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Since the year 2000, prospective dental students at Innsbruck Medical University, Innsbruck, Austria, have undergone both theoretical and practical preadmission exams, called the Dental Admission Test (DAT). The aim of this investigation was to assess the suitability and outcome of this selection practice. Five classes from 2001 to 2005 (N=97; forty-three female, fifty-four male) were retrospectively reviewed. DAT results were compared with student performance, gender, ability to graduate on time, and dropout rates. Furthermore, the influence of a previous medical degree was evaluated. The t-test was used to analyze correlations between the results of the DAT and the following: gender, students who graduated on time, and students who had previously completed a medical degree. Pearson's correlation coefficient (r) was applied to analyze correlations among test scores, age, and students' performance during the first clinical year. Students graduating on time were noted to have significantly better DAT results; students with a previous medical degree showed significantly better grades during their first clinical year. The difference between the performance of male and female applicants on the DAT was not significant. Correlation was found between DAT results and dental school performance (r=-0.462). We conclude that the DAT may reduce dropout rates by excluding applicants unlikely to be successful in practical courses and that DAT scores are a reliable tool to predict student performance during the first clinical year of dental school in Innsbruck.

Purpose -After salary and wages, facility and real estate expenditure are the largest cost items in the semi-public sector. Especially, for long-term care facilities, there is high-saving potential from more efficient and effective use of property. The main purpose of this paper is an exploratory research study in order to analyse the operating costs of long-term care facilities. Design/methodology/approach -The survey is based on empirical data questionnaires, data generation and semi-structured interviews at 18 long-term care facilities in Tyrol, Austria carried out during Summer 2007. In order to determine the volume and to prioritize the cost drivers computer-aided real-estate benchmarking software was used, which was developed by the Institute of Real Estate Benchmarking at the University of Applied Sciences KufsteinTirol, Austria. Statistic analyses were conducted to investigate saving potential, determine the best case of the sample and submit recommendations to the decision makers. Findings -The main findings are the investigation and visualization of saving potential of long-term care facilities and identification of the volume and structure of the cost drivers and illuminated current best practices in effective building upkeep and operating costs of long-term care facilities in Tyrol. Furthermore, the study reveals the immense saving potential in the costs of various services.Research limitations/implications -This survey is based on the operating costs of long-term care facilities. Other running costs such as costs for healthcare personnel as well as quality indicators are not considered in this survey. Further research activities will be necessary regarding the identification of these cost drivers by the application of regression models. Practical implications -Professional property management of long-term care facilities will be shown to decrease the cost share in the healthcare sector. The results should help to establish cost benchmarking increasingly and develop it as a strategic planning tool in order to support management in the healthcare sector in the decision-making process. Originality/value -The paper presents a new measuring method, which allows an holistic view of three influencing factors, namely the amount of beds, occupancy and the space consumption, to investigate weak points in cost efficiency on one chart.

ERP projects are complex purposes which influence main internal and external operations of companies. The success of the project directly influences the performance and the survival of the organisation. Recent research has methodically collected plausible data in the field of critical success factors (CSFs) within ERP projects. This article describes how the collected publications were used to identify the main CSFs and how they can be ranked according to the importance of success or failure through a literature review. Because of the influence of CSFs to ERP-projects in general, the term "ERP project" is used in the further parts of this paper. The second part of this paper proposes how CSFs can be integrated into classical ERP project phases. Past researches did nearly not investigate how CSFs which were mentioned in different publications can influence the ERP-project phases. At the end of the paper the trend of CSF in relation of the publication year and the origin of the author are shown.

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A solid and accurate proximal femur segmentation technique using the popular active shape model (ASM) is proposed. For generating an optimal shape prior, the minimum description length, based on 200 supervised manual segmented proximal femur shapes, is used. The segmentation is based on a coarse to fine scaling technique including a profile scale space method. The segmentation results are compared using an optimal defined initial pose and a pose based on a registration technique. Using ideal template initialization, 95% of the shapes have been recovered exactly (average point-to-point error approximately 13 pixels, average point-to-boundary error approximately 7 pixels). Using a template-based initialization based on a registration technique, a successful segmentation rate of approximately 89% is achieved, with an average point-to-point error approximately 12 pixels, and an average point-to-boundary error approximately 8 pixels. With an adequate template initialization and an improved ASM, this method seems to provide an accurate tool for segmentation of the proximal femur shapes on conventional hip overview x-ray images.

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