For downloading the full-text of this article please click here. Background and Objective: Improving community health is the most important concerns of judicial authorities in every society. Previous ...research has yielded conflicting results in terms of changes in the rates of social harms in Ramadan (in comparison with the rest of the year). Therefore, the primary objective of this study was to investigate the relationship between Ramadan and the number of accidents or injuries reported by emergency wards of hospitals in Kermanshah, Iran, during a seven year period (2001 through 2008). The study also aimed at examining the possible differences between men and women in this regard. Method: The current study had a retrospective, quasi-experimental nature. All male and female patients (whose age ranged from 15 to 45 years) who were admitted to emergency departments of Taleghani and Imam Reza hospitals of Kermanshah due to car accident injuries and three other injuries caused by gunshot, fighting, and fall from height during Ramadan and non-Ramadan months of the years 2001 through 2008 were included in our study. Convenient sampling was used for data collection. Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, paired samples t-test and ANOVA were exploited for data analysis. In this study, The ethical issues were all considered and the authors declared no conflict of interest. Results: For both males and females, a large number of accidents were generally recorded in non-Ramadan months compared with Ramadan (0.001). Nonetheless, no statistically significant differences were found between mean scores obtained for Ramadan and non-Ramadan months in either group (0.743 and 0.773 for women and men, respectively). On the other hand, the mean values of men’s injuries were higher than those of women’s in all cases (0.05 α≤). Conclusion: The results of this study showed that, on average, the number of accidents and other injuries in non-Ramadan months is greater than that of Ramadan (though the difference is not statistically considerable). Furthermore, the number of injuries in women during Ramadan and other months of the studied years were lower than that of men. For downloading the full-text of this article please click here.
Car accidents is a major source of congestion that affect the traffic dynamic especially in urban network. In this paper, we studied the impact of evacuation time (T) of damaged cars and transmission ...probability (r) on traffic characteristics when a car accident occurs at the intersection of two roads. Traffic is temporary stuck for T time steps then the vehicles involved in collision will be removed from the system. Simulation results show the existence of a critical evacuation time (injection rate α) after which the variation of injection rate (evacuation time) hasn’t any effect on neither the flow nor the probability of accidents Pac. Moreover, when α≤0.02 or α>0.1, the system exhibits a second order transition from Low Density Phase (LDP) to High Density Phase (HDP). However, the transition is of first order when 0.02 ¡ α≤0.1. Furthermore, car accidents take place if α is higher than a critical value αc. This value does not depend on T when T<40 or T>60. Nonetheless, it depends strongly on T if 40≤T≤60. The effects of the transmission probability and the probability to have a collision p’ are also studied. Likewise, different phase diagrams of the system are discussed.
•We studied the effect of evacuation time and transmission probability on the traffic.•Existence of a critical evacuation time after which α hasn’t any effect.•The system exhibits a second/first order transition from LDP to HDP depending de α.•The flow and accidents phase diagrams of the system are proposed.•The probability to have an accident affects traffic characteristics.
With an increase in population, there is an increase in the number of accidents that happen every minute. These road accidents are unpredictable. There are situations where most of the accidents ...could not be reported properly to nearby ambulances on time. In most of the cases, there is the unavailability of emergency services which lack in providing the first aid and timely service which can lead to loss of life by some minutes. Hence, there is a need to develop a system that caters to all these problems and can effectively function to overcome the delay time caused by the medical vehicles. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a framework using IoT, which helps in detecting car accidents and notifying them immediately. This can be achieved by integrating smart sensors with a microcontroller within the car that can trigger at the time of an accident. The other modules like GPS and GSM are integrated with the system to obtain the location coordinates of the accidents and sending it to registered numbers and nearby ambulance to notify them about the accident to obtain immediate help at the location.
The radiologic finding of focal stenosis of the main pancreatic duct is highly suggestive of pancreatic cancer. Even in the absence of a mass lesion, focal duct stenosis can lead to surgical ...resection of the affected portion of the pancreas. We present four patients with distinctive pathology associated with non-neoplastic focal stenosis of the main pancreatic duct. The pathology included stenosis of the pancreatic duct accompanied by wavy, acellular, serpentine-like fibrosis, chronic inflammation with foreign body-type giant cell reaction, and calcifications. In all cases, the pancreas toward the tail of the gland had obstructive changes including acinar drop-out and interlobular and intralobular fibrosis. Three of the four patients had a remote history of major motor vehicle accidents associated with severe abdominal trauma. These results emphasize that blunt trauma can injure the pancreas and that this injury can result in long-term complications, including focal stenosis of the main pancreatic duct. Pathologists should be aware of the distinct pathology associated with remote trauma and, when the pathology is present, should elicit the appropriate clinical history.
Introduction. Road traffic injuries are a major public health problem, ranking 8th in the leading causes of death and are forecasted to rank 5th by 2030 worldwide. Children, pedestrians, cyclists and ...the elderly remain among those most at risk of road traffic injuries. Material and methods. A specialized literature search was conducted within the main international databases, including: PubMed/MEDLINE, Google Scholar, and Research Gate, using a set of inclusion criteria. Data from references were extracted systematically into results tables, including: author/citation, study design, assessments/data, limitations, and key facts. Reported outcomes were compiled in narrative form. Results. Many researchers and scientists both in the country and abroad have studied road injuries. Authors of the studies used different methods and obtained obvious data about road traumas and major risk factors. Among the main causes of unintentional motor vehicle injuries were excessive speed, alcohol consumption while driving, mental disorder, drugs, and unsupervised children. There is an increasing incidence of road injuries among children, and most of the road traffic crashes involving children occur in May-September, between 11.00 and 18.00. The obtained results motivate the need to study this topic in depth, on separate age groups, and to propose specific prevention measures for each actor involved. Conclusions. There are many factors, which contributes to road crashes and related injuries, but those requires multisectoral involvement.
•Two dashcams were used to evaluate microsleep-related behaviors in truck collisions.•Collisions occurred within about 40 s after anti-sleepiness behaviors decreased.•Behavioral signs of microsleep ...in professional drivers surged before collisions.•Collisions occurred after repeated abnormal vehicle behaviors by microsleep.•Monitoring systems should evaluate both the driver and vehicle simultaneously.
With the rapid spread of dashcams, many car accidents have been recorded; however, behavioral approaches using these dashcam video footage have not been sufficiently examined. We employed dashcam video footage to evaluate microsleep-related behaviors immediately prior to real-world truck collisions in professional drivers to explore a new solution to reduce collisions attributed to falling asleep at the wheel.
In total, 3,120 s of video footage (60 s/case × 52 cases) from real-world truck collisions of 52 professional drivers obtained from interior and exterior dashcams were used and visually analyzed in a second-by-second manner to simultaneously evaluate any eye changes and microsleep-related behaviors (the driver’s anti-sleepiness behavior, behavioral signs of microsleep, and abnormal vehicle behavior) during driving.
Assessment of the frequency of occurrence of each item of microsleep-related behavior in the 52 collisions revealed that the item “touching” in terms of anti-sleepiness behavior, “absence of body movement” in terms of behavioral signs of microsleep, and “inappropriate line crossing” in terms of abnormal vehicle behavior were observed at the highest rate in all drivers (46.2%, 75.0%, and 78.8%, respectively). Decreases in anti-sleepiness behavior coincided with increases in behavioral signs of microsleep and abnormal vehicle behavior, with collisions occurring within approximately 40 s of these changes. Collisions were more common among young people and in the early morning and evening.
Our dashcam video footage-based analysis in truck collisions attributed to falling asleep at the wheel revealed the process of changes in microsleep-related driver and vehicle behaviors, classified as anti-sleepiness behavior, behavioral signs of microsleep, and abnormal vehicle behavior. Based on these findings, to prevent collisions caused by falling asleep at the wheel, it is crucial to monitor not only the driver's eyes, but also the driver's whole body and vehicle behavior simultaneously to reliably detect microsleep-related behaviors.
With the prevalence of GPS tracking technologiees, car insurance companies have started to adopt usage-based insurance policies, which adapt insurance premiums according to the customers' driving ...behavior. Although many risk models for assessing an individual driver's accident risk based on the history of driving trajectories, driving events, and exposure records exist, these models do not take the geographical context of the driven trajectories and driving events into account. This study explores the influence of enriching the existing purely driving-behavior-based feature set by multiple geographical context features for the task of differentiating between accident and accident-free drivers. Prediction performances of five machine learning classifiers—logistic regression, random forest, XGBoost, feed-forward neural networks (FFNN), and long short-term memory (LSTM) networks—were evaluated on the usage records of over 8000 vehicles in one year from Italy. The results show that the inclusion of geographical information such as weather, points of interest (POIs), and land use can increase the relative predictive performance in terms of AUC by up to 8%, among which land use is the most informative. For the data of this study, XGBoost generally yielded the best performance and made most use out of the geographical information, while logistic regression is only slightly outperformed by more complex models if the proposed geographical information is not available. LSTM did not outperform the other methods, possibly due to the small volume of training data available. The results outline the potential of including the geographical context in usage-based car insurance risk modeling to improve the accuracy, leading to fairer usage-based insurance policies.
•Including geographical context increases prediction accuracy of all classifiers.•Land use visited by the trajectories provides the most informative context.•Logistic regression models achieved similar results as more complex models.
From 2016 onwards, a group of cardiologists initially formed in 2013 took the initiative to regulate and standardize the rights of European citizens suffering from diverse cardiovascular conditions ...at the European level. Subsequently, the Romanian government embraced and incorporated these recommendations into law a year later. This process addressed several important new aspects, including stents, myocarditis, and various cardiomyopathies, with a focus on striking a balance between the individual’s right to drive a vehicle and the need to safeguard the lives of others. The Romanian law, however, is vague and states that “candidates or drivers from the indicated groups can be issued or renewed their driving licenses only after the condition in question has been effectively treated and subject to the opinion issued by the specialist cardiology doctor and, depending on a case, by performing a periodic medical check” but does not clearly specify how and for how long and to whom exactly the driver’s license should be suspended. Interestingly, Switzerland, despite not being an EU member, developed its own set of recommendations three years later, drawing strong inspiration from the German guidelines, which in turn personalized its indications (being the European country with the most publications in this field). A refinement of the refinement, one could say. The indications are clear, precise, and structured in a point-by-point fashion. The purpose of this review is to explore the Swiss guidelines on fitness to drive in cardiovascular diseases interactively, with discussions on fictitious cases, in the hope that doctors will be able to become more familiar with these rigid and often interpretable indications and implement them in their daily practice.
PDF
