With the cost of health care rising rapidly, both physicians and administrators regularly face resource allocation decisions. Under these conditions of relative scarcity, the equitable and appropriate distribution of limited resources becomes an ethical as well as a financial issue. Through ethical analysis, physician executives can assist their physician colleagues and fellow administrators to find rationally defensible answers to questions regarding the distribution of limited resources. Six criteria are frequently "weighted in the balance" by ethicists when analyzing whether justice is served in the distribution of a limited resource: need, equality, contribution, ability to pay, effort, and merit. The authors argue that, from an ethical standpoint, the best single criterion upon which one can base an allocation decision is that of merit, defined as the potential to benefit from the investment of additional resources.
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Comput Med Imaging Graph
January 2025
CAS Key Laboratory of Molecular Imaging, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China; School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China; National Key Laboratory of Kidney Diseases, Beijing 100853, China. Electronic address:
In clinical optical molecular imaging, the need for real-time high frame rates and low excitation doses to ensure patient safety inherently increases susceptibility to detection noise. Faced with the challenge of image degradation caused by severe noise, image denoising is essential for mitigating the trade-off between acquisition cost and image quality. However, prevailing deep learning methods exhibit uncontrollable and suboptimal performance with limited interpretability, primarily due to neglecting underlying physical model and frequency information.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJMIR Med Educ
January 2025
Department of Orthopedics, First Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, China.
Background: Teaching severe pelvic trauma poses a significant challenge in orthopedic surgery education due to the necessity of both clinical reasoning and procedural operational skills for mastery. Traditional methods of instruction, including theoretical teaching and mannequin practice, face limitations due to the complexity, the unpredictability of treatment scenarios, the scarcity of typical cases, and the abstract nature of traditional teaching, all of which impede students' knowledge acquisition.
Objective: This study aims to introduce a novel experimental teaching methodology for severe pelvic trauma, integrating virtual reality (VR) technology as a potent adjunct to existing teaching practices.
PLoS Med
January 2025
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States of America.
Background: Nirmatrelvir with ritonavir (Paxlovid) is indicated for patients with Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) who are at risk for progression to severe disease due to the presence of one or more risk factors. Millions of treatment courses have been prescribed in the United States alone. Paxlovid was highly effective at preventing hospitalization and death in clinical trials.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Diagnosing dementia remains challenging in low-income settings due to limited diagnostic options and the absence of definitive biomarkers. The use of brain MRI in the diagnosis of dementia is infrequent in Uganda, and even when it is used, subtle findings like mild regional atrophy are often overlooked, despite being crucial for imaging diagnosis.
Objective: The purpose of this study was to explore the perceptions and practices of imaging personnel and physicians regarding the use of brain MRI as a diagnostic approach for dementia in Uganda.
ACS Nano
January 2025
Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Reproductive Medicine, Guangdong Provincial Clinical Research Center for Obstetrical and Gynecological Diseases, Department of Gynecology & Obstetrics, Reproductive Medicine Center, The First Affiliated Hospital, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510080, PR China.
Regeneration of the injured endometrium, particularly the functional layer, is crucial for the prevention of uterine infertility. At present, clinical treatment using sodium hyaluronate hydrogel injection is limited by its relatively low fluidity, short-term retention, and insufficient bioactive ingredients, so it is necessary to develop an advanced healing-promoting hydrogel. The modulation of the microenvironment by presents a bioactive component that can facilitate the regeneration of the functional layer.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEnter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!