Clinical accuracy, defined as the ability to discriminate between states of health, is the fundamental property of any diagnostic test or system. It is readily expressed as clinical sensitivity and specificity, and elegantly represented by the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. To demonstrate the use of ROC curves, we reexamine a study of the ability of serum lipid and apolipoprotei...

between CVP and indexes of fluid responsiveness might be influenced by ongoing fluid losses or gains that were not necessarily easily measurable. Finally, in many clinical situations, the success or failure of fluid resuscitation measures is not determined by preset goals in terms of cardiac output or other indexes of cardiac performance but by criteria such as pressor requirements or blood lac...

The input prices indexes used in part to set payment rates for Medicare inpatient hospital services in both prospective payment system (PPS) and PPS-excluded hospitals were rebased from 1982 to 1987 beginning with payments for fiscal year 1991. In this article, the issues and evidence used to determine the composition of the revised hospital input price indexes are discussed. One issue is the n...

The medical-care sector often experiences changes in medical protocols and technologies that cause shifts in treatments. However, the commonly used medical-care price indexes reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics hold the mix of medical services fixed. In contrast, episode expenditure indexes, advocated by many health economists, track the full cost of disease treatment, even as treatments...

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it shows the properties that regional economics is implicitly assuming when “relative” inequality measures, such as the Gini coefficient and the generalized entropy family of indexes, are used to quantify the geographic concentration of economic activity. Second, it proposes a new geographic concentration index that is based on an “absolute” inequality m...

Appropriate cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) enhances quality of life and improves survival in patients with refractory heart failure due to systolic dysfunction and mechanical dyssynchrony. On the assumption that the main therapeutic mechanism of CRT is the correction of dyssynchronous myocardial contraction, imaging-based measures of dyssynchrony have been intensely investigated with t...

In this paper, we present a study on the characterization and the classification of binary digital objects. This study is performed using a set of values obtained by the computation of "shape and texture indexes". To get the shape indexes, we extract a set of data called "measures" from 2D shapes, like for example surface and perimeter. These indexes are then used as parameters of a function re...

Four conceptualizations of war zone stressor experiences were defined: traditional combat, atrocities-abusive violence, perceived threat, and malevolent environment. Items from the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study (NVVRS) were reviewed for content, and stressor indexes were created. Using retrospective self-report data from the NVVRS, intercorrelations among stressor scores and betw...