J Med Syst
-
The aim of this study was to assess procedures with high turnover time to procedure time ratios, estimate the effect of productivity changes on case efficiency, and determine causative factors. We specifically focused on suspension direct microlaryngoscopy (SML) (CPT 31526) cases because significantly greater productivity was possible for these cases in terms of ratios. After determining process times, we developed economic scenarios that employed time-reductions, and then assessed involved staff opinions using brainstorming and cause--effect methods. Improving all process times by 30% achieved up to a 50% improvement in revenue and the return on investment in additional scope equipment occurred within 2 months.
-
Recognition of lung sounds is an important goal in pulmonary medicine. In this work, we present a study for neural networks-genetic algorithm approach intended to aid in lung sound classification. Lung sound was captured from the chest wall of The subjects with different pulmonary diseases and also from the healthy subjects. ⋯ Multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network employing backpropagation training algorithm was used to predict the presence or absence of adventitious sounds (wheeze and crackle). We used genetic algorithms to search for optimal structure and training parameters of neural network for a better predicting of lung sounds. This application resulted in designing of optimum network structure and, hence reducing the processing load and time.