OBJECTIVE: To determine the effect of availability of clinical information from an integrated electronic health record system on pregnancy outcomes at the point of care. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We used provider interviews and surveys to evaluate the availability of pregnancy-related clinical information in ambulatory practices and the hospital, and applied multiple regression to determine whether greater clinical information availability is associated with improvements in pregnancy outcomes and changes in care processes. Our regression models are risk adjusted and include physician fixed effects to control for unobservable characteristics of physicians that are constant across patients and time. RESULTS: Making nonstress test results, blood pressure data, antenatal problem lists, and tubal sterilization requests from office records available to hospital-based providers is significantly associated with reductions in the likelihood of obstetric trauma and other adverse pregnancy outcomes. Better access to prenatal records also increases the probability of labor induction and decreases the probability of Cesarean section (C-section). Availability of lab test results and new diagnoses generated in the hospital at ambulatory offices is associated with fewer preterm births and low-birth-weight babies. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS: Increased availability of specific clinical information enables providers to deliver better care and improve outcomes, but some types of clinical data are more important than others. More available information does not always result from automated integration of electronic records, but rather from the availability of the source records. Providers depend upon information that they trust to be reliable, complete, consistent, and easily retrievable, even if this requires multiple interfaces.

Dynamic textures are important parts of natural video signals that usually generate an enormous size of high-dimensional data; therefore, effective representation methods are needed for relevant applications. This paper presents a new method for compact representation of high-dimensional data based on tensor decomposition, which can preserve the native form of the data. By treating the high-dimensional data as higher-order tensors, we propose a multiple tensor rank-R decomposition (MTRD) algorithm, which uses low-rank tensors to iteratively approximate the original tensor. Through our MTRD algorithm, the dimension of the data can be greatly reduced, and the decomposition coefficients give a compact representation of the data. As our compact representation method can characterize regular textures in video well, we apply it to dynamic texture video coding, and achieve a better video quality than H.264/AVC with a very low bit-rate just by simply quantizing and coding the decomposition coefficients. Experimental results show that the peak signal-to-noise ratio values of the reconstructed testing sequences can be improved from approximately 0.28 dB up to 8.96 dB, while their bit-rate reductions range from approximately 1.34% to 64.92%.

The parametrization for one kind of multifilter banks generating balanced multiwavelets is presented in this paper, in which two lowpass filters are flipping filters, and two highpass filters have linear phase. Based on these parametric expressions, some balanced multiwavelets and analysis-ready multiwavelets are constructed, which are symmetric, or antisymmetric. Moreover, on the basis of balanced multiwavelet transform, a new method of multiple description coding is given, and experiments show that this method works well. Compared with the traditional multiple description coding method, this method has low redundancy.

Balanced multiwavelets with interpolatory property are discussed in this paper. This kind of multiwavelets can have a sampling property like Shannon's sampling theorem. It has been shown that the corresponding matrix-valued refinable mask has special structure, and an orthogonal multifilter bank {H(z),G(z)} can be reduced to a scalar valued conjugate quadrature filter (CQF) a(z) . But it does not mean that any scalar CQF can form a "good" multifilter bank which can generate a vector-valued refinable function with some degree of smoothness. In the context of balanced multiwavelets, we give the definition of transferring balance order, which a scalar CQF a(z) satisfies, to guarantee that the multiwavelet Ψ generated is balanced. On the basis of the parametrization of a scalar CQF with any length and conditions of transferring balance order, parametrization of multifilter banks which can generate interpolatory multiwavelet and interpolatory scaling function, is gotten. Moreover, some balanced interpolatory multiwavelets have been constructed. Interpolatory analysis-ready multiwavelets (armlets) are also discussed in this paper. It is known that conditions of armlets are easy to validate, compared with balanced multiwavelets. But it will be present that if the corresponding scaling function Φ is interpolatory, the multiwavelet Ψ is balanced of order n if and only if it is an armlet of order n. Finally, the application of balanced multiwavelets with interpolatory property in image processing is also discussed.