Studies in health technology and informatics
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2005
Comparative StudyTeaching intravenous cannulation to medical students: comparative analysis of two simulators and two traditional educational approaches.
This study examines the effectiveness of two virtual reality simulators when compared with traditional methods of teaching intravenous (IV) cannulation to third year medical students. Thirty-four third year medical students were divided into four groups and then trained to perform an IV cannulation using either CathSim, Virtual I. V., a plastic simulated arm or by practicing IV placement on each other. ⋯ Students trained on the Virtual I. V. showed significantly greater improvement over baseline when compared with the simulated arm group (p<.026). Both simulators provided at least equal training to traditional methods of teaching, a finding with implications for future training of this procedure to novices.
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This chapter describes a software process improvement framework, structured to ensure regulatory compliance for the software developed in medical devices. Software is becoming an increasingly important aspect of medical devices and medical device regulation. Medical devices can only be marketed if compliance and approval from the appropriate regulatory bodies of the Food and Drug Administration (US requirement), and the European Commission under its Medical Device Directives (CE marking requirement) is achieved.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2005
Tools for statistical analysis with missing data: application to a large medical database.
Missing data is a common feature of large data sets in general and medical data sets in particular. Depending on the goal of statistical analysis, various techniques can be used to tackle this problem. Imputation methods consist in substituting the missing values with plausible or predicted values so that the completed data can then be analysed with any chosen data mining procedure. ⋯ The control chart was established for the 3 imputation methods studied here, assuming a multivariate normal distribution of data. The use of this tool on a large medical database was then investigated. We show how the control chart can be used to assess the quality of the imputation process in the pre-processing step upstream of data mining procedures.
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Cricothyroidotomy is an emergency procedure that is performed when the patient's airway is blocked, and less invasive attempts to clear it have failed. Cricothyroidotomy has been identified as an essential skill for military readiness. This training is relevant to more than 40,000 U. ⋯ Cadavers do not have the correct physiology. Mannequins do not adequately cover the full range of anatomical variations. In this paper, we describe our effort to build a computer-based cricothyroidotomy simulator to address these problems.