The Relationship of Left Ventricular Trabeculation to Ventricular Function and Structure Over a 9.5-Year Follow-Up The MESA Study

Left ventricular (LV) trabeculation is highly variable among individuals and is increased in some diseases (e.g., congenital heart disease or cardiomyopathies), but its significance in population-representative individuals is unknown

Integrated micro X-ray fluorescence and chemometric analysis for printed circuit boards recycling

A novel approach, based on micro X-ray fluorescence (μXRF), was developed to define an efficient and fast automatic recognition procedure finalized to detect and topologically assess the presence of the different elements in waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE). More specifically, selected end-of-life (EOL) iPhone printed circuit boards (PCB) were investigated, whose technological improvement during time, can dramatically influence the recycling strategies (i.e. presence of different electronic components, in terms of size, shape, disposition and related elemental content). The implemented μXRF-based techniques allow to preliminary set up simple and fast quality control strategies based on the full recognition and characterization of precious and rare earth elements as detected inside the electronic boards. Furthermore, the proposed approach allows to identify the presence and the physical-chemical attributes of the other materials (i.e. mainly polymers), influencing the further physical-mechanical processing steps addressed to realize a pre-concentration of the valuable elements inside the PCB milled fractions, before the final chemical recovery

Impact of Scribes with Flow Coordination Duties on Throughput in an Academic Emergency Department

Introduction: With the increasing influence of electronic health records in emergency medicine came concerns of decreasing operational efficiencies. Particularly worrisome was increasing patient length of stay (LOS). Medical scribes were identified to be in a good position to quickly address barriers to treatment delivery and patient flow. The objective of this study was to investigate patient LOS in the mid- and low-acuity zones of an academic emergency department (ED) with and without medical scribes.Methods: A retrospective cohort study compared patient volume and average LOS between a cohort without scribes and a cohort after the implementation of a scribe-flow coordinator program. Patients were triaged to the mid-acuity Vertical Zone (primarily Emergency Severity Index [ESI] 3) or low-acuity Fast Track (primarily ESI 4 and 5) at a tertiary academic ED. Patients were stratified by treatment zone, acuity level, and disposition.Results: The pre-intervention and post-intervention periods included 8900 patients and 9935 patients, respectively. LOS for patients discharged from the Vertical Zone decreased by 12 minutes from 235 to 223 minutes (p<0.0001, 95% confidence interval [CI], -17,-7) despite a 10% increase in patient volume. For patients admitted from the Vertical Zone, volume increased 13% and LOS remained almost the same, increasing from 225 to 228 minutes (p=0.532, 95% CI, -6,12). For patients discharged from the Fast Track, volume increased 14% and LOS increased six minutes, from 89 to 95 minutes (p<0.0001, 95% CI, 4,9). Predictably, only 1% of Fast Track patients were admitted.Conclusion: Despite substantially increased volume, the use of scribes as patient flow facilitators in the mid-acuity zone was associated with decreased LOS. In the low-acuity zone, scribes were not shown to be as effective, perhaps because rapid patient turnover required them to focus on documentation

Disparity map generation based on trapezoidal camera architecture for multiview video

Visual content acquisition is a strategic functional block of any visual system. Despite its wide possibilities, the arrangement of cameras for the acquisition of good quality visual content for use in multi-view video remains a huge challenge. This paper presents the mathematical description of trapezoidal camera architecture and relationships which facilitate the determination of camera position for visual content acquisition in multi-view video, and depth map generation. The strong point of Trapezoidal Camera Architecture is that it allows for adaptive camera topology by which points within the scene, especially the occluded ones can be optically and geometrically viewed from several different viewpoints either on the edge of the trapezoid or inside it. The concept of maximum independent set, trapezoid characteristics, and the fact that the positions of cameras (with the exception of few) differ in their vertical coordinate description could very well be used to address the issue of occlusion which continues to be a major problem in computer vision with regards to the generation of depth map

Dentistry

The specialty of Dental Surgery has progressed from the "blood and acrylic" of the early seventies. Dentistry has undergone a quantum leap over the past twenty-five years, with improvements in both technique and technology, bringing us the sophisticated procedures used in today's practice.peer-reviewe

A hybrid radiation detector for simultaneous spatial and temporal dosimetry

In this feasibility study an organic plastic scintillator is calibrated against ionisation chamber measurements and then embedded in a polymer gel dosimeter to obtain a quasi-4D experimental measurement of a radiation field. This hybrid dosimeter was irradiated with a linear accelerator, with temporal measurements of the dose rate being acquired by the scintillator and spatial measurements acquired with the gel dosimeter. The detectors employed in this work are radiologically equivalent; and we show that neither detector perturbs the intensity of the radiation field of the other. By employing these detectors in concert, spatial and temporal variations in the radiation intensity can now be detected and gel dosimeters can be calibrated for absolute dose from a single irradiation