BACKGROUND In economic evaluation, cost per quality-adjusted life year (QALY) is generally used as an indicator for cost-effectiveness. Although JPY 5 million to 6 million (USD 60, 000 to 75,000) per QALY is frequently referred to as a threshold in Japan, do all QALYs have the same monetary value? METHODS To examine the relationship between severity of health status and monetary value of a QA...

The NGN convergence services will play an important role to consolidate the deployment of NGN at the initial phase. At the initial stage, scenario-based approach is expected to act as an efficient way to pre-design before the actual implementation of NGN, the subject for providing the convergence services to the customers. This paper first proposes a deployment model of the NGN convergence serv...

background and aims. tooth loss may lead to mastication disability, which in turn has important impact on individual’s quality of life. social and psychological factors have been shown to be associated with tooth loss. this study aimed to investigate the social determinants and prevalence of tooth loss, and presence of functional dentition among female heads of household under support of welfar...

Next-generation network (NGN) is a new concept and becoming important for future telecommunications networks. This paper illustrates five function layers of NGN architecture and discusses some end-to-end QoS (quality of service) for NGN (called NGNQoS) as: (1) One Application Layer that supports SIP protocol; (2) Network Control Layer that aims at overcoming the bottleneck problem at edge nodes...

In this study, the densities, excess molar volumes and partial molar volumes of four binary systems containing N,N-dimethyl acetamide (DMAc) with 1-alkanols (1-butanol up to 1-heptanol) are measured at 298.15 K. The results showed both constructive and expansive excess volumetric behavior for studying binary mixtures. Deviation values of heavy alcohol have more positive and less negative excess...

Biogas (BG), a renewable form of energy, can mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, unlike conventional gas. Thus, the Korean Government is considering the introduction of a BG mandate, in which the legal blend is 2% BG and 98% conventional gas (BG2), by 2020 to expand BG use. We should examine the public acceptability of the introduction, which will incur a rise in the gas price. This study attemp...