Achieving the Millennium Development Goal of reducing maternal mortality in rural Africa: an experience from Burundi.

OBJECTIVES: To estimate the reduction in maternal mortality associated with the emergency obstetric care provided by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and to compare this to the fifth Millennium Development Goal of reducing maternal mortality. METHODS: The impact of MSF's intervention was approximated by estimating how many deaths were averted among women transferred to and treated at MSF's emergency obstetric care facility in Kabezi, Burundi, with a severe acute maternal morbidity. Using this estimate, the resulting theoretical maternal mortality ratio in Kabezi was calculated and compared to the Millennium Development Goal for Burundi. RESULTS: In 2011, 1385 women from Kabezi were transferred to the MSF facility, of whom 55% had a severe acute maternal morbidity. We estimated that the MSF intervention averted 74% (range 55-99%) of maternal deaths in Kabezi district, equating to a district maternal mortality rate of 208 (range 8-360) deaths/100 000 live births. This lies very near to the 2015 MDG 5 target for Burundi (285 deaths/100 000 live births). CONCLUSION: Provision of quality emergency obstetric care combined with a functional patient transfer system can be associated with a rapid and substantial reduction in maternal mortality, and may thus be a possible way to achieve Millennium Development Goal 5 in rural Africa

Drive Video Analysis for the Detection of Traffic Near-Miss Incidents

Because of their recent introduction, self-driving cars and advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) equipped vehicles have had little opportunity to learn, the dangerous traffic (including near-miss incident) scenarios that provide normal drivers with strong motivation to drive safely. Accordingly, as a means of providing learning depth, this paper presents a novel traffic database that contains information on a large number of traffic near-miss incidents that were obtained by mounting driving recorders in more than 100 taxis over the course of a decade. The study makes the following two main contributions: (i) In order to assist automated systems in detecting near-miss incidents based on database instances, we created a large-scale traffic near-miss incident database (NIDB) that consists of video clip of dangerous events captured by monocular driving recorders. (ii) To illustrate the applicability of NIDB traffic near-miss incidents, we provide two primary database-related improvements: parameter fine-tuning using various near-miss scenes from NIDB, and foreground/background separation into motion representation. Then, using our new database in conjunction with a monocular driving recorder, we developed a near-miss recognition method that provides automated systems with a performance level that is comparable to a human-level understanding of near-miss incidents (64.5% vs. 68.4% at near-miss recognition, 61.3% vs. 78.7% at near-miss detection).Comment: Accepted to ICRA 201

Social determinants and maternal exposure to intimate partner violence of obstetric patients with severe maternal morbidity in the intensive care unit: a systematic review protocol

Introduction: Maternal mortality is a potentially preventable public health issue. Maternal morbidity is increasingly of interest to aid the reduction of maternal mortality. Obstetric patients admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) are an important part of the global burden of maternal morbidity. Social determinants influence health outcomes of pregnant women. Additionally, intimate partner violence has a great negative impact on women's health and pregnancy outcome. However, little is known about the contextual and social aspects of obstetric patients treated in the ICU. This study aimed to conduct a systematic review of the social determinants and exposure to intimate partner violence of obstetric patients admitted to an ICU. Methods and analysis: A systematic search will be conducted in MEDLINE, CINAHL, ProQuest, LILACS and SciELO from 2000 to 2016. Studies published in English and Spanish will be identified in relation to data reporting on social determinants of health and/or exposure to intimate partner violence of obstetric women, treated in the ICU during pregnancy, childbirth or within 42 days of the end of pregnancy. Two reviewers will independently screen for study eligibility and data extraction. Risk of bias and assessment of the quality of the included studies will be performed by using the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP) checklist. Data will be analysed and summarised using a narrative description of the available evidence across studies. This systematic review protocol will be reported according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Protocols (PRISMA-P) guidelines. Ethics and dissemination: Since this systematic review will be based on published studies, ethical approval is not required. Findings will be presented at La Trobe University, in Conferences and Congresses, and published in a peer-reviewed journal

Architecture for Cooperative Prefetching in P2P Video-on- Demand System

Most P2P VoD schemes focused on service architectures and overlays optimization without considering segments rarity and the performance of prefetching strategies. As a result, they cannot better support VCRoriented service in heterogeneous environment having clients using free VCR controls. Despite the remarkable popularity in VoD systems, there exist no prior work that studies the performance gap between different prefetching strategies. In this paper, we analyze and understand the performance of different prefetching strategies. Our analytical characterization brings us not only a better understanding of several fundamental tradeoffs in prefetching strategies, but also important insights on the design of P2P VoD system. On the basis of this analysis, we finally proposed a cooperative prefetching strategy called "cooching". In this strategy, the requested segments in VCR interactivities are prefetched into session beforehand using the information collected through gossips. We evaluate our strategy through extensive simulations. The results indicate that the proposed strategy outperforms the existing prefetching mechanisms.Comment: 13 Pages, IJCN

Cross-Layer Adaptive Feedback Scheduling of Wireless Control Systems

There is a trend towards using wireless technologies in networked control systems. However, the adverse properties of the radio channels make it difficult to design and implement control systems in wireless environments. To attack the uncertainty in available communication resources in wireless control systems closed over WLAN, a cross-layer adaptive feedback scheduling (CLAFS) scheme is developed, which takes advantage of the co-design of control and wireless communications. By exploiting cross-layer design, CLAFS adjusts the sampling periods of control systems at the application layer based on information about deadline miss ratio and transmission rate from the physical layer. Within the framework of feedback scheduling, the control performance is maximized through controlling the deadline miss ratio. Key design parameters of the feedback scheduler are adapted to dynamic changes in the channel condition. An event-driven invocation mechanism for the feedback scheduler is also developed. Simulation results show that the proposed approach is efficient in dealing with channel capacity variations and noise interference, thus providing an enabling technology for control over WLAN.Comment: 17 pages, 12 figures; Open Access at http://www.mdpi.org/sensors/papers/s8074265.pd

A novel tool for organisational learning and its impact on safety culture in a hospital dispensary

Incident reporting as a key mechanism for organisational learning and the establishment of a stronger safety culture are pillars of the current patient safety movement. Studies have suggested that incident reporting in healthcare does not achieve its full potential due to serious barriers to reporting and that sometimes staff may feel alienated by the process. The aim of the work reported in this paper was to prototype a novel approach to organisational learning that allows an organisation to assess and to monitor the status of processes that often give rise to latent failure conditions in the work environment, and to assess whether and through which mechanisms participation in this approach affects local safety culture. The approach was prototyped in a hospital dispensary using Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycles, and the effect on safety culture was described qualitatively through semi-structured interviews. The results suggest that the approach has had a positive effect on the safety culture within the dispensary, and that staff perceive the approach to be useful and usable

Improving latency tolerance of multithreading through decoupling

The increasing hardware complexity of dynamically scheduled superscalar processors may compromise the scalability of this organization to make an efficient use of future increases in transistor budget. SMT processors, designed over a superscalar core, are therefore directly concerned by this problem. The article presents and evaluates a novel processor microarchitecture which combines two paradigms: simultaneous multithreading and access/execute decoupling. Since its decoupled units issue instructions in order, this architecture is significantly less complex, in terms of critical path delays, than a centralized out-of-order design, and it is more effective for future growth in issue-width and clock speed. We investigate how both techniques complement each other. Since decoupling features an excellent memory latency hiding efficiency, the large amount of parallelism exploited by multithreading may be used to hide the latency of functional units and keep them fully utilized. The study shows that, by adding decoupling to a multithreaded architecture, fewer threads are needed to achieve maximum throughput. Therefore, in addition to the obvious hardware complexity reduction, it places lower demands on the memory system. The study also reveals that multithreading by itself exhibits little memory latency tolerance. Results suggest that most of the latency hiding effectiveness of SMT architectures comes from the dynamic scheduling. On the other hand, decoupling is very effective at hiding memory latency. An increase in the cache miss penalty from 1 to 32 cycles reduces the performance of a 4-context multithreaded decoupled processor by less than 2 percent. For the nondecoupled multithreaded processor, the loss of performance is about 23 percent.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version