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Background A barrier to screening is a specific attitude, opinion or state that prevents the patient from seeking preventive care. The aim of this study was to identify and compare barriers to cervical cancer screening (CCS) in Northern Slovakia between women seeking and not seeking CCS. Methods Data collection was performed in twenty gynaecological departments, each department sending data from five healthy women and five untreated women with cervical cancer. Women completed a validated and standardized questionnaire with 28 statements (the CPC-28 questionnaire: “Creencias, Papanicolaou, Cancer-28” questionaire – Beliefs about Papanicolaou and Cervical Cancer). A four-point Likert scale (item score from 1 to 4) was used to assess responses. A linear transformation was made to calculate the responses. Differences with a p value of < 0.05 were considered statistically significant. Results From the 200 questionnaires, 135 (67.5%) participants were divided into the women seeking CCS (n = 97) and the women not seeking CCS (n = 38). The women not seeking CCS vs seeking CCS had higher barriers according to the CPC-28 domain one (median; interquartile range: 33.33; 28.70-40.74 vs 14.82; 7.41–29.63; p < 0.001). The risk of not seeking CCS was statistically significant in non-working (OR; 95% CI: 2.458; 1.127–5.358; p < 0.024), non-childbearing women (OR; 95% CI: 3.302; 1.421–7.671; p < 0.006) and women without cervical cancer (OR; 95% CI: 4.709; 1.960-11.317; p < 0.001). Conclusion We identified barriers to cervical cancer screening in both of our groups but the results were more frequent and statistically significant in the women not seeking CCS.

this paper presents principles for model based testing of embedded systems with use of critical knowledge about system and their environment. For critical knowledge representation UML models can be used. These properties have different priority, impact, dependency, which creates different situations for testing. Critical properties mentioned in this article can serve as input for generating test cases. V-model, as a well known model, provides another approach for representing critical properties of software architecture and testing embedded systems. This model is often used in medical projects, e.g. radiotherapy. Some principles are taken from radiotherapy software project in Siemens Healthcare. Tracing of critical properties in V-model is also part of this article. Keywords-critical knowledge, model based testing, embedded systems, UMLI. MOTIVATION The progress in technological solutions allows designing, implementing and using systems in various spheres of everyday life. Except of information and control systems are becoming popular various embedded systems working in specialized hardware architectures, with specialized operating systems and using specialized peripherals developed for a specific application domain. As an example of these systems used for medical purposes can be radiotherapy.These kind of embedded medical systems are developed by top-down method. V-model is a frequently used model for these cases. Figure 1. V-model The main parts of this model (Figure 1. ) are creating requirements of developed system, analysis, detailed design, implementation and multiple types of testing. Each type of testing on the right side of V-model is binded with a specific phase of software life cycle on the left side of a model (e.g. unit tests are created based on design specification and integration tests are created based on requirement specification).First step of this implementation type is the analysis of requirements with the goal to identify critical properties of final system. Those are the properties, which have high impact on the success of a system. These are especially outer properties such as safety, reliability, userfriendliness (in case of interactive systems) and adapting communication protocols of embedded systems with communication protocols of peripherals or technological devices, where communication is required.Critical properties are regarding to architecture of final system, ways of accessing required processes, data and control flows. All these identified critical properties represented with convenient models together with acquired relevant experiences of managers, analytics, designers, programmers and testers are creating critical knowledge, which usage in software life cycle is crucial. One area of using this knowledge is testing of systems.To identify critical requirements of embedded system in whole model, special keys are introduced. These keys accomplish one basic property -traceability. It is assured that the requirement is fully implemented and tested from the beginning to the end of V-m...

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