Purpose: Previous work (Finch, 2008) reported on the development and implementation of a safety oriented system of performance intervention zones (PIZ), which was used in the assessment of internationally educated massage therapists. The study reported in this paper explores the usefulness and impact of the system as experienced by the evaluators involved in the diagnostic assessment.
Method: This exploratory research was of a qualitative design in which data were collected during a series of individual semi-structured interviews with evaluators who used the performance intervention zone system during the diagnostic assessment of internationally educated massage therapists in Ontario. After obtaining informed consent, interviews were taped, transcribed and analyzed, resulting in identification of a number of themes and recommendations regarding future use and development of the system.
Results: Analysis revealed four themes within the data. These were that the performance intervention zone system 1) enhanced the confidence of examiners in their ability to conduct the comprehensive clinical examination effectively, 2) assisted and improved examiner decision making during the examination, 3) was a useful aid to communication regarding candidate performance, and 4) could be improved by clarifying the nature of intervention and implementing more extensive examiner training prior to the examination.
Conclusion: The performance intervention zone system was found to be useful in orienting examiners to the evaluation process, in supporting decision making during the comprehensive clinical evaluation and as an aid to communication in the post-examination review of candidate performance. The system could be improved through implementation of a pre-examination workshop focused on use of the PIZ and by delineation of levels of examiner intervention during the examination.
Download full-text PDF |
Source |
---|---|
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jbmt.2010.07.004 | DOI Listing |
JCI Insight
January 2025
Medical Oncology Department, Research Institute for Medical Innovation, Radboud University Medical Center, Nijmegen, Netherlands.
Background: Previously, we demonstrated that changes in circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) are promising biomarkers for early response prediction (ERP) to immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI) in metastatic urothelial cancer (mUC). In this study, we investigated the value of whole blood immunotranscriptomics for ERP-ICI and integrated both biomarkers into a multimodal model to boost accuracy.
Methods: Blood samples of 93 patients were collected at baseline and after 2-6 weeks of ICI for ctDNA (N=88) and immunotranscriptome (N=79) analyses.
Brief Bioinform
November 2024
School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an, 710129 Shaanxi, China.
The identification of neoantigens is crucial for advancing vaccines, diagnostics, and immunotherapies. Despite this importance, a fundamental question remains: how to model the presentation of neoantigens by major histocompatibility complex class I molecules and the recognition of the peptide-MHC-I (pMHC-I) complex by T cell receptors (TCRs). Accurate prediction of pMHC-I binding and TCR recognition remains a significant computational challenge in immunology due to intricate binding motifs and the long-tail distribution of known binding pairs in public databases.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBrief Bioinform
November 2024
Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, 83 Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong, 999077, China.
The complexity of T cell receptor (TCR) sequences, particularly within the complementarity-determining region 3 (CDR3), requires efficient embedding methods for applying machine learning to immunology. While various TCR CDR3 embedding strategies have been proposed, the absence of their systematic evaluations created perplexity in the community. Here, we extracted CDR3 embedding models from 19 existing methods and benchmarked these models with four curated datasets by accessing their impact on the performance of TCR downstream tasks, including TCR-epitope binding affinity prediction, epitope-specific TCR identification, TCR clustering, and visualization analysis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPulmonology
December 2025
Sorbonne Université, INSERM, UMRS1158 Neurophysiologie Respiratoire Expérimentale et Clinique, Paris, France.
Background: Nasal high flow (NHF) has been proposed to sustain high intensity exercise in people with COPD, but we have a poor understanding of its physiological effects in this clinical setting.
Research Question: What is the effect of NHF during exercise on dynamic respiratory muscle function and activation, cardiorespiratory parameters, endurance capacity, dyspnoea and leg fatigue as compared to control intervention.
Study Design And Methods: Randomized single-blind crossover trial including COPD patients.
J Med Internet Res
January 2025
Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, The University of Florida, GAINESVILLE, FL, United States.
Background: The implementation of large language models (LLMs), such as BART (Bidirectional and Auto-Regressive Transformers) and GPT-4, has revolutionized the extraction of insights from unstructured text. These advancements have expanded into health care, allowing analysis of social media for public health insights. However, the detection of drug discontinuation events (DDEs) remains underexplored.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEnter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!