The variability in the progression of Alzheimer's disease (AD) across patients has made identification of disease-delaying treatments difficult. Quantitative analysis of this variability has important implications in understanding the pathophysiology of AD and identifying disease-delaying treatments. The functional assessment staging (FAST) procedure characterizes seven stages in the course of ...

In this study, the outcomes of descriptive, experimental and informant-based methods of functional assessment were compared in four individuals with developmental disabilities who showed problem behaviors. Results indicated that the descriptive and experimental assessments were concordant in only one of the four cases whilst informant-based and experimental assessments were concordant in three ...

Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMR) has undergone considerable technology advances in recent years, so that it is now entering into mainstream cardiac imaging practice. In particular, CMR is proving to be a valuable imaging tool in the detection, morphological assessment and functional assessment of cardiomyopathies. Although our understanding of this broad group of heart disorders continu...

Non-invasive functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has opened a unique window into human and animal brain function, with a spatial resolution of a few millimeters and a temporal resolution of a few seconds. To further improve the current technical limitations of fMRI, various post-processing and data acquisition schemes were developed. Improved fMRI methods include variations of a conven...

BACKGROUND Instruments of functional evaluation for patients with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD), available from the literature, are limited and scarce, making clinical decision on Physiotherapy difficulty. OBJECTIVES To describe the process of creating a functional assessment scale in patients with DMD while going up and down the stairs, as well as to analyse the intra and inter-rater rel...

As stroke care has developed, there has been a need to robustly assess the efficacy of interventions both at the level of the individual stroke survivor and in the context of clinical trials. To describe stroke-survivor recovery meaningfully, more sophisticated measures are required than simple dichotomous end points, such as mortality or stroke recurrence. As stroke is an exemplar disabling lo...

In a systematic study of hybrid MR time-series with simulated "activation" (contrast-to-noise range 1-10) we investigated the power and compared the ability of the "novelty indices" (NI) kurtosis, negentropy, and 1-lag autocorrelation, to discriminate between potentially interesting ("structured") and uninteresting ("noisy") time-courses (TCs). NIs may be employed as preprocessing tools to focu...

Policymakers hoped to substitute a new, multi-purpose, functional assessment instrument, the minimum data set post-acute care (MDS-PAC), into the planned prospective payment system (PPS) for inpatient rehabilitation hospitals. PPS design requires a large database linking treatment costs with measures of the need for care, so the PPS was designed using the functional independence measure (FIM) d...

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a technique for measuring the efficiency of decision making units. In all models of the DEA, for each unit under assessment, the numerical efficiency is obtained which may be less than or equal to one. Given the possible large number of functional units, we use various ranking methods for evaluating units. One of the rating methods is Balance index and Topsis....

In this article we would like to present some recent applications of the B formal method to the development of safety critical system. These SIL3/SIL4 compliant systems have their functional specification based on a formal model. This model has been proved, guaranteeing a correct by construction behaviour of the system in absence of failure of its components. The constructive process used durin...