Development and Evaluation of a Hybrid Course in Clinical Virology at a Faculty of Pharmacy in Lille, France.

Background: During their studies, pharmacy students must acquire the specific skills in clinical virology required for their subsequent professional practice. Recent experiments on teaching and learning in higher education have shown that hybrid courses strengthen the students' commitment to learning and enable high-quality knowledge acquisition.

Objective: This study concerned the design and deployment of a hybrid course that combines face-to-face and Web-based instruction in clinical virology for fourth-year pharmacy students.

Enzymatically degraded Eurylon 6 HP-PG: ethylcellulose film coatings for colon targeting in inflammatory bowel disease patients.

Objectives: Film coatings based on blends of Eurylon 6 HP-PG (a hydroxypropylated and pregelatinized high amylose starch) and ethylcellulose were to be evaluated as promising coating materials for site-specific drug delivery to the colon of patients suffering from inflammatory bowel diseases.

Methods: Pellet starter cores containing 60% 5-aminosalicylic acid were prepared by extrusion/spheronization and coated with different Eurylon 6 HP-PG:ethylcellulose blends at various coating levels. Drug release was measured in media simulating the contents of the upper gastrointestinal tract (in the presence and absence of enzymes) as well as in media simulating the contents of the colon.

An architecture for online comparison and validation of processing methods and computerized guidelines in intensive care units.

Clinical decision support systems are a combination of software techniques to help the clinicians in their medical decision making process via functionalities ranging from basic signal analysis to therapeutic planning and computerized guidelines. The algorithms providing all these functionalities must be very carefully validated on real patient data and must be confronted to everyday clinical practice. One of the main problems when developing these techniques is the difficulty to obtain high-quality complete patient records, comprising data coming both from the biomedical equipment (high-frequency signals), and from numerous other sources (therapeutics, imagery, clinical actions, etc.

Physical activity and sedentary lifestyle in children as time-limited functions: usefulness of the principal component analysis method.

This study was designed to examine the hourly variation in and the interplay between physical activity and sedentary behavior (SB) in order to highlight key time periods for physical activity interventions for children. Data for physical activity and SB obtained with ActiGraph in 56 boys and 47 girls aged from 8 to 11 years. These data were divided into sixty minute-time samples for moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) and SB, and analyzed using a principal component analysis (PCA) and correlation statistics.

Methodological approach for the evaluation of the performances of medical intensive care units.

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to present a methodological approach enabling the comparison of clinical and economic performances of intensive care units and a graphical visualization based on these 2 dimensions.

Patients And Methods: A retrospective analysis of a database of 666 patients admitted in intensive care units over a period of 2 consecutive months.

Results: Calculation of clinical performance is based on the difference between the mortality observed and forecast from the Simplified Acute Physiology Score version 2.

Towards symbolization using data-driven extraction of local trends for ICU monitoring.

We propose a methodology for the extraction of local trends from a stream of data. It has been designed to suit the needs of interpretation-oriented visualization and symbolization from ICU monitoring data. After giving implementation details for efficient computation of local trends, we propose the use of a characteristic analysis span for each variable.

Multicentric study of monitoring alarms in the adult intensive care unit (ICU): a descriptive analysis.

Objectives: To assess the relevance of current monitoring alarms as a warning system in the adult ICU.

Design: Prospective, observational study.

Settings: Two university hospital, and three general hospital, ICUs.

Introduction of knowledge bases in patient's data management system: role of the user interface.

As the number of signals and data to be handled grows in intensive care unit, it is necessary to design more powerful computing systems that integrate and summarize all this information. The manual input of data as e.g.

INFORM: integrated support for decisions and activities in intensive care.

Many medical decision support systems that have been developed in the past have failed to enter routine clinical practice. Often this is because the developers have failed to analyse in sufficient detail the precise user requirements, because they have produced a system which takes too narrow a view of the patient, or because the decision support facilities have not been sufficiently well integrated into the routine clinical data handling activities. In this paper we discuss how the AIM-INFORM project is setting out to deal with these issues, in the context of the provision of decision support in the intensive care unit.

Computer-assisted evaluation of respiratory data in ventilated critically ill patients.

In intensive care unit, a lot of data are currently available but remain unused by nurses and residents because of complexity of analysis. We have developed a system for interpretation of respiratory data (RESPAID) in order to improve monitoring of patients under respiratory support and also to provide a high level of information. RESPAID is a real-time system which interprets quantitative and qualitative aspects of the usual respiratory data at different levels of information.