BACKGROUND Medical practitioners have unmet information needs. Health care research dissemination suffers from both "supply" and "demand" problems. One possible solution is to develop methodologic search filters ("hedges") to improve the retrieval of clinically relevant and scientifically sound study reports from bibliographic databases. To develop and test such filters a hand search of the lit...

BACKGROUND Retinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) permits quantification of retinal layer atrophy relevant to assessment of neurodegeneration in multiple sclerosis (MS). Measurement artefacts may limit the use of OCT to MS research. OBJECTIVE An expert task force convened with the aim to provide guidance on the use of validated quality control (QC) criteria for the use of OCT in MS resear...

Study Design Reliability study. Purpose To examine the reliability of novice and experienced raters for measurements of the size and composition of the cervical extensor muscles using a thresholding technique. Overview of Literature Although some authors have reported on the dependability of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) measurements of the cervical muscles, there remains some variabilit...

BACKGROUND The grades of recommendation, assessment, development and evaluation (GRADE) approach is widely implemented in systematic reviews, health technology assessment and guideline development organisations throughout the world. We have previously reported on the development of the Semi-Automated Quality Assessment Tool (SAQAT), which enables a semi-automated validity assessment based on GR...

OBJECTIVE To examine the intra-rater, inter-rater, and inter-instrumental reliability of the digitalized pinch muscle strength dynamometer. METHOD Thirty normal subjects were examined for pinch strength, using both the Preston pinch gauge and the digitalized pinch dynamometer. The participants performed all pinch strength tests in the seated position as recommended by the American Society of ...

BACKGROUND Root cause analysis is a method to examine causes of unintended events. PRISMA (Prevention and Recovery Information System for Monitoring and Analysis: is a root cause analysis tool. With PRISMA, events are described in causal trees and root causes are subsequently classified with the Eindhoven Classification Model (ECM). It is important that root cause analysis tools are reliable, b...

OBJECTIVE To adapt the Pain Assessment in Advanced Dementia (PAINAD) scale to Brazilian Portuguese with respect to semantic equivalence and cultural aspects, and to evaluate the respective psychometric properties (validity, feasibility, clinical utility and inter-rater agreement). METHODS Two-stage descriptive, cross-sectional retrospective study involving cultural and semantic validation of ...

OBJECTIVES/HYPOTHESIS The future development of integrated automatic assessment in temporal bone virtual surgical simulators calls for validation against currently established assessment tools. This study aimed to explore the relationship between mastoidectomy final-product performance assessment in virtual simulation and traditional dissection training. STUDY DESIGN Prospective trial with bl...

Nowadays crowdsourcing is widely used in supervised machine learning to facilitate the collection of ratings for unlabelled training sets. In order to get good quality results it is worth rejecting results from noisy/unreliable raters, as soon as they are discovered. Many techniques for filtering unreliable raters rely on the presentation of training instances to the raters identified as most a...

Purpose: To investigate the reliability of Functional Movement Screen (FMS) in basketball players. A few studies have compared the reliability of FMS between raters with different experience in athletes. The purpose of this study was to compare the FMS scoring between the beginners and expert raters using video records.  Methods: This is a cross-sectional study. The study subjects compris...