Search results for " tools"
showing 10 items of 331 documents
Interface transition checklists in spinal surgery
2016
Issue Recently, quality tools have been promoted to improve patient safety and process efficiency in healthcare. While surgeons primarily focused on surgical issues, like infection rates or implant design, we introduced pre-admission and preoperative checklists in the early 2000s. Initial assessment To assess the efficiency of these tools in a neurosurgical department, we performed a survey of all spinal instrumentation patients operated in 2011 ( n = 147). The results revealed several problems. Choice of solution We consequently redesigned the checklists accompanied by flanking measures, such as written and online accessible standards. Furthermore, the staff was trained to use the update…
Pain intensity as prognostic factor in cancer pain management
2015
Aim The aim of this study was to prospectively assess the prognostic value of initial pain intensity and its duration in advanced cancer patients. Methods A prospective study was conducted in a sample of patients with cancer requiring pain control. Patients underwent standard analgesic strategies used in our palliative care units. Pain intensity was measured at admission (T0) and after successful dose titration or opioid/route switching within a week (Ts). Patients were also asked about their pain intensity reported 15 days before admission (T-15). Doses of opioids and duration of opioid use were recorded. Patients were also assessed for the presence of incident pain, neuropathic pain, alco…
Detection of Temporal Clusters of Healthcare-Associated Infections or Colonizations with Pseudomonas aeruginosa in Two Hospitals: Comparison of SaTSc…
2014
International audience; The identification of temporal clusters of healthcare-associated colonizations or infections is a challenge in infection control. WHONET software is available to achieve these objectives using laboratory databases of hospitals but it has never been compared with SaTScan regarding its detection performance. This study provided the opportunity to evaluate the performance of WHONET software in comparison with SaTScan software as a reference to detect clusters of Pseudomonas aeruginosa. A retrospective study was conducted in two French university hospitals. Cases of P. aeruginosa colonizations or infections occurring between 1st January 2005 and 30th April 2014 in the fi…
The effects of low doses of pregabalin on morphine analgesia in advanced cancer patients
2012
Abstract OBJECTIVES: The aim of this study was to evaluate the opioid response in patients receiving morphine and pregabalin, independently from the presumed pain mechanisms, in comparison with patients receiving morphine treatment only. METHODS: A multicenter prospective randomized controlled study was carried out in a sample of 70 advanced cancer patients with pain requiring strong opioids. Thirty-five patients (group MO) were randomized to receive sustained-release morphine using initial doses of 60 mg/day. Thirty-five patients (group MO-PR) were randomized to start the same morphine doses and pregabalin in increasing doses, starting with 25 mg/day up to 150 mg/day in one week. The follo…
Tools for identifying cancer pain of predominantly neuropathic origin and opioid responsiveness in cancer patients.
2009
Neuropathic pain (NP) is a difficult issue, particularly in cancer which is a dynamic condition where multiple pain etiologies are concomitantly present. Cancer pain is often labeled as mixed mechanism pain and is not easily classified as exclusively nociceptive or NP. The aim of this study was to explore the value of evaluation tools such as Neuropathic Pain Questionnaire (NPQ), complete and short form (NPQ-SF), Leeds Assessment of Neuropathic Signs and Symptoms (LANSS) and Neuropathic Pain Symptom Inventory (NPSI). The secondary outcome was to evaluate the response to opioid titration, according to the hierarchical classification of definite, possible and unlikely NP. A consecutive sample…
Heat under the microscope
2014
[Introduction] Recent advances in computational and spectroscopic tools offer new insights into the nature of thermal conduction at ever-finer length scales and ways to control it. Heat conduction is familiar to us all and yet requires a wide range of physics—statistical mechanics, crystallography, and quantum mechanics among them—to fully explain. At the macroscale, heat conduction can be described as a diffusion process in which energy moves along a temperature gradient. The heat flux dissipated by the gradient depends on a material property, the thermal conductivity, as described by the constitutive relation, Fourier’s law. The heat equation, which is derived from Fourier’s law and the c…
Petri Net Modelling of the Starch Enzymatic Liquefaction
2012
This paper investigates the use of the Petri Net modelling language for the description and analysis of the enzymatic reactions that are used for the starch liquefaction. The Coloured Petri Net formalism supported by the CPN Tools modelling and simulation environment is used. The pools of substrates and products are represented as the places and the possible reactions as the transition of the net. The concurrent reactions are modelled trough transitions that are enabled at the same time. The occurrence probabilities associated with each of these concurrent transitions are chosen as the model parameters. The analysis of the specific properties of the model is used to fit the model to data fr…
Design of a Permanent Magnet Synchronous Generator using Interactive Multiobjective Optimization
2017
We consider an analytical model of a permanent magnet synchronous generator and formulate a mixed-integer constrained multiobjective optimization problem with six objective functions. We demonstrate the usefulness of solving such a problem by applying an interactive multiobjective optimization method called NIMBUS. In the NIMBUS method, a decision is iteratively involved in the optimization process and directs the solution process in order to find her/his most preferred Pareto optimal solution for the problem. We also employ a commonly used noninteractive evolutionary multiobjective optimization method NSGA-II to generate a set of solutions that approximates the Pareto set and demonstrate t…
El uso de conchas marinas como soporte de útiles pulimentados: una pieza recuperada en Costamar (Castellón)
2013
[EN] The uniqueness of a polished tool discovered from the Neolithic levels of the prehistoric site of Costamar (Castellón, Spain) raised a detailed analysis both the nature of the support, which has been identified as a sea shell concerning the species Spondylus gaederopus, as well as traces of use preserved at the edge that allows us to define the tool as an adze.
Agri-urban patterns in Mediterranean urban regions: the case study of Pisa
2020
International audience; Urban regions require planning tools in order to manage agricultural areas under urban pressure. The aim of our paper is to test an analytical framework that combines both the composition in urban and agricultural land covers and their spatial configuration into four general agri-urban patterns: isolated fields, urban belt fields, periurban agricultural areas and rural areas. We evaluated the spatial distribution and the changes of such patterns in the short-term (2003-2011) starting from Spot images for the case study of Pisa, Italy. The results indicate an increase of the most urban patterns despite continuing to have cash crops, a stability of periurban agricultur…