1,720,999 research outputs found
Cancer cost profiles: The Epicost estimation approach
Full text linkSustainability of cancer burden is becoming increasingly central in the policy makers' debate, and poses a challenge for the welfare systems, due to trends towards greater intensity of healthcare service use, which imply increasing costs of cancer care. Measuring and projecting the economic burden associated with cancer and identifying effective policies for minimising its impact are important issues for healthcare systems. Scope of this paper is to illustrate a novel comprehensive approach (called Epicost) to the estimation of the economic burden of cancer, based on micro-data collected from multiple data sources. It consists of a model of cost analysis to estimate the amount of reimbursement payed by the National Health Service to health service providers (hospitals, ambulatories, pharmacies) for the expenses incurred in the diagnoses and treatments of a cohort of cancer patients; these cancer costs are estimated in various phases of the disease reflecting patients' patterns of care: initial, monitoring and final phase. The main methodological features are illustrated using a cohort of colon cancer cases from a Cancer Registry in Italy. This approach has been successfully implemented in Italy and it has been adapted to other European countries, such as Belgium, Norway and Poland in the framework of the Innovative Partnership for Action Against Cancer (iPAAC) Joint Action, sponsored by the European Commission. It is replicable in countries/regions where population-based cancer registry data is available and linkable at individual level with administrative data on costs of care
Trends of colorectal cancer incidence and mortality rates from 2003 to 2014 in Italy
No full textOBJECTIVE::
To evaluate the trends of colorectal cancer (CRC) incidence and mortality rates from 2003 to 2014 in Italy by age groups and regions.
METHODS::
We used the data of 48 cancer registries from 17 Italian regions to estimate standardized incidence and mortality rates overall and by sex, age groups (<50, 50-69, 70+ years), and geographic area (northwest, northeast, center, south, and islands). Time trends were expressed as annual percent change in rates (APC) with 95% confidence intervals (95% CI).
RESULTS::
Incidence rates decreased from 104.3 (2003) to 89.9 × 100,000 (2014) in men and from 64.3 to 58.4 × 100,000 in women. Among men, incidence decreased during 2007-2010 (APC -4.0, 95% CI -6.0 to -1.9) and 2010-2014 (APC -0.7, 95% CI -1.4 to 0.0), while in women it linearly decreased during the whole period (APC -1.1, 95% CI -1.4 to -0.8). Mortality rates showed a linear reduction both in men (APC -0.7, 95% CI -1.0 to -0.3) and women (APC -0.9, 95% CI -1.2 to -0.6) and decreased respectively from 41.1 to 39.2 × 100,000 and from 24.6 to 23.1 × 100,000. In the 50- to 69-year-old range (screening target age), incidence showed a prescreening increase, followed by a peak after screening started, and a decline thereafter. Incidence and mortality rates significantly decreased in all areas but in the south and islands, where incidence increased and mortality remained stable.
CONCLUSIONS::
A renewed commitment by all regional health systems to invest in primary (i.e., lifestyle) and secondary (i.e., screening programs) prevention is of utmost importance.To evaluate the trends of colorectal cancer (CRC) incidence and mortality rates from 2003 to 2014 in Italy by age groups and regions
Staging Cancer Through Text Mining of Pathology Records
No full textValuable information is stored in a healthcare record system and over 40% of it is estimated to be unstructured in the form of free clinical text. A collection of pathology records is provided by the Veneto Cancer Registry: these medical records refer to cases of melanoma and contain free text, in particular, the diagnosis. The aim of this research is to extract from the free text the size of the primary tumour, the involvement of lymph nodes, the presence of metastasis, and the cancer stage of the tumour. This goal is achieved with text mining techniques based on a supervised statistical approach. Since the procedure of information extraction from a free text can be traced back to a statistical classification problem, we apply several machine learning models in order to extract the variables mentioned above from the text. A gold standard for these variables is available: the clinical records have already been assessed case-by-case by an expert. The most efficient of the estimated models is the gradient boosting. Despite the good performance of gradient boosting, the classification error is not low enough to allow this kind of text mining procedures to be used in a Cancer Registry as it is proposed
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Impact on colorectal cancer mortality of screening programmes based on the faecal immunochemical test
No full textDispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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