUND New WHO guidelines recommend ART initiation for HIV-positive persons with CD4 cell counts ≤500 cells/µL, a higher threshold than was previously recommended. Country decision makers must consider whether to further expand ART eligibility accordingly. METHODS We used multiple independent mathematical models in four settings-South Africa, Zambia, India, and Vietnam-to evaluate the pot...

Abstract Introduction The VICTORIA trial demonstrated the efficacy and safety of vericiguat in patients with worsening heart failure (HF) an ejection fraction (EF) <45%. Trial selection criteria might limit external validity, perceived low generalisability may be underlying reason for poor implementation new treatments. Purpose We calculated proportions who would eligible according to tr...

BACKGROUND The prevalence estimates of statin eligibility among Hispanic/Latinos living in the United States under the new 2013 American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association (ACC/AHA) cholesterol treatment guidelines are not known. METHODS AND RESULTS We estimated prevalence of statin eligibility under 2013 ACC/AHA and 3rd National Cholesterol Education Program Adult Treatment Pan...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Endovascular treatment (EVT) is a new standard of care for selected, large vessel occlusive strokes. We aimed to determine frequency of potentially eligible patients for intravenous thrombolysis (IVT) and EVT in comprehensive stroke centers. In addition, predictors of EVT eligibility were derived. METHODS Patients from a stroke center-based registry (2003-2014), admitte...

In this paper, we propose a rule-based formalization of eligibility criteria for clinical trials. The rule-based formalization is implemented by using the logic programming language Prolog. Compared with existing formalizations such as pattern-based and scriptbased languages, the rule-based formalization has the advantages of being declarative, expressive, reusable and easy to maintain. Our rul...

Clinical text, such as clinical trial eligibility criteria, is largely underused in state-of-the-art medical search engines due to difficulties of accurate parsing. This paper proposes a novel methodology to derive a semantic index for clinical eligibility documents based on a controlled vocabulary of frequent tags, which are automatically mined from the text. We applied this method to eligibil...

In this paper, a Branch-and-Bound (B&B) algorithm is presented to solve the problem of minimizing the maximum completion time Cmax on unrelated parallel machines with machine eligibility restrictions when job preemption is not allowed. A customized lower bound, a search and a branching strategy are developed for the B&B. A machine eligibility factor is also introduced to represent the percentag...