Search results for "Quality Assurance"

The use of nomograms in LDR-HDR prostate brachytherapy

2011

Purpose: The common use of nomograms in Low Dose Rate (LDR) permanent prostate brachytherapy (BT) allows to estimate the number of seeds required for an implant. Independent dosimetry verification is recommended for each clinical dosimetry in BT. Also, nomograms can be useful for dose calculation quality assurance and they could be adapt ed to High Dose Rate (HDR). This work sets nomograms for LDR and HDR prostate-BT implants, which are applied to three different institutions that use different implant techniques. Material and methods: Patients treated throughout 2010 till April 2011 were considered for this study. This exam ple was chosen to be the representative of the latest implant tech…

Commissioning and quality assurance procedures for the HDR Valencia skin applicators

2016

The Valencia applicators (Nucletron, an Elekta company, Elekta AB, Stockholm, Sweden) are cup-shaped tungsten applicators with a flattening filter used to collimate the radiation produced by a high-dose-rate (HDR) 192 Ir source, and provide a homogeneous absorbed dose at a given depth. This beam quality provides a good option for the treatment of skin lesions at shallow depth (3-4 mm). The user must perform commissioning and periodic testing of these applicators to guarantee the proper and safe delivery of the intended absorbed dose, as recommended in the standards in radiation oncology. In this study, based on AAPM and GEC-ESTRO guidelines for brachytherapy units and our experience, a set …

Preoperativ oppvarming av pasienter med hoftebrudd : Kan preoperativ oppvarming med varmluftsteppe redusere intraoperativt temperaturfall hos pasient…

2018

Masteroppgave spesialsykepleie ME519 – Universitetet i Agder 2018 Background: Hip fractures are a common cause of hospitalization and are linked with high morbidity and mortality rates. It is therefore important to optimize every aspect of their treatment to minimize complications. The Nurse Anesthetist plays an important role in preventing complications related to both surgery and anesthesia. Purpose: The aim of this project is to evaluate the quality of the current procedure for preoperative prevention of hypothermia in our hospital. We wanted to investigate if this procedure for preventing hypothermia is as effective as preoperative warming with a forcedair system in hip fracture patient…

Good clinical response, remission, and predictors of remission in rheumatoid arthritis patients treated with tumor necrosis factor-α blockers: The GI…

2007

OBJECTIVE: To assess the prevalence of good clinical response and remission in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients with longstanding disease treated with anti-tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-alpha) drugs at outpatient clinics. METHODS: Retrospective national study of 14 academic tertiary referral rheumatology medical centers. RA patients with a Disease Activity Score (DAS28) > 3.2 were defined as having active disease and could start TNF-alpha blockers. All patients received one TNF-alpha blocker plus methotrexate (10-20 mg/wk). At the third month the patients were categorized as responders or nonresponders, based on improvement of at least 0.25 of the Health Assessment Questionnaire (HAQ).…

Issues in e-learning quality assurance

2011

As a decisive factor, the future of any discipline rests on quality, and e-learning is no exception. Due to its multidisciplinary nature, the contribution from various fields such as education, technology, and economy are needed to achieve quality, thereby creating rich learning experience. Undertaking such a task is challenging according to Pawlowski and Ehler (2006) because "it is necessary to find a valid perspective and definition of quality. This requires an answer to the question for which processes of educational scenario quality development has to be carried out, which quality and according to which perspective it is defined." Being diverse and situational/context dependent, there s…

Semantic Portal as a Tool for Structural Reform of the Ukrainian Educational System

2014

Education is recognized as a fundamental enabler of human development. The adoption of information and communications technologies (ICTs) by education (especially in developing countries) contributes to educational system reforms, in addition to the traditional advantages, such as social openness and accessibility. Yet the academic community has not studied sufficiently the challenging context in which ICTs are used as instruments for the reform of inefficient, and sometimes even corrupted, educational systems rather than just as means for smarter classrooms, remote access, or content management. The object of this study is Ukrainian higher education (HE) and its quality assurance (QA) syst…

External Assessors as “Reviewers” for Quality Assurance of Open Access Journals

2017

On Line Validation Exercise (OLIVE): A Web Based Service for the Validation of Medium Resolution Land Products. Application to FAPAR Products

2014

International audience; The OLIVE (On Line Interactive Validation Exercise) platform is dedicated to the validation of global biophysical products such as LAI (Leaf Area Index) and FAPAR (Fraction of Absorbed Photosynthetically Active Radiation). It was developed under the framework of the CEOS (Committee on Earth Observation Satellites) Land Product Validation (LPV) sub-group. OLIVE has three main objectives: (i) to provide a consistent and centralized information on the definition of the biophysical variables, as well as a description of the main available products and their performances (ii) to provide transparency and traceability by an online validation procedure compliant with the CEO…