Background: Surgical mortality data are collected routinely in high-income countries, yet virtually no low-or middle-income countries have outcome surveillance in place. The aim was prospectively to collect worldwide mortality data following emergency abdominal surgery, comparing findings across countries with a low, middle or high Human Development Index (HDI).Methods: This was a prospective, multicentre, cohort study. Self-selected hospitals performing emergency surgery submitted prespecified data for consecutive patients from at least one 2-week interval during July to December 2014. Postoperative mortality was analysed by hierarchical multivariable logistic regression.

Dynamic software adaptation addresses software systems that need to change their behavior during execution. To address reuse in dynamic software adaptation, software adaptation patterns, also referred to as software reconfiguration patterns, have been developed. A software adaptation pattern defines how a set of components that make up an architecture or design pattern dynamically cooperate to change the software configuration to a new configuration given a set of adaptation commands. This paper describes a dynamic self-adaptation pattern for distributed transaction management in service-oriented applications.