1,720,954 research outputs found
Unique challenges in managing pediatric colorectal diseases in under-resourced areas: context-aware adaptive responses from short-term surgical outreach visits
Get PDFPediatric Colorectal Diseases (PCRD), mainly Anorectal Malformations (ARM) and Hirschsprung's Disease, are a major issue in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Even with advances in healthcare facilities and global health initiatives, most of children living in low resources SSA lack of specialist pediatric surgical facilities. Improved healthcare access is needed to manage PCRD in these locations, to prevent and reduce missing or delayed diagnosis, early mismanagement by inexperienced health practitioners, and barriers to corrective therapy and long-term follow-up. A retrospective analysis of data from three SSA hospitals shows that international surgical outreach visits helped increase capacity. Along one hundred twentyfour weeks of staggered surgical outreach visits 174 ARM and 64 highly suspected HSCR cases were collected. The study evaluates 152 ARM and 59 HSCR patients who had not been treated before. Those who came after an unsuccessful treatment elsewhere were not included. Management, clinical course, complications and results are reported. Focus is on context-aware adaptive surgery and sustainable solutions to improve outcomes and quality of life for those children, discussing long-term follow-up options and results. The local context has a substantial impact on epidemiology, demographics, and presentation compared to high-resource countries. Intestinal stomas done at a primary health facility level presented at referral to our Hospital with 25% complication rate. Due to social, economical, and transit issues, only 108 ARM and 41 HSCR could finally receive a corrective treatment by the outreach visiting teams. Complications (9.1%) were controlled using adaptive solutions. Only one surgical fatality occurred. A limited proportion of patients (46% ARM, 31% HSCR) attended a regular follow up schedule for one year or more, and finding those lost in wide rural areas was difficult. Successful and comprehensive PCRD management in under-resourced SSA requires better training at the primary health level on early recognition and correct, first surgical approach, together with a referral network to specialist facilities for further treatment. Surgical short-term outreach trips can boost local capability in under-resourced areas. The research of adaptive and sustainable surgical solutions to reduce hospital stay and staged treatments time for PCRD must be emphasised. Nevertheless financial and logistical constraints still challenge post-discharge monitoring and follow-up, which remain crucial for long-term outcome
The hidden burden of Pediatric urology in Sub-Saharan Africa: an analysis of hospital admission data from three East African Health Centres
Get PDF: Specialist facilities for children are still unavailable in some Sub-Saharan African contexts. It is the case of pediatric urology, whose recent advances are still largely unshared. Prenatal diagnosis of urinary abnormalities (CAKUT) is largely unknown. Early recognition and referral of Undescended testis (UDT), Hypospadia, bladder exstrophy epispadias complex, ambiguous genitalia, stone disease, and tumours are uncommon in rural areas. Missed diagnosis is not uncommon and delayed management is associated with poor outcomes. We present a cross-sectional, descriptive study about the epidemiology of Pediatric urological admissions to three sub-Saharan East African Hospitals. All the urological cases between 0-18 years referred to three distinct East African Hospitals over 124 weeks were considered. Prevalence of different groups of diseases, age, and mode of presentation were reported. We found 351 cases (M/F 127/24) out of 2543 surgical referrals (13%). Seventy percent of cases were Hypospadias and UDT. Fifty percent of UDT were beyond 6, and most Hypospadias were between 4 and 7 yrs. CAKUT had a very low prevalence (4.84%), and about 50% of Wilms Tumours came too late to be resectable. In many African contexts, urology is still a tiny portion of the pediatric surgical workload compared to the 25% of European and American reports. There are also differences in the epidemiology of genitourinary conditions. A hidden burden of diseases may be presumed, remaining undiagnosed due to the shortage of specialist facilities
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe 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
Get PDF“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
Get PDFWe 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
Get PDFWe 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
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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