Objectives: To obtain health-related quality-of-life (HR-QOL) valuations (or `utilities') from New Zealand women for four health states representative of advanced (metastatic) breast cancer, suitable for use in cost-utility analysis, and to compare four valuation methodologies. Methods: Written...

Our study suggests that women in the New Zealand general public are able to consistently evaluate and value case descriptions of advanced breast cancer using either direct methods (VAS or TTO) or the EQ-5D health state classification system. Some of the valuations elicited using the four methods...

Clinical trials and meta-analyses of trials are models of clinical reality. A pharmacoeconomic model is a logical, quantitative blend of therapeutic and/or disease management strategies, evidence-based clinical outcomes, patient survival data and/or quality-of-life (utility) data,...

Introduction: Streptococcus pneumoniae (Sp.) is a leading cause of paediatric bacterial meningitis, pneumonia and acute otitis media, as is non-typable Haemophilus influenzae (NTHi) for acute otitis media. In 2008, a 7-valent conjugated pneumococcal vaccine (PCV7) was included in the New Zealand...

The design and implementation of the Thomas algorithm optimised for hardware acceleration on an FPGA is presented. The hardware based algorithm combined with custom data flow and low level parallelism available in an FPGA reduces the overall complexity from 8N down to 5N arithmetic operations,...