The diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is often challenging, due to a wide spectrum of presentations, progressive changes in disease course over time, and, perhaps, most importantly, lack of a clinical or laboratory gold standard to define the presence or absence of disease. Several attempts at the creation of RA classification criteria have been undertaken; however, each time, there have b...

OBJECTIVE Allergic bronchopulmonary aspergillosis (ABPA) occurs in cases of atopic asthma and may result in important lung disease. Early diagnosis is essential as this disease is responsive to steroids. However, while asthma is common, ABPA is infrequently diagnosed. CT allows precision in the diagnosis of central bronchiectasis (which is virtually pathognomonic of ABPA) and may enable earlier...

background and objectives: arteriovenous fistula is a popular vascular access method for surgical treatmentof hemodialysis patients. the method, however, is associated with a high rate of early failure varying in the range of 20-60%. predicting early arteriovenous fistula failure and its risk factors can help reduce its incidence, its hospitalization rate, and associated costs. in this study, w...

Hypertonicity is the most common type of cerebral palsy consists of 85% of the affected children. It has a very complex nature making intervention and management very difficult. This article tries to make reader familiar with various types of intervention and introduce a new intervention process to help clinicians decide better. Literature was reviewed with two criteria including: identifying v...

this research aims to explain the key criteria of the process of place-identity formation in new urban development. based on the theories, views, and researches that are identified and cited in the framework of the mentioned purpose, eight key criteria are important and considered. these criteria are included “familiarity”, “environmental legibility and distinctiveness”, “satisfaction”, “enviro...

In this paper, we consider the step fixed-charge transportation problem (FCTP) in which a step fixed cost, sometimes called a setup cost, is incurred if another related variable assumes a nonzero value. In order to solve the problem, two metaheuristic, a spanning tree-based genetic algorithm (GA) and a spanning tree-based memetic algorithm (MA), are developed for this NP-hard problem. For compa...

This paper is a critical review of studies of educational programmes designed to improve prescription practices in ambulatory care. Scientific articles were selected from the following bibliographical indices: MEDLINE, IME, ICYT and ERIC. The searches covered the time period between 1988 and 1997. The search criteria included: primary-care, educat*, prescription* and other related keywords. The...