Showing papers by "Mika Shigematsu published in 2011"
TL;DR: Both decreased WBC and PLT counts can be considered to be common predictors of poor prognosis in H5N1 influenza patients <18 years of age.
Abstract: Objective
The World Health organization received reports of 478 laboratory-confirmed cases of influenza A (H5N1) from 15 countries between November 2003 and February 2010. More than 50% of these cases involved patients <20 years of age. Determining an association between the clinical factors at the time of hospital admission and prognosis may be useful for timely and adequate consultation and treatment. It has been difficult to obtain these clinical factors adjusted with other confounding factors, such as age and sex, as published studies of H5N1 virus infection usually reported only a few cases. So, we performed a pooled analysis of the reported cases.
6 citations
11 Apr 2011
TL;DR: This work introduces Open Bio Safety Lab, their implementation of a virtual world based training application in bio-risk management, which is one of the most important areas for training systems nowadays, and presents the results of the exploratory test study, which indicates a high degree of usability of the system.
Abstract: Recently, virtual world technology has been successfully used to create interesting and useful applications in the context of scientific research, ranging from visualization of static 3D representations of molecular entities to full execution of astrophysical simulations. Unfortunately, the majority of these applications are somewhat limited by the current functionality of the virtual world client software, constraining them to provide only the most basic features of user interfaces. Thus, the implementation of applications such as training programs becomes quite challenging due to the high level of interaction a user must have with the training environment itself. In order to analyze the level of usability for virtual world based applications, we will introduce Open Bio Safety Lab, our implementation of a virtual world based training application in bio-risk management, which is one of the most important areas for training systems nowadays. We also present the results of our exploratory test study with twenty-four subjects, which indicates a high degree of usability of our system, not only for the testing aspect of the training, but also for the learning aspect.
2 citations