Category: Q

A febrile illness causing a spotted fever and transmitted to humans by the bite of Ixodes ticks infected with Rickettsia australis. The disease is found principally in eastern coastal Australia and is similar to Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever in the U.S.  

In vertebral canal block, the cerebrospinal fluid pressure is scarcely affected by compression of the veins of the neck, unilaterally or bilaterally. In healthy persons, the pressure rises rapidly on compression, then disappears when the compression is released.  

Crystalline quartz used for prisms and lenses; fused quartz used for windows, through which ultraviolet radiations are freely transmitted.  

A quartz rod containing various shapes and angles used to conduct, by total internal reflection, ultraviolet radiation from a water-cooled mercury arc quartz lamp.  

A phenomena where an insufficient number of x-ray photons strike the radiographic image receptor during an exposure. This phenomenon causes a speckled or snowy appearing nonuniform intensity over the areas of similar densities on the film. In radiography it is corrected by increasing milliampereseconds (mAS).  

Determination of the amount of a substance in a specified material. The amount may be represented in various ways: “x” grams, “x” g/L, kPa (i.e., an absolute quantity, a con-centrational quantity, an intensive quantity).  

Any measure of the process, performance, or outcome of health care delivery. In general, quality indicators are chosen because they correlate with greater patient safety and decreased mortality. In caring for patients with pneumonia, for example, the percentage of patients who have blood cultures drawn and antibiotics administered in the first hours of their arrival…

A measure of health that combines the duration of life and its degradation by disease or death. A year in perfect health is considered to have a QALY of 1.0; a year of life in a coma is assigned a lower QALY approaching zero.  

A technique used to gain insights from two or more descriptive analyses of the same phenomenon by listing common elements in a standardized format so that patterns in analytical thought can be highlighted.  

Determination of the presence of a substance in a test sample or of the physicochemical characteristics of a substance in a sample.