Assessing and upgrading the cleanliness of the emergency department brief title: upgrading the emergency room's cleanliness.

Objective: To upgrade cleaning and disinfection of patient rooms in a crowded emergency department (ED).

Setting: Tertiary referral hospital.

Design: Prospective, 3-component, before-and-after intervention study.

How effective are monthly departmental tracer surveys? A 5-year retrospective study of 138 surveys in 96 departments.

Background: Repeat department-wide surveys are commonly employed for infection control. There remains debate concerning their cost-effectivess. The aim of the study was to measure the impact of repeat department-wide surveys in major in-patient departments (IPDs) and ambulatory facilities (AFs) in a tertiary care hospital.

Fully nonparametric survival analysis in the presence of time-dependent covariates and dependent censoring.

In the presence of informative right censoring and time-dependent covariates, we estimate the survival function in a fully nonparametric fashion. We introduce a novel method for incorporating multiple observations per subject when estimating the survival function at different covariate values and compare several competing methods via simulation. The proposed method is applied to survival data from people awaiting liver transplant.

Graph theoretic analysis of structural connectivity across the spectrum of Alzheimer's disease: The importance of graph creation methods.

Graph theory is increasingly being used to study brain connectivity across the spectrum of Alzheimer's disease (AD), but prior findings have been inconsistent, likely reflecting methodological differences. We systematically investigated how methods of graph creation (i.e.