The lack of consistency ofmuch medical judgment and decision making has long been appreciated. This is now recognised as an important source of error, and attempts to quantify it have been enhanced by an increasingly sophisticated statistical toolbox at the disposal of the clinical investigator. Variability in measurement and classification may arise from two sources, (a) a lack of consistency ...

Stirrup and Underwood make their argument for SPECT imaging from the perspective of ‘‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’’ They acknowledge the historic value of myocardial perfusion SPECT, as well as the limitations of SPECT technology. Their comments only partially reflect the societal yearning for more precise answers about the presence, extent, and prognosis of patients with coronary artery d...

Implicit in the idea of medical audit are two notions: the quantifying of medical practice in terms of treatment, procedures, outcomes, and complications; and the use of these data to exact some form of accountability. Therefore some sort of objective monitoring, or quality control, of practices or procedures is needed so that periods of suboptimal performance in relation to an agreed standard ...

Background: The Sense of Competence Questionnaire (SCQ) was originally developed for informal caregivers of patients with diagnosed dementia. In order to study the validity and usefulness of the SCQ when applied to informal caregivers of older adults with dementia symptoms (i.e. cognitive impairment, pre-diagnostic dementia or dementia in its early stages), we investigated the construct validit...

In this paper we introduce a practical first step towards the creation of an automated debate agent: a state-of-the-art recurrent predictive model for predicting debate winners. By having an accurate predictive model, we are able to objectively rate the quality of a statement made at a specific turn in a debate. The model is based on a recurrent neural network architecture with attention, which...