Background: The objective of this paper was to estimate the impact of country-wide hospital pay-for-performance on readmissions for a set of common conditions in Lebanon. Methods: This retrospective cohort study included all hospitalizations under the coverage of the Ministry of Public Health in Lebanon between 2011 and 2019. We calculated 30-day all-cause readmissions following general, pneumonia

In this paper we propose minimal solvers for relative pose estimation for two views of the projected silhouettes of two 3D cylinders. Using such line features instead of the standard point feature correspondences means more stable information (i.e. more stable to lighting condition, seasons, changes in environment etc.). Such features also lead to more compact and semantically interpretable repres

Fano resonances are ubiquitous phenomena appearing in many fields of physics, e.g., atomic or molecular photoionization, or electron transport in quantum dots. Recently, attosecond interferometric techniques have been used to measure the amplitude and phase of photoelectron wave packets close to Fano resonances in argon and helium, allowing for the retrieval of the temporal dynamics of the photoio

Time delay estimation or Time-Difference-Of-Arrival estimates is a critical component for multiple localization applications such as multilateration, direction of arrival, and self-calibration. The task is to estimate the time difference between a signal arriving at two different sensors. For the audio sensor modality, most current systems are based on classical methods such as the Generalized Cro

This paper suggests an approach to solving the time-of-arrival self-calibration problem for imbalanced problems, where there is a low number of receivers but many senders. The idea is to solve several subproblems created by only using data relating to four receivers. The solutions are then clustered according to a proposed metric in order to remove failed reconstructions. They are then combined in

Rapid urbanization can change local climate by increasing land surface temperature (LST), particularly in metropolitan regions. This study uses two decades of remote sensing data to investigate how urbanization-induced changes in land use/land cover (LULC) affect LST in the Beijing Region, China. By focusing on the key issue of LST and its contributing variables through buffer zones, we determined

IMPORTANCE During the past decade, spinal surgical procedures have been increasingly performed on an ambulatory basis, a change in clinical practice supported only by observational evidence thus far. There have been no randomized clinical trials (RCTs) comparing ambulatory care with inpatient care after any spinal surgery. OBJECTIVE To assess whether ambulatory care is noninferior to overnight hos

Background: The use of welfare technology is gaining ground in municipal eldercare and is increasingly being integrated into everyday routines. However, the meanings that eldercare personnel attach to welfare technology in the care of older recipients, and thus the domestication of welfare technology, remain largely underexplored. This study explores how eldercare personnel understand and ascribe

Background: Right ventricular (RV) dyssynchrony or post systolic contraction (PSC) causes inefficient pumping and has not been investigated as a prognostic marker in pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH). The objective was to investigate if RV dyssynchrony and PSC are prognostic markers of transplantation-free survival in PAH and if multiple RV views improve prognostication. Methods: Patients with

This issue of Journal of Scandinavian Cinema features a diverse range of articles covering topics from early silent cinema to contemporary genre filmmaking. Highlights include discussions of digital restoration, cinematic influence, Sámi culture, horror in children’s cinema and film literacy. The issue also reviews new research on Carl Th. Dreyer that emphasizes the emotional aspects of his films.

Background: Pediatric atopic dermatitis (AD) is a common chronic disease. For assessing treatment outcomes, the concept of controlled and uncontrolled AD has been introduced. Objectives: The aim of the study was to estimate healthcare resource use in terms of visits, treatments and costs in children with controlled and uncontrolled AD. Materials & Methods: The study utilised administrative dat

This entry reflects on the meaning and significance of playful work in contemporary organizations. In recent years, playful work has become a prominent managerial technique to combat employee disengagement and low morale in organizations. This trend has its roots in positive psychology, especially Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow and Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory. Developments such a

What future aspirations have informed the incentives for producing children's literature in Muslim minority communities? What social dynamics and theological debates have accompanied its visions of Islamic futures? What narrative tropes, visual-aesthetics norms and literary genres has it appropriated, while maturing into an innovative religious-pedagogic-literary expression? Probing such questions

BACKGROUND: Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is an aggressive hematological neoplasm. Little improvement in survival rates has been achieved over the past few decades. Necroptosis has relationship with certain types of malignancies outcomes. Here, we evaluated the diagnostic ability, prognostic capacity of necroptosis-related genes (NRGs) and the effect of their copy number variations (CNVs) in AML.ME

Intracellular delivery is crucial in biological and medical studies. Although many molecular tools have been created for cell-based gene therapies, it remains challenging to introduce external molecules into cells. As one of the most popular non-viral transfection methods, electroporation induces transient pores in the cell membrane by applying an external electric field. Unsatisfactory transfecti

Quark spin effects in e+e- annihilation to pseudoscalar and vector mesons are implemented for the first time in the pythia Monte Carlo event generator. The spin-dependent fragmentation of the string stretched between the produced quark-antiquark pair with correlated spin states is described by the string+P30 model implemented in the string fragmentation routine of pythia by using the StringSpinner