Abstract
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) established the national Caregiver Support Line (CSL) in February 2011. The CSL is operated by licensed master's degree social workers who ...provide caregivers of veterans with information about caregiver benefits and services, counseling, and referrals to a caregiver support coordinator at the nearest VA medical center. The authors compared differences in veteran health care utilization patterns in the six months before and after a caregiver call to the CSL, hypothesizing that veterans with caregivers using the CSL had improved access to health care services and improved access increased utilization of health care. A pre- and posttest design was used. CSL calls that resulted in referrals to VA health care services or to local VA caregiver support coordinators were included in the sample. Data were extracted from the CSL database and matched to veteran care utilization data using veteran medical record data. Veteran inpatient stays for general medicine, hospice, respite, and long-term care significantly increased after the CSL call, but other inpatient stays (surgery, neurology) did not. Outpatient services for home health, respite, and mental health all significantly increased. Caregivers’ use of the national CSL may help facilitate access for veterans to needed care services.
The purpose of this study was to retrospectively assess the role of early postmortem CT in evaluating support-line misplacement to improve future treatment in the trauma setting.
We included all ...postmortem CT examinations that were performed for trauma patients within the 1st hour after declaration of death in our tertiary medical center between August 1, 2008, and August 31, 2013. Correct placement of the following support lines was evaluated: endotracheal tubes (ETTs), chest drains, central venous catheters (CVCs), and nasogastric tubes (NGTs). Prehospital resuscitation efforts were started in all cases.
Early postmortem CT was performed on average 22 minutes after declaration of death in 25 consecutive patients with severe trauma. Overall, 14 subjects (56%) had suboptimal or misplaced support lines. Of ETTs inserted into 18 trauma victims; three (17%) were mislaid in the right main bronchus and five (28%) were near or at the level of the carina. Of chest drains inserted into 13 subjects, 10 were suboptimally positioned (77%). Of CVCs inserted into eight subjects (seven femoral and one brachiocephalic), one femoral CVC (13%) was malpositioned in the soft tissues of the pelvis. Of NGTs inserted in five trauma victims, one was folded within the pharynx.
Early postmortem CT for patients who have experienced severe poly-trauma can be of important educational value to radiologists and the trauma teams, providing immediate feedback regarding the location of the support lines and possibly contributing to improved training and command of the learning curve by medical staff.
In passing the Caregivers and Veterans Omnibus Health Services Act of 2010, Congress created a legislative mandate for the Veterans Administration (VA) to strengthen its program of support services ...for caregivers of veterans. As part of this expansion, the VA implemented a nationwide toll-free telephone Caregiver Support Line (CSL). The CSL is a single point of entry system to link caregivers to national and local services to support care of a veteran. This article describes the CSL and its role in supporting aging veterans and their caregivers, discusses social workers' contributions to its development and implementation, and reports utilization data.
Lattice slabs are usual in Brazil. They are formed by precast joists with latticed bars on a base of concrete, and a cover of concrete placed at the jobsite. The assembly of the joists and the ...filling elements is simple and do not require manpower with great skill, presenting low cost-benefit ratio. However, it is precisely in assembling phase that arise questions related to the scaffold support distance. A mistake in the proper positioning can lead to two undesirable situations. In one of them, a small space between the support lines increases the cost of scaffold, and in other an excessive space can generate exaggerated displacements, and even the collapse of the slab in the stage of concreting. The objective of this work is to analyze the bearing capacity of lattice joists in assembling phase, looking for information that is useful in defining the scaffold support distance. Several joists were tested to define the failure modes and their load bearing capacities. The results allowed to determine equations for calculating the appropriate distance between the support lines of the joists.
Lajes treliçadas são usuais no Brasil. Elas são formadas por vigotas pré-moldadas, com armadura treliçada sobre uma base de concreto, e por uma capa de concreto moldada na obra. A montagem das vigotas e dos elementos de enchimento é simples e não exige mão de obra com grande habilidade, apresentando baixa relação custo-benefício. Entretanto, é justamente na fase de montagem que surgem questões relativas à distância entre as linhas de escora. Um erro no posicionamento adequado pode levar a duas situações indesejáveis. Em uma delas, um espaço pequeno entre as linhas de escora aumenta o custo do cimbramento, e na outra, um espaço excessivo pode gerar deslocamentos exagerados, e até mesmo o colapso da laje, na fase de concretagem. O objetivo deste trabalho é analisar a capacidade portante de vigotas treliçadas, na fase de montagem, procurando informações que sejam úteis na definição da distância entre as linhas de escora. Foram ensaiadas várias vigotas para definir os modos de ruína e suas capacidades de carga. Os resultados permitiram determinar expressões para o cálculo da distância adequada entre as linhas de escora das vigotas.
The visibility of support lines and tubes was compared in computed radiography (CR) and screen-film adult chest radiographs. Parameters investigated were radiation dose, image minification, and the ...use of unsharp mask enhancement. Five radiologists rated the visibility of support lines and tubes on a five-point scale ranging from 1 (entire course of line visible) to 5 (line not visible or only small portion seen). These CR results were compared with the visibility of support lines and tubes as assessed by the same readers for conventional screen-film radiographs (600 speed). Support line and tube visibility improved with image enhancement, image minification, and increasing radiation dose. At the same radiation exposure, support line and tube visibility of the screen-film combination was superior to that of standard CR images. Application of an unsharp mask enhancement algorithm to CR images, however, significantly improved support line and tube visibility in comparison to that obtained with the screen-film combination. It was concluded that unsharp mask processing is a valuable tool for improving the visibility of support lines and tubes in CR chest radiographs.
Over the years many ellipse detection algorithms spring up and are studied broadly, while the critical issue of detecting ellipses accurately and efficiently in real-world images remains a challenge. ...In this paper, we propose a valuable industry-oriented ellipse detector by arc-support line segments, which simultaneously reaches high detection accuracy and efficiency. To simplify the complicated curves in an image while retaining the general properties including convexity and polarity, the arc-support line segments are extracted, which grounds the successful detection of ellipses. The arc-support groups are formed by iteratively and robustly linking the arc-support line segments that latently belong to a common ellipse. Afterward, two complementary approaches, namely, locally selecting the arc-support group with higher saliency and globally searching all the valid paired groups, are adopted to fit the initial ellipses in a fast way. Then, the ellipse candidate set can be formulated by hierarchical clustering of 5D parameter space of initial ellipses. Finally, the salient ellipse candidates are selected and refined as detections subject to the stringent and effective verification. Extensive experiments on three public datasets are implemented and our method achieves the best F-measure scores compared to the state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/AlanLuSun/High-quality-ellipse-detection.
Robust image matching is crucial for many applications of remote sensing and photogrammetry, such as image fusion, image registration, and change detection. In this paper, we propose a robust feature ...matching method based on support-line voting and affine-invariant ratios. We first use popular feature matching algorithms, such as SIFT, to obtain a set of initial matches. A support-line descriptor based on multiple adaptive binning gradient histograms is subsequently applied in the support-line voting stage to filter outliers. In addition, we use affine-invariant ratios computed by a two-line structure to refine the matching results and estimate the local affine transformation. The local affine model is more robust to distortions caused by elevation differences than the global affine transformation, especially for high-resolution remote sensing images and UAV images. Thus, the proposed method is suitable for both rigid and non-rigid image matching problems. Finally, we extract as many high-precision correspondences as possible based on the local affine extension and build a grid-wise affine model for remote sensing image registration. We compare the proposed method with six state-of-the-art algorithms on several data sets and show that our method significantly outperforms the other methods. The proposed method achieves 94.46% average precision on 15 challenging remote sensing image pairs, while the second-best method, RANSAC, only achieves 70.3%. In addition, the number of detected correct matches of the proposed method is approximately four times the number of initial SIFT matches.
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