This paper summarises key activities initiated and the progress achieved between April 1993 and June 2002 in implementing the Three Rs in one of ECVAM's priority areas - the production and quality control of biologicals. These have included: organising nine key workshops; financially supporting and/or participating in a number of prevalidation and/or validation studies; financial contributions ...

A method for the speciication of software for safety-critical applications is presented. It is based on a combination of the formal speciication languages Z and real-time CSP. Guidelines for the development and validation of speciications are provided. Speciication development is supported by reference architectures that can serve as templates for the speciication of concrete systems. Validatio...

BACKGROUND International interest in clinical practice guidelines has never been greater but many published guidelines do not meet the basic quality requirements. There have been renewed calls for validated criteria to assess the quality of guidelines. OBJECTIVE To develop and validate an international instrument for assessing the quality of the process and reporting of clinical practice guid...

The creation and validation of product line software architectures are inherently more complex than those of software architectures for single systems. This paper compares a process for creating and evaluating a traditional, one-ofa-kind software architecture with one for a reference software architecture. The comparison is done in the context of PuLSE-DSSA, a customizable process that integrat...

BACKGROUND Drug prescribing errors are frequent in the hospital setting and pharmacists play an important role in detection of these errors. The objectives of this study are (1) to describe the drug prescribing errors rate during the patient's stay, (2) to find which characteristics for a prescribing error are the most predictive of their reproduction the next day despite pharmacist's alert (i....

PURPOSE To investigate the behavior of whole-head and local specific absorption rate (SAR) as a function of trajectory acceleration factor and target excitation pattern due to the parallel transmission (pTX) of spatially tailored excitations at 7T. MATERIALS AND METHODS Finite-difference time domain (FDTD) simulations in a multitissue head model were used to obtain B(1) (+) and electric field...

A method for the speciication of software for safety-critical applications is presented. It is based on a combination of the formal speciication languages Z and real-time CSP. Guidelines for the development and validation of speciications are provided. Speciication development is supported by reference architectures that can serve as templates for the speciication of concrete systems. Validatio...

Advances in autonomous agent technology have resulted in the potential for implementations of multiple agents to act as psychological theories of complex social and affective phenomena. Simulating attachment behaviours in infancy provides a relatively simple starting point for this type of theory development. The presence of neurophysiological, psychological and other types of data facilitates ...

introduction: the objective of the study was to develop an instrument to measure patient education content. materials and methods: first of all, literature searches were undertaken to determine current national and international patient education questionnaires. then a forty five item questionnaire was developed. questionnaires were filled by 399 patients in surgery wards of kerman medical hosp...