Deceased-donor livers are a scarce, lifesaving resource. For patients whose lives depend upon liver transplantation, policies for prioritizing allograft allocation are of ultimate importance. In the current paradigm, donor livers are allocated on the basis of medical urgency. Thus, the onus is on the transplant community to refine the allocation system continuously so that livers are targeted t...

Case Implant rehabilitation in patients suffering from rheumatoid arthritis (RA) has been reported an improvement in the quality of life. Implanttreatment success depends on many factors like achievement of appropriate osseointegration. There are many controversies about theinteractions between anti-rheumatic drugs and osseointegration. Moreover, the scientifc evidence regarding implant survi...

We are currently in the midst of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, and a second wave of flu in the fall and winter could lead to more hospitalizations for pneumonia. Recent pathologic and historic data from the 1918 influenza pandemic confirms that many, if not most, of the deaths in that pandemic were a result of secondary bacterial pneumonias. This means that a second wave of 2009 H1N1 pandemic influen...

The allocation of scarce, reusable resources over time to interconnected tasks in uncertain and dynamic environments in order to optimize a performance measure is a general problem which arises in many real-world domains. The paper overviews several recent distributed approaches to this problem and compares their properties, such as the guarantees of finding a (near-) optimal solution, their ro...

Relative to the magnitude of the epidemic, government funds available for HIV prevention are scarce. To optimize use of funds, we applied a mathematical model of the cost of HIV prevention interventions using national data on HIV risk-group size and HIV prevalence. This procedure suggested an allocation of funds across nine interventions to potentially prevent an estimated 20,000 infections ann...

Public health emergencies from natural disasters, infection, and man-made threats can present ethically or legally challenging questions about who will receive scarce resources. Federal and state governments have offered little guidance on how to prioritize distribution of limited resources. Several allocation proposals have appeared in the medical literature, but components of the proposed app...