Plos One
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Comparative Study
Comparative evaluation of cerebral gliomas using rCBV measurements during sequential acquisition of T1-perfusion and T2*-perfusion MRI.
To assess the inter-technique agreement of relative cerebral blood volume (rCBV) measurements obtained using T1- and T2*-perfusion MRI on 3T scanner in glioma patients. ⋯ In the current study, T1- and T2*-perfusion showed similar diagnostic performance for discrimination of grade III and grade IV gliomas; however, T1-perfusion was found to be better for the evaluation of tumors with intratumoral hemorrhage, postoperative recurrent tumors, and lesions near skull base. We conclude that T1-perfusion MRI with a single dose of contrast could be used as an alternative to T2*-perfusion to overcome the issues associated with this technique in brain tumors for reliable perfusion quantification.
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Observational Study
Evaluation of antibiotic dispensing practice in community pharmacies in Jordan: A cross sectional study.
It is well known that the emergence of antibiotic resistance is linked to the misuse and overuse of antibiotics. Misuse includes self-medication and the inappropriate use of antibiotics because of improper dosage or improper duration than recommended. This study investigated three patterns of dispensing antibiotics in a sample of community pharmacies in Jordan. ⋯ In conclusion, a significant proportion of antibiotics are dispensed without prescription in Jordan. Moreover, a considerable proportion of prescribed antibiotics were inappropriate for the conditions concerned. This indicates the importance of enforcing the Jordanian regulations prohibiting the dispensing of nonprescription antibiotics and the implementation of continuous education to physicians and pharmacists to increase awareness about the emergence of antibiotic resistance.
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Outcome measurement is fundamental to assess needs and priority of care in palliative care settings. The Integrated Palliative care Outcome Scale (IPOS) was developed from earlier versions of this tool. Its use is encouraged to ameliorate the assessment of individual outcomes in palliative care settings. This study aimed to translate and culturally adapt IPOS into Italian, and explore its face and content validity. ⋯ The Italian IPOS, in its four versions directed to patients or staff and with a recall period of 3 or 7 days, has face and content validity for use in clinical settings and is ready for further psychometric and clinimetric validation.
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As part of the Models of Child Health Appraised (MOCHA) project, this study aimed to answer the following research questions: 1) How do European citizens perceive the quality of primary health care provided for children? And 2) What are their priorities with respect to quality assessment of primary health care aimed at satisfying children's needs? ⋯ Between countries, significant differences exist in the perceived quality of primary care and priorities with regard to quality assessment. Taking into account the citizens' perspective in decision-making means that aspects with low perceived quality that are highly prioritized warrant further action.
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The Text Forum Threads (TFThs) contain a large amount of Initial-Posts Replies pairs (IPR pairs) which are related to information exchange and discussion amongst the forum users with similar interests. Generally, some user replies in the discussion thread are off-topic and irrelevant. Hence, the content is of different qualities. ⋯ Moreover, crowdsourcing platforms were used for judging the quality of the replies and classified them into high-quality, low-quality or non-quality replies to the Initial-Posts. Then, the high-quality IPR pairs were extracted and identified based on their quality, and they were ranked using three classifiers i.e., Support Vector Machine, Naïve Bayes, and the Decision Trees according to their quality dimensions of relevancy, author activeness, timeliness, ease-of-understanding, politeness, and amount-of-data. In conclusion, the experimental results for the TFThs showed that the proposed approach could improve the extraction of the quality replies and identify the quality features that can be used for the Text Forum Thread Summarization.