Remote monitoring of pacemakers and defibrillators: Effective and safe in Brazil?

Background: The remote monitoring (RM) of cardiac implantable electronic devices (CIEDs) has become a common method of in-home monitoring and follow-up in high-income countries given its effectiveness, safety, convenience, and the possibility of early intervention. However, in Brazil, RM is still underutilized.

Objectives: This observational study aims to demonstrate our experience of using RM in Brazil and the predictive factors of RM of CIED follow-up in Brazil.

SAR image segmentation based on level set approach and G⁰A model.

This paper proposes an image segmentation method for synthetic aperture radar (SAR), exploring statistical properties of SAR data to characterize image regions. We consider G⁰A distribution parameters for SAR image segmentation, combined to the level set framework. The G⁰A distribution belongs to a class of G distributions that have been successfully used to model different regions in amplitude SAR images for data modeling purpose.

Residual analysis for linear mixed models.

Residuals are frequently used to evaluate the validity of the assumptions of statistical models and may also be employed as tools for model selection. For standard (normal) linear models, for example, residuals are used to verify homoscedasticity, linearity of effects, presence of outliers, normality and independence of the errors. Similar uses may be envisaged for three types of residuals that emerge from the fitting of linear mixed models.