OBJECTIVES Based on the important changes in South Africa since 2009 and the Antiretroviral Treatment Guideline 2013 recommendations, we explored the cost-effectiveness of different strategy combinations according to the South African HIV-infected mothers' prompt treatments and different feeding patterns. STUDY DESIGN A decision analytic model was applied to simulate cohorts of 10,000 HIV-inf...

We study maintenance of a complex dynamic system consisting of ageing and unobservable components under a predetermined threshold reliability level. Our aim is to construct an optimum replacement policy for the components of the system by minimizing total number of replacements or total replacement cost. We represent the problem with dynamic Bayesian networks (DBNs). We prove that under the exi...

Aims Patients receiving cardiac resynchronization therapy defibrillators (CRT-Ds) are likely to undergo one or more device replacements, mainly for battery depletion. We assessed the economic impact of battery depletion on the overall cost of CRT-D treatment from the perspectives of the healthcare system and the hospital. We also compared devices of different generations and from different manu...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Efficiency-based healthcare decision-making has been widely accepted for some time, with cost per quality-adjusted life year (QALY) as the main outcome measure. Nevertheless, for numerous medical procedures, little data are available on the cost per QALY gained. The aim of the present study was to calculate the cost per QALY gained with primary hip and knee replacement...

This paper proposes an e cient implementation of method calls using the Hierarchy-Relative Naming Scheme. The relative cost of the straightforward implementation of the scheme increases dramatically when virtual address space sharing optimization and replacement with local procedure calls is taken into account. We designed a method call instruction sequence that is as e cient as a simple proced...

A Web proxy must accurately predict network performance between itself and its servers and clients in order to make good distillation decisions. In this paper, we show that the current approaches to make such predictions — either assuming the proxy is well-connected to all servers or using past observations — are insufficient. We propose a new prediction method, estimation with uncertainty, tha...

ƒ In each study, we used a simulation model to identify a subpopulation based on age and clinical risk, for whom we used genetic testing to find intensified prevention measures, which was optimally costeffective. ƒ As more genetic tests become available, this method can be used to identify screening strategies that maximize cost-effectiveness. ƒ We develop a framework for stratified costeffecti...

  A novel optimal single machine replacement policy using a single as well as a two-stage decision making process is proposed based on the quality of items produced. In a stage of this policy, if the number of defective items in a sample of produced items is more than an upper threshold, the machine is replaced. However, the machine is not replaced if the number of defective items is less than ...

Many countries have been triggered to provide a new energy policy which promotes renewable energy applications because of public awareness to reduce the global warming and rising in fuel prices. Renewable energy sources such as solar energy are green and promising energy in the future for widespread use. Combining renewable energy sources with battery makes electricity supply more economical an...