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Objectives: This study aims to define consensus-based criteria for acquiring and reporting prostate MRI and establishing prerequisites for image quality. Methods: A total of 44 leading urologists and urogenital radiologists who are experts in prostate cancer imaging from the European Society of Urogenital Radiology (ESUR) and EAU Section of Urologic Imaging (ESUI) participated in a Delphi consensus process. Panellists completed two rounds of questionnaires with 55 items under three headings: image quality assessment, interpretation and reporting, and radiologists’ experience plus training centres. Of 55 questions, 31 were rated for agreement on a 9-point scale, and 24 were multiple-choice or open. For agreement items, there was consensus agreement with an agreement ≥ 70% (score 7–9) and disag

Background: Internationally, stakeholder involvement is recognised as important in the Health Technology Assessment (HTA) process but little is known about the value of this activity. Aims: To identify the contribution of stakeholder involvement in an EU project, that has developed concepts and methods to assess complex technologies and applied these in a palliative care case study. Methods: Stakeholders (n=155), (commissioners, professionals, academics, patients, caregivers) in England, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway and Poland took part in the project. Involvement occurred in various ways (i.e. individuals or group, face-face, telephone, email and in Skype meetings) throughout the project. Results: Stakeholder involvement was valuable as they: identified priorities in palliative care which led to the focus on home care provision and family carer support early in the project; validated findings for patient preferences and moderators of treatment effect, giving additional insights into these; informed gaps in the effectiveness evidence; provided expert opinion to assist economic modelling to predict the potential cost impact of the introduction of additional carer support; informed the assessment of sociocultural aspects which focused on user-professional relationships and decision making; took part in a ‘mock’ decision making meeting to end the case study. Conclusion: The philosophy of stakeholder involvement is consistent with the principles of palliative care, potentially enhancing understanding of the health technology and improving the relevance and responsiveness of research. There is not one model to fit all as involvement needs to be flexible and responsive to specific circumstances. Stakeholder advice can complement and enrich traditional forms of evidence, providing additional insights without creating heavy workloads for researchers or stakeholders. (co-funded by the European Union under grant agreement 306141).

This guidance is intended for individuals and institutions that develop guidelines, perform or commission health technology assessments (HTAs) and systematic reviews (SRs) and that have an interest in the use of qualitative evidence synthesis (QES)/ qualitative systematic review within the framework of an integrated HTA or SR.

This comprehensive executive summary reports on a case study designed to demonstrate the application of a number of the key concepts and methods developed in the INTEGRATE-HTA project to the assessment of complex technologies. The case study focuses on models of home based palliative care with and without an additional element of caregiver support, known as reinforced and non-reinforced home based palliative care respectively.

Ethics has been identified as a key element in Health Technology Assessment (HTA) since its conception. However, ethical issues are still not frequently addressed explicitly in HTA. Several valuable reasons have been identified. The basis of the article is the claim that ethics is often not part of HTA for "epistemological reasons". Hence, the main aim of the contribution is to explore in more details and emphasize them by using the fact/value dichotomy. Our conclusion is that current HTA configuration is predominantly based on the comparison among objective and empirically testable "facts", whilst ethics is not empirically testable. In this sense, there is a sort of "epistemological gap", which can explain why it is so difficult to integrate ethics in HTA. We suggest that the epistemological differences among the various domains of HTA are addressed more explicitly.

Ethics has been identified as a key element in Health Technology Assessment (HTA) since its conception. However, ethical issues are still not frequently addressed explicitly in HTA. Several valuable reasons have been identified. The basis of the article is the claim that ethics is often not part of HTA for “epistemological reasons”. Hence, the main aim of the contribution is to explore in more details and emphasize them by using the fact/value dichotomy. Our conclusion is that current HTA configuration is dominantly based on the comparison among objective and empirically testable “facts”, whilst ethics is not empirically testable. In this sense, there is a sort of “epistemological gap”, which can explain why it is so difficult to integrate ethics in HTA. We suggest that the epistemological differences among the various domains of HTA are addressed more explicitly.

The aim of this guidance is to provide a systematic approach to identify patient preferences for treatment outcome (PPTO). These preferences can either be retrieved from the literature or elicited from patients. Information on PPTOs can be used in the evaluation of health technologies such as treatments or protocols, to determine research agendas or to evaluate the patient-perceived value of treatment outcomes used in trials for systematic reviews or Health Technology Assessment (HTA). This guidance describes the steps needed to retrieve PPTOs, provides an overview of the most commonly used methods to elicit them, and describes the appraisal of studies where such methods are used

The technique for obtaining detailed velocity fields in a wavy liquid layer in stratified air/water pipe flow is described in this paper. By combining Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) with an interface detection technique, the velocity field is resolved in the whole liquid layer. Furthermore, since the shape of the interface is resolved at each time instance, this information is used to conditionally average the velocity field according to the wave phase, which results in phaseresolved velocity profiles. These velocities are then used to separate the wave-induced motion from the turbulenceinduced motion in the liquid layer. In this way, the turbulent wavy regime is analysed. The results of the measurements are compared to the theory of waves and turbulence.