Context: This systematic review was conducted to investigate the role of phones (telephone and mobile phone) in interventions designed to control obesity in children under age six and to determine the features and effects of these interventions. Evidence Acquisition: A systematic search was conducted of the electronic databases (until November 2016). Randomized controlled trials that assessed the effects of phone-based interventions to control obesity in children under age six were included. Results: Of the 1920 papers accessed, 38 were relevant based on title and abstract. After review of the full texts, five studies were deemed eligible for inclusion. The results showed that in two studies phone-based interventions succeeded in improving the children's weight and BMI while in three other studies they were not. Among the functionalities of a telephone and mobile phone (e.g. text messaging and smartphone applications), only phone calls were used to communicate with participants. Only one of the included studies had used the phone as its main intervention, in the other studies the phone was used as part of a multicomponent intervention. Most of the included studies used phone calls to encourage and remind the participants about their children's nutritional status and physical activity. Conclusions: Although the numerous functions of phones can be used independently or in combination with other interventions for controlling obesity, so far, only the phone call function has been used for children under age six. Moreover, there is still no strong evidence on their positive effects on obesity control in children under age six.
Coronary artery disease (CAD) is one of the most prevalent causes of death worldwide. The early diagnosis and timely medical care of cardiovascular patients can greatly prevent death and reduce the cost of treatments associated with CAD. In this study, we attempt to prepare a new model for early CAD diagnosis. The proposed model can diagnose CAD based on clinical data and without the use of an invasive procedure. Methods: In this paper, machine-learning (ML) techniques were used for the early detection of CAD, which were applied to a CAD dataset known as Z-Alizadeh Sani. Since this dataset has 54 features, the Pearson correlation feature selection method was conducted to identify the most effective features. Then, six machine learning techniques including decision tree, deep learning, logistic regression, random forest, support vector machine (SVM), and Xgboost were employed based on a semi-random-partitioning framework. Result: Applying Pearson feature selection to the dataset demonstrated that only eight features were the most effective for CAD diagnosis. The results of running the six machine-learning models on the selected features showed that logistic regression and SVM had the same performance with 95.45% accuracy, 95.91% sensitivity, 91.66% specificity, and a 96.90% F1 score. In addition, the ROC curve indicates a similar result regarding the AUC (0.98). Conclusions: Prediction is an important component of medical decision support systems. The results of the present study showed that feature selection has a high impact on machine-learning performance and, regardless of the evaluation metrics of the machine-learning models, determining the effective features is very important. However, SVM and Logistic Regression were designated as the best models according to our selected features.
Background:Hospital websites are important sources for patients to access health information.Aim:The purpose of this study was to develop the quality evaluation model for hospital websites.Methods:The quantitative study was conducted through the modified Delphi method in 2014-2015. The population of the study includes 10 experts were chosen by targeting non-randomized method. A questionnaire was prepared based on the prototype that was developed by research papers and related models. The validity of the questionnaires was confirmed by face validity and CVI and CVR estimation. Reliability was obtained by split-half method (α = 0.8). Experts’ opinions were collected through interview. Then, their frequency and percentage were determined. Items with options completely agree and agree over 75% was approved, items below 50% were removed, and items 50%–75% were removed after three interviews repetitions.Results:Most of the experts agreed about the pleasant and harmonious colors, the readable and consistent fonts (100%). The least frequency was allocated to correct grammar and words, support for multilingual and rapidly changing of displaying pages in the website with a frequency of 2 (20%).Conclusion:The minimum qualitative criteria for a website are usability, efficiency, user friendly, service, reliability and interaction.
Introduction: Medical tourism is the most important aspect of health tourism. The responsibilities of this industry are mostly undertaken by agencies and facilitators acting as intermediaries between patients and service providers. As a key factor, websites provide extensive services to patients for a better presence in medical tourism market. The present study aimed to compare medical tourism websites and facilitators in Iran and other countries using correspondence analysis.Method: Websites were selected based on the specified criteria such as content of websites which were examined using content analysis technique. The data belonging to website content were classified into two groups including medical and tourism services and information and communication issues. Correspondence analysis was done using two R packages (FactoMineR for analysis and fact extra for data visualization).Results: Of 42 selected websites, 19 was belonged to Iran, 11 to North America, 7 to South and Central America, and 5 to Asia. Medical tourism facilitators in North America and Asia tend to provide modern contact and legal information. Against Iranians' facilitators tend to show traditional contact and general information. South American websites provide more information about hospital accreditation. Iranian websites emphasized tourism-related information. Whereas, North American’s are emphasized on cost-comparison lists.Conclusion: Results of the present study provide a snapshot of status of data provided on websites in terms of medical, tourist and communication services available in the studied websites and clearly showed that Iranian medical tourism facilitator websites act differently from those of other countries. Websites play important roles for guiding customers to make decisions regarding the medical journey. Therefore, Iranian medical tourism facilitator websites must reduce their differences with those of other countries in order to be more actively participate and earn more profit in this competitive market.
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