Conventional Health Technology Assessment (HTA) is usually conducted at a point in time at which the development of the respective technology may no longer be influenced. By this time developers and/or purchasers may have misinvested resources. Thus the demand for Technology Assessment (TA) which incorporates appropriate methods during early development stages of a technology becomes apparent. ...

In the past two decades, setting up independent health technology assessment (HTA) agencies has become a popular tool to inform reimbursement decision-making in health care, spreading from Northern European countries across Western Europe but much less so to post-communist countries. Structural political science explanations leave gaps in clarifying this diffusion pattern. This paper proposes a...

The current investigation evaluated repertoires that may be related to performance on auditory-to-visual conditional discrimination training with 9 students who had been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. The skills included in the assessment were matching, imitation, scanning, an auditory discrimination, and a visual discrimination. The results of the skills assessment showed that 4 part...

UNLABELLED Many authors have discussed the effects of visual stimulations on visual functions, but there is no research about the effects on using vision in everyday activities (i.e. functional vision). Children with perinatal brain damage can develop cerebral visual impairment with preserved visual functions (e.g. visual acuity, contrast sensitivity) but poor functional vision. OBJECTIVE Our...

Content-aware image retargeting has drawn much attention in image and vision research in recent years. However, existing methods are very difficult to ensure that the result images from retargeting achieve good visual effect on the whole, since these methods mainly focus on spatial image information. In this paper, we propose a new approach on content-aware image retargeting based on visual eff...

BACKGROUND Electrical impedance tomography (EIT) is a new non-invasive, mobile screening method which does not use ionizing radiation to the human breast; allows conducting quantitative assessment of the images besides the visual interpretation. The aim of this study was to correlate the quantitative assessment and visual interpretation of breast electrical impedance tomographs and associated f...

BACKGROUND The purpose of this study is to validate the use of visual evoked potential (VEP) to objectively quantify visual acuity in normal and amblyopic patients, and determine if it is possible to predict visual acuity in disability assessment to register visual pathway lesions. METHODS A retrospective chart review was conducted of patients diagnosed with normal vision, unilateral amblyopi...

visual memory is an important cognitive ability, which has been studied in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (asds). in such studies meaningful shapes were used more frequently. since meaningless shapes provide a better assessment of short term visual memory, in this study we used them to evaluate visual memory in children and adolescents with asds compared to the normal group.four vis...