PURPOSE: This is a qualitative study to identify dimensions of long-term care hospital care quality that provide high-level medical services for long-term care patients in Korea. METHODS: Service consumers and providers were interviewed, and collected data were analyzed into thesis, type and dimension. The focus group method was applied to two provider groups and individual interview was applied to two persons who had experienced a long-term care hospital. RESULTS: The results of analyzing the comsumers and providers was integrated into 8 dimensions: physical environment, staff, clinical care and nursing, multiplicity of activity program, atmosphere, interaction with family, nutrition, and quality improvement system. CONCLUSION: The dimensions of long-term care hospital care quality from this study can be used as a basis of quality indicators. Quantitative studies to test these dimensions are required for establishing quality management systems.
Atmosphere ; Focus Groups ; Humans ; Korea ; Long-Term Care* ; Nursing ; Qualitative Research ; Quality Improvement ; Quality Indicators, Health Care

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: The diagnostic performance of shear wave elastography (SWE) combined with ultrasound (US) in the differential diagnosis of thyroid nodules was evaluated. MATERIALS AND METHODS: 459 articles were collected using KoreaMed, Ovid-MEDLINE, Ovid-EMBASE, and Cochrane Library. The searching words were ‘{(elastography and shear).mp. OR SWE.mp. OR acoustic radiation force impulse.mp. OR ARFI.mp. OR acuson.mp. OR aixplorer.mp.}’. Two authors independently performed article selection and evaluation of the quality of studies with Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network tool. RESULTS: 2582 specimens (thyroid nodules) from 11 studies selected were included in this review. Combined use of US and SWE was reported higher specificity in five literatures, lower specificity in five studies, and no changes in 1 study when compared to US. We performed meta-analysis using data from 10 studies. The pooled sensitivity and specificity of US and SWE group for the differential diagnosis of benign and malignant nodules were 0.91 (I2=83.4%), 0.73 (I2=95.9%). The pooled sensitivity and specificity of US alone group were 0.88 (I2=93.2%), 0.71 (I2=92.7%). CONCLUSION: SWE is not effective in the differential diagnosis of thyroid nodules to minimize unnecessary biopsy of nodules. The included studies showed significant heterogeneity of results.
Acoustics ; Biopsy ; Diagnosis, Differential ; Elasticity Imaging Techniques ; Population Characteristics ; Sensitivity and Specificity ; Thyroid Gland ; Thyroid Nodule ; Ultrasonography

BACKGROUND: We aimed to conduct a systematic review of previously published material to evaluate the diagnostic effectiveness of PCR-based tests in detecting BRAF mutation. METHODS: Eight Korean databases, including KoreaMed, Ovid-MEDLINE, and Ovid-EMBASE were used to identify relevant published studies. Nine studies describing usage of real-time PCR, dual-priming oligonucleotide (DPO)-multiplex real-time PCR and allele-specific PCR were included in the final assessment. Two reviewers screened all references independently for assessing the quality of the included articles and extracted data. RESULTS: The rate of detection of the BRAF mutations was lower in the Korean population (11.1-17.2%) than that in the Western population (36.7-82.2%). The diagnostic accuracy of the BRAF mutation tests was assessed on the basis of four previous reports, all of which employed real-time PCR on malignant melanoma. In fact, the diagnostic accuracy of real-time PCR was found to be higher than that of sequencing tests (pooled sensitivity, 0.96; pooled specificity, 0.83; and summary receiver operating characteristic area under the curve, 0.99). In addition, we found that there was no publication bias in meta-analysis. The concordance rate of the BRAF mutation tests compared with reference tests was 87.9-98.1%. CONCLUSIONS: Real-time PCR for the detection of the BRAF gene mutation is an effective technology for determining the appropriateness of treatment with BRAF kinase inhibitors in terminal stage cancer as well as metastatic and malignant melanoma.
Melanoma* ; Phosphotransferases ; Polymerase Chain Reaction ; Publication Bias ; Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reaction ; ROC Curve ; Sensitivity and Specificity

Several compounds and extracts isolated from a brown alga, Ishige (I.) okamurae, exhibit anti-oxidant and anti-inflammatory effects. The present study investigated whether the ethyl acetate (EtOAc) fraction of I. okamurae (EFIO) could ameliorate carbon tetrachloride (CCl4)-induced hepatotoxicity in rats. Sprague-Dawley rats were intraperitoneally (i.p.) administered with EFIO at 10 or 50 mg/kg per day for 2 consecutive days before CCl4 injection (3.3 mL/kg, i.p.). Twenty four hours later, the rats were anesthesized with diethyl ether and dissected. Pretreatment with EFIO significantly reduced the increased serum levels of alanine aminotransferase and aspartate aminotransferase in CCl4-treated rats. Pretreatment with EFIO also significantly inhibited the reduced activities of superoxide dismutase and catalase in the CCl4-injured liver. Histopathological evaluations showed that hemorrhage, hepatocyte necrosis, inflammatory cell infiltration, and fatty degeneration induced by CCl4 treatment were ameliorated by the administration of EFIO. Additionally, liver immunohistochemical analyses revealed the marked reduction in ED1-positive monocyte-like macrophages in EFIO-pretreated rats given CCl4. These results suggest that EFIO ameliorates CCl4-induced liver injury, possibly through the inhibition of oxidative stress.
Acetates ; Alanine Transaminase ; Animals ; Aspartate Aminotransferases ; Carbon ; Carbon Tetrachloride ; Catalase ; Ether, Ethyl ; Hemorrhage ; Hepatocytes ; Liver ; Macrophages ; Necrosis ; Oxidative Stress ; Rats ; Rats, Sprague-Dawley ; Superoxide Dismutase

This paper describes a community effort to improve earlier versions of the full-text corpus of Genomics & Informatics by semi-automatically detecting and correcting PDF-to-text conversion errors and optical character recognition errors during the first hackathon of Genomics & Informatics Annotation Hackathon (GIAH) event. Extracting text from multi-column biomedical documents such as Genomics & Informatics is known to be notoriously difficult. The hackathon was piloted as part of a coding competition of the ELTEC College of Engineering at Ewha Womans University in order to enable researchers and students to create or annotate their own versions of the Genomics & Informatics corpus, to gain and create knowledge about corpus linguistics, and simultaneously to acquire tangible and transferable skills. The proposed projects during the hackathon harness an internal database containing different versions of the corpus and annotations.

This paper describes a community effort to improve earlier versions of the full-text corpus of Genomics & Informatics by semi-automatically detecting and correcting PDF-to-text conversion errors and optical character recognition errors during the first hackathon of Genomics & Informatics Annotation Hackathon (GIAH) event. Extracting text from multi-column biomedical documents such as Genomics & Informatics is known to be notoriously difficult. The hackathon was piloted as part of a coding competition of the ELTEC College of Engineering at Ewha Womans University in order to enable researchers and students to create or annotate their own versions of the Genomics & Informatics corpus, to gain and create knowledge about corpus linguistics, and simultaneously to acquire tangible and transferable skills. The proposed projects during the hackathon harness an internal database containing different versions of the corpus and annotations.