Accurate quantitation of mitral regurgitation offers a major clinical dilemma. The clinical clues depend largely on cardiac auscultation, the accuracy of which needs to be rigorously tested (1). Mitral regurgitation may not be associated with a clinically audible systolic murmur, and the auscultatory features of severity of regurgitation are generally based on increased volume of diastolic flow...

background and objectives: the reliability of hospital assessment results depends on the appropriateness of the indicators used. in this study, we systematically review the literature to identify the major indicators of hospital performance evaluation, as employed in performance assessment literature.methods: literature databases including pubmed, scopus, science direct, google scholar, doja, a...

The international animal health community is advocating a more widespread use of quantitative risk assessment in making international trade decisions. In this article, the authors explain why quantitative risk assessment is a valuable tool, outline a process with key steps for developing a quantitative risk assessment, and describe a method for quantifying the uncertainty associated with the re...

Chemical category formation and the use of read-across to fill data gaps are seen as crucial methods for the risk assessment of chemicals under the REACH legislation. Such methods are especially important if the goal of reducing the number of experimental animals used in toxicological testing is going to be met. One of the crucial steps in the development of a chemical category is the definitio...

BACKGROUND Calcaneal quantitative ultrasound (QUS) is a useful tool in osteoporosis screening. However, QUS device may not be available at all primary health care settings. Osteoporosis self-assessment tool for Asians (OSTA) is a simple algorithm for osteoporosis screening that does not require any sophisticated instruments. This study explored the possibility of replacing QUS with OSTA by dete...

Individual structural alerts often fail to accurately predict chemical toxicity as they tend to overlook the moderating effects of other co-occurring alerts. Features are said to have statistical interaction effects when one changes or modulates the effect of another on the target property. Here we introduce Chemistry-Wide Association Study (CWAS; by analogy with GWAS in genomics) to systematic...

Physiologically based toxicokinetic [(PBTK), or alternatively referred to as physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK)] models are quantitative descriptions of absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion of chemicals in biota. PBTK models are increasingly being used as an effective tool for designing toxicology experiments and for conducting extrapolations essential for risk assessme...

This mixed-methods design study investigated Iranian TOEFL iBT and IELTS teachers’ views on thestructure of the TOEFL iBT and IELTS receptive and productive sections from the yardsticks of dynamic and static assessment. It also examined the conformity level of the receptive and productive sections of TOEFL iBT and IELTS to dynamic assessment and static assessment standards. To achieve the objec...