Elderly Hospitalised Patients-The Impact of Itch and its Prevalence.

Introduction: Pruritus in elderly patients can have a significant impact on the quality of life but may be underestimated and poorly addressed by healthcare professionals.

Materials And Methods: From March to May 2010, a structured interview questionnaire including the Dermatology Life Quality Index (DLQI) was administered to all patients admitted to the geriatric ward in Changi General Hospital, Singapore, except for those with cognitive impairment.

Results: A total of 194 patients were enrolled in the study; 94 patients (48.

Thermoacoustic tomography forward modeling with the spectral element method.

A thermoacoustic tomography (TAT) forward solver based on the spectral element method (SEM) with perfectly matched layer absorbing boundary condition has been developed. The TAT forward solver is intended to model acoustically inhomogeneous media with high accuracy in the frequency domain. The high-order basis functions used in the SEM are Gauss-Lobatto-Legendre (GLL) polynomials.

3-D Quantum Transport Solver Based on the Perfectly Matched Layer and Spectral Element Methods for the Simulation of Semiconductor Nanodevices.

A 3-D quantum transport solver based on the spectral element method (SEM) and perfectly matched layer (PML) is introduced to solve the 3-D Schrödinger equation with a tensor effective mass. In this solver, the influence of the environment is replaced with the artificial PML open boundary extended beyond the contact regions of the device. These contact regions are treated as waveguides with known incident waves from waveguide mode solutions.

An efficient forward solver in electrical impedance tomography by spectral element method.

In electrical impedance tomography (EIT), a forward solver capable of predicting the voltages on electrodes for a given conductivity distribution is essential for reconstruction. The EIT forward solver is normally based on the conventional finite element method (FEM). One of the major problems of three-dimensional (3-D) EIT is its high demand in computing power and memory since high precision is required for obtaining a small secondary field which is typical for a small anomaly.