Tilburg University

About: Tilburg University is a education organization based out in Tilburg, Noord-Brabant, Netherlands. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Context (language use). The organization has 5550 authors who have published 22330 publications receiving 791335 citations.

Quality of life of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis patients

Abstract: Little attention has been paid to quality of life (QOL) in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF). Therefore, the aim of this study was to address this issue and study the relationship between QOL, depressive symptoms, and breathlessness in these patients. Forty-one IPF patients and 41 healthy persons matched for age and sex completed the World Health Organization Quality of Life assessment instrument-100. The IPF patients also completed the Beck Depression Inventory, the Bath Breathlessness Scale, a social support questionnaire and a question concerning perceived seriousness of illness. Compared to the control group, QOL in IPF patients was mainly impaired in the domains “physical health” and “level of independence”. A number of relationships were found between pulmonary function tests and QOL. The QOL facet “negative feelings” was highly associated with scores on depression. Subjective breathlessness was related to depressive symptoms and QOL. Moreover, sex and effective/emotional breathlessness predicted overall QOL. In conclusion, the impairment of the quality of life areas “physical health” and “level of independence” are important issues in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. Subjective breathlessness, especially the effective/emotional scale, seems related to quality of life and depressive symptoms. Rehabilitation programmes are needed that are aimed at physiological aspects and psychosocial aspects of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis in order to enhance the quality of life of these patients.

Open source software for disaster management

Abstract: Evaluating how the Sahana disaster information system coordinates disparate institutional and technical resources in the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunami.

Deriving Robust Counterparts of Nonlinear Uncertain Inequalities

Abstract: In this paper we provide a systematic way to construct the robust counterpart of a nonlinear uncertain inequality that is concave in the uncertain parameters. We use convex analysis (support functions, conjugate functions, Fenchel duality) and conic duality in order to convert the robust counterpart into an explicit and computationally tractable set of constraints. It turns out that to do so one has to calculate the support function of the uncertainty set and the concave conjugate of the nonlinear constraint function. Conveniently, these two computations are completely independent. This approach has several advantages. First, it provides an easy structured way to construct the robust counterpart both for linear and nonlinear inequalities. Second, it shows that for new classes of uncertainty regions and for new classes of nonlinear optimization problems tractable counterparts can be derived. We also study some cases where the inequality is nonconcave in the uncertain parameters.