Diabetic Foot Ulcers: The Importance of Patient Comorbidity Recognition and Total Contact Casting in Successful Wound Care.

Diabetic foot ulcers (DFUs) are a major burden on the health-care system. The purpose of this study is to investigate factors affecting the healing rate of DFU in a university wound care center. Records of DFU patients treated between July 2013 and February 2015 were reviewed.

Mining internal data to reduce clinical costs.

Hospitals and health systems should undertake the following steps in pinpointing areas for clinical cost reduction: Identify potential areas of opportunity through an analysis of top discharges. Use severity-adjusted data to review variability by case. Review length of stay and resource consumption at a high level.

Aircraft noise annoyance at three joint air carrier and general aviation airports.

The results of social surveys conducted near three airports that support both general aviation and scheduled air carrier operations are presented and discussed. Inferences supported by these data include: The nature of noise exposure and community reaction at smaller airports may differ from that at larger airports; survey techniques are capable of identifying changes in annoyance associated with numerically small changes in noise exposure; changes in the prevalence of annoyance are causally produced by changes in noise exposure; and changes in annoyance associated with changes in exposure vary with time.

Community response to blasting.

Annoyance due to chronic exposure to blast noise and vibration was assessed in residential areas near two surface mines and a quarry. It was found possible to base useful prediction of the prevalence of high annoyance on a metric of outdoor ground vibration related to high centiles of the long term distribution of exposure levels.

Effective masking bandwidths at low frequencies.

Masking of low-frequency sinusoids of varying durations by Gaussian noise of varying spectral shape was measured in three different studies. Common solutions to technical problems associated with control and specification of low-frequency signals were used in the three studies. If interpreted in terms of Fletcher's critical ratio assumptions, data from the first study lead to the inference that the masking bandwidth is inversely related to signal frequency below about 200 Hz.