Health technological innovation has helped to improve health care delivery and patient outcomes. However, the proliferation of health care technology has accompanied burgeoning health care costs and evoked social, ethical, legal, and political concerns. Health technology assessment (HTA) is the systematic evaluation of properties, effects and/or other impacts of health care technology. The main purpose of HTA is to inform persons of technology-related policy making in health care. There is great variation in the scope, selection of methods and level of detail in the practice of HTA. This paper will introduce the basic concepts and methods of HTA in order to help those who are interested in conducting HTA.
Random allocation to intervention groups remains the best method of ensuring that the groups being compared are similar at the onset of study and of avoiding removing selection bias between groups of patients. The success of randomization depends on two interrelated processes. First, an unpredictable allocation sequence must be generated based on a random procedure. Second, strict implementation of that sequence must be secured through an assignment mechanism called allocation concealment to prevent those involved in a trial from knowing upcoming assignments. Inadequate allocation concealment can lead to clinicians scheduling patient’s assignment and compromising the unpredictable allocation sequence.
Interstitial lung disease is the most common pulmonary complication in patients with inflammatory myopathy, with a high case fatality rate, unknown pathogenesis, and complex clinical manifestations, and the treatment is difficult. Early and timely treatment can improve the patient’s clinical symptoms and inhibit the development of the disease. The present treatment protocols can be mainly summarized as the commonly used drugs (corticosteroids, azathioprine, cyclophosphamide, mycophenolate mofetil, and intravenous immunoglobulin) and new drugs (cyclosporin A, tacrolimus, biological agents, and anti-fibrosis drug), etc. In this paper, the treatment progress of inflammatory myopathy-related interstitial lung disease and different myositis antibody-related interstitial lung disease in recent years at home and abroad is reviewed, so as to provide a basis for clinical treatment.
The feature extraction and feature selection are the important issues in pattern recognition. Based on the geometric algebra representation of vector, a new feature extraction method using blade coefficient of geometric algebra was proposed in this study. At the same time, an improved differential evolution (DE) feature selection method was proposed to solve the elevated high dimension issue. The simple linear discriminant analysis was used as the classifier. The result of the 10-fold cross-validation (10 CV) classification of public breast cancer biomedical dataset was more than 96% and proved superior to that of the original features and traditional feature extraction method.
Objective To undertake a preliminary study of the concept and approach of patient value and preference and to learn how to understand and elicit patient preference in the light of evidence-based medicine so as to promote evidence-based practice and improve the relationship between clinicians and patients. Methods The searching key words were developed and pertinent data were retrospectively retrieved for the years of 1992-2002. MEDLINE and CBMdisc were searched along with handsearching 9 Chinese medical journals and 4 evidence-based medicine books. Data were scanned and analyzed. Results A total of 2 646 related articles were identified, most of which were found in MEDLINE (2 403), followed by CBMdisc (185) and the journals (58). Currently there is no original article to study in this field from a point of view of evidence-based medicine in China. Conclusion Patient value and preference have been emphasized in the approach of evidence-based medicine and it is a worthwhile topic for us to explore.
Objective To investigate the relationship between smoking and lung cancer by evidence-based evaluation. Methods Using Meta-analysis method, the results of 29 case-control studies involving the relationship between smoking and lung cancer in recent decade were analyzed by Review Manager 4. 2 software. Results The association between smoking and lung cancer was significant ( Z =12. 16, P lt; 0. 000 01) , and the pooled OR value was 5. 75( 4. 34, 7. 62) . The population attributable risk percentage( PARP) of smoking was 69. 16% . The pooled OR of 1-10 cpd( cigarettes per day) , 10-20 cpd, 20-40 cpd and more than 40 cpd were 1. 97( 1. 69, 2. 30) , 5. 20( 3. 54, 7. 62) , 7. 46( 5. 22, 10. 67) and 15. 14 ( 5. 27, 43. 44) respectively. The pooled OR of less than 20 years of smoking duration, 20-40 years and more than 40 years were 1. 25( 1. 01, 1. 53) , 5. 10( 3. 03, 8. 57) and 10. 77( 7. 30, 15. 89) respectively. While the pooled ORof less than 10 pack-years, 10-20 pack-years, 20-40 pack-years and more than 40 pack-years were 1. 73( 1. 01, 2. 96) , 3. 73 ( 3. 02, 4. 61) , 5. 69 ( 3. 79, 8. 54) and 8. 41 ( 4. 56, 15. 51) respectively. The pooled OR of initial smoking age less than 15 years old, 15-20 years old and more than 20 years old were 13. 31( 7. 09, 24. 97) , 7. 21( 4. 51, 11. 52) and 4. 74( 3. 47, 6. 47) respectively. The pooled OR of quitting smoking for 1-10 years, 10-20 years and more than 20 years were 7. 16( 4. 70, 10. 91) , 2. 12( 1. 16, 3. 86)and 1. 47 ( 0. 67, 3. 20 ) respectively, and more than 20 years of quitting smoking had no significant difference. The pooled OR of light smoking and deep smoking were 3. 26( 1. 24, 8. 58) and 8. 07( 4. 67, 13. 94) respectively. Conclusions Smoking is an important risk factor of lung cancer. Meta-anlalysis revealed cigarettes comsuption per day, smoking duration, total amount of cigarettes ( pack-years) , smoking behaviour( depth) , initial age of smoking and duration of quitting smoking can increase the risk of lung cancer.