1,720,986 research outputs found

    Dental care access and the elderly: What is the role of teledentistry? A systematic review

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    A high level of unmet oral health needs is very common among elderly people. In a society that is getting older and that has been hit so hard by the coronavirus pandemic, the development of new strategies aimed at enhancing general and oral health status should be crucial in order to promote healthy aging. The aim of this systematic review is to assess the feasibility of Teledentistry in communities or in a domiciliary setting where elderly people live. A structured and systematic research was performed on the major electronic databases for studies published in English until 30 June 2020: the PubMed, Cochrane Library, Web of Science, Scopus, and CINAHL databases. A total of 13 articles were identified through database searching using combinations of keywords. Out of 13 papers, eight abstracts were reviewed to assess if they were coherent with the aim of the study, and full texts were retrieved. After abstract reviews, seven articles were selected for closer inspection. Of these, six were assessed for eligibility. Four papers were aimed at assessing patients and health practitioners experiences about Teledentistry, three studies reported a cost analysis and cost description of Teledentistry in residential aged care facilities, and two studies investigated the feasibility and accuracy of Teledentistry for diagnosis dental pathology. The implementation of Teledentistry in residential aged care facilities and in home-assistance programs could be a viable tool for the management of oral care in people who cannot access dental care

    A colour-based image segmentation method for the measurement of masticatory performance in older adults

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    Masticatory efficiency in older adults is an important parameter for the assessment of their oral health and quality of life. This study presents a measurement method based on the automatic segmentation of two-coloured chewing gum based on a K-means clustering algorithm. The solution proposed aims to quantify the mixed areas of colour in order to evaluate masticatory performance in different dental conditions. The samples were provided by 'two-colour mixing' tests, currently the most used technique for the evaluation of masticatory efficacy, because of its simplicity, low acquisition times and reduced cost. The image analysis results demonstrated a high discriminative power, providing results in an automatic manner and reducing errors caused by manual segmentation. This approach thus provides a feasible and robust solution for the segmentation of chewed samples. Validation was carried out by means of a reference software, demonstrating a good correlation (R2 = 0.64) and the higher sensitivity of the proposed method (+75 %). Tests on patients with different oral conditions demonstrated that the K-means segmentation method enabled the automatic classification of patients with different masticatory conditions, providing results in a shorter time period (20 chewing cycles instead of 50)

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The 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

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    “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

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    We 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

    Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts

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    We 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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