INTRODUCTION Dreams might represent a window on altered states of consciousness with relevance to psychotic experiences, where reality monitoring is impaired. We examined reality monitoring in healthy, non-psychotic individuals with varying degrees of dream awareness using a task designed to assess confabulatory memory errors - a confusion regarding reality whereby information from the past fee...

The basic functions of a Coronary Care Unit (CCU) is continuous and intensive monitoring of cardiac function, both invasive and non-invasive. Monitoring techniques serve three main purposes, namely to protect the patient by ensuring that any abnormal variations are immediately evident; to indicate the pattern of the patient's response to treatment so that it can be modified as required; and to ...

Ready reckoners are used in the clinical setting as a tool for the estimation of nutrient intake. With increasing opportunities for nutrition research, ready reckoners may provide for a more rapid analysis of nutritional intake than computerised methods, often seen as the gold standard for nutritional analysis. This research aimed to determine the level of agreement between ready reckoner and c...

OBJECTIVE To determine the extent to which computerised decision support can improve concordance of multidisciplinary teams with therapeutic decisions recommended by guidelines. DESIGN Multicentre cluster randomised trial. PARTICIPANTS Multidisciplinary cardiac rehabilitation teams in Dutch centres and their cardiac rehabilitation patients. INTERVENTIONS Teams received an electronic patie...

To identity those patients with hydrocephalus as a basis for their presenile dementia it is suggested that such patients be screened non-invasively by CT scan. If there is ventricular dilatation and small cortical sulci, intracranial pressure should be monitored for 48 hours to detect `B' waves. Patients with significant `B' waves (10 mmHg) for at least two hours in the day might benefit from a...

In Italy, the 21 regional health authorities are in charge of organising and implementing their own vaccination strategy, based on the national vaccine plan. Immunisation coverage varies greatly among the regions for certain vaccines. Efforts to increase childhood immunisation coverage have included initiatives to develop and implement computerised immunisation registers in as many regions as p...

Conventional CT scan the scan is taken slice by slice and after each slice the scan stops and moves down to the next slice eg, from the top of the abdomen down to the pelvis. This requires patients to hold their breath to avoid movement artefact. Spiral/helical CT scan this is a continuous scan which is taken in a spiral fashion. It is a much quicker process and the scanned images are contiguous.

The advent of computerised electrocardiography has been of prime importance for the storage and retrieval of data, but none of the available systems is of universal application for analysis of patterns. Future needs require hierarchical systems of increasing degrees of complexity, depending on the source of requests, and there should be appropriate provision for review by cardiologists before t...