Dignity in mental health practice and research: Time to unite on innovation, outreach and education

Dignity has been described as ‘the inherent and inalienable worth of all human beings irrespective of social status such as race, gender, physical or mental state. Dignity is, therefore, at the core of psychological well-being, social connection and humanity. Mental health interventions that explicitly promote and preserve dignity for people experiencing mental distress are growing in clinical practice and research in the USA, India, Europe and elsewhere. However, there is a need for more research and policy supporting the implementation and evaluation of these initiatives. Here, we highlight some of these programmes and make recommendations on how to further integrate dignity in mental health research, practice, outreach and education in India and the world

DETECTING AND REPORTING STACK SPLITS IN A STACKABLE SWITCH

Stack splits are a commonly encountered failure for stackable systems within enterprise networks, where there is a possibility of multiple active stacks forming from the breakdown of a single stackable system. Proposed herein are techniques involving a management station-driven approach that provides for the ability to identify/enumerate stack splits and alert network administrators that appropriate actions to resolve failures can be taken. Further, techniques proposed herein may facilitate performing preventative actions by a network independently or/and in concert with a network adminstrator, in order to avoid network outages, chaos, and further network failures

IMSupport: Guiding Stressed Students and Reducing the Mental Health Stigma

In the current world, students are constantly affected by stressors, such as academics and social pressures in their lives, that may lead to many serious mental health issues. Many students are uncomfortable with reaching out for mental health support because of the judgment they may receive. Additionally, high-achieving students specifically are not able to overcome the stigma surrounding mental health, and thus are not reaching out for help. Since many students already have access to technology, we believe that an application that helps students reach out anonymously to other students will benefit their emotional well-being by serving as a way to communicate their feelings. There have been numerous cases where those who struggle at a young age with mental health and do not acquire help, continue to be affected in the later parts of their lives. For these students, many of their stressors are derived from school work and academic pressure. Therefore, our app, IMSupport would be designed to address both aspects of stress relevant to high-achieving students: academic and mental health support. The app would be able to provide a personal and anonymous platform that would allow students to contact their peers for the help they need. This would help our constituents because our provides a way to communicate their emotion

Experimental In-Vivo Models Used in Fat Grafting Research for Volume Augmentation in Soft Tissue Reconstruction

As the popularity of fat grafting research increases, animal models are being used as the source of pre-clinical experimental information for discovery and to enhance techniques. To date, animal models used in this research have not been compared to provide a standardized model. We analyzed publications from 1968-2015 to compare published accounts of animal models in fat grafting research. Data collected included: species used, graft characteristics (donor tissue, recipient area, amount injected, injection technique), time of sacrifice and quantification methods. Mice were most commonly used (56% of studies), with the athymic nude strain utilized most frequently (44%). Autologous fat was the most common source of grafted tissue (52%). Subcutaneous dorsum was the most common recipient site (51%). On average, 0.80+/-0.60 mL of fat was grafted. A single bolus technique was used in 57% of studies. Fat volume assessment was typically completed at the end of the study, occurring at less than 1 week to one year. Graft volume was quantified by weight (63%), usually in conjunction with another analysis. The results demonstrate the current heterogeneity of animal models in this research. We propose that the research community reach a consensus to allow better comparison of techniques and results. One example is the model used in our laboratory and others; this model is described in detail. Eventually, larger animal models may better translate to the human condition but, given increased financial costs and animal facility capability, should be explored when data obtained from small animal studies is exhausted or inconclusive

Centralized Airflow Control to Reduce Output Power Variation in a Complex OWC Ocean Energy Network

A centralized airflow control scheme for a complex ocean energy network (OEN) is proposed in this paper to reduce the output power variation (OPV). The OEN is an integrated network of multiple oscillating water columns (OWCs) that are located at different geographical sites connected to a common electrical grid. The complexity of the OWC-OEN increases manifolds due to the integration of several OWCs and design of controllers become very challenging task. So, the centralized airflow control scheme is designed in two stages. In control stage-1, a proportional-integral- (PI-) type controller is designed to provide a common reference command to control stage-2. In control stage-2, the antiwindup PID controllers are implemented for the airflow control of all the OWCs simultaneously. In order to tune the large number of control parameters of this complex system, a fitness function based on integral squared error (ISE) is minimized using the widely adopted particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique. Next, the simulation results were obtained with random wave profiles created using the Joint North Sea Wave Project (JONSWAP) irregular wave model. The OPV of the proposed OWC-OEN was reduced significantly as compared to the individual OWC. It was further observed that the OPV of the proposed scheme was lower than that achieved with uncontrolled and MPPT controlled OWC-OEN. The effect of communication delay on the OPV of the proposed OWC-OEN scheme was also investigated with the proposed controller, which was found to be robust for a delay up to 100 ms.This work was supported in part by the Basque Government through project IT1207-19 and MCIU/MINECO through RTI2018-094902-B-C21/RTI2018-094902-B-C22 (MCIU/AEI/FEDER, UE)

Distributed Intermittent Fault Diagnosis in Wireless Sensor Network Using Likelihood Ratio Test

In current days, sensor nodes are deployed in hostile environments for various military and commercial applications. Sensor nodes are becoming faulty and having adverse effects in the network if they are not diagnosed and inform the fault status to other nodes. Fault diagnosis is difficult when the nodes behave faulty some times and provide good data at other times. The intermittent disturbances may be random or kind of spikes either in regular or irregular intervals. In literature, the fault diagnosis algorithms are based on statistical methods using repeated testing or machine learning. To avoid more complex and time consuming repeated test processes and computationally complex machine learning methods, we proposed a one shot likelihood ratio test (LRT) here to determine the fault status of the sensor node. The proposed method measures the statistics of the received data over a certain period of time and then compares the likelihood ratio with the threshold value associated with a certain tolerance limit. The simulation results using a real time data set shows that the new method provides better detection accuracy (DA) with minimum false positive rate (FPR) and false alarm rate (FAR) over the modified three sigma test. LRT based hybrid fault diagnosis method detecting the fault status of a sensor node in wireless sensor network (WSN) for real time measured data with 100% DA, 0% FAR and 0% FPR if the probability of the data from faulty node exceeds 25%

Melanoma

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Adipose Tissue Therapeutics for Scar Rehabilitation after Thermal Injury

Background: Burn injuries are common and in the long term can lead to hypertrophic or keloid scars, pain and pruritus, limited mobility across joints, and disfigurement. Numerous reports suggest adipose derived tissues, including adipose derived stem cells (ADSCs) and processed lipoaspirate, can improve acutely healing wounds from a variety of etiologies including excisional, thermal, and radiation injuries by both secretion of growth factors and direct differentiation. There are many options for scar treatment, including laser therapy, silicone sheets, steroid injection, and even skin grafting however these techniques either lack optimal efficacy or involve significant cost and morbidity. Clinical case series suggest a beneficial effect of adipose tissues in improving scarred tissues, however this phenomenon has not been extensively studied in animal models especially in a thermal scar model. Objectives: (1) Determine if adipose tissue can accelerate and improve scar remodeling subacutely after acute wound healing has occurred. (2) Determine if the effect is related to adipose derived stem cells or other components of lipoaspirate. Methods: 50 CD1 nu/nu athymic mice received a standardized 70°C 10 second burn with a brass rod to the dorsal skin. Digital photographs and hyperspectral images were taken immediately following injury and serially over the study’s entirety. Burned skin reliably progressed through normal stages of wound healing to a scarred and granulating state. At six weeks post-burn animals received subcutaneous injection immediately beneath the scar with fresh human lipoaspirate (n=10), high dose hADSCs in matrigel (n=10), low dose hADSCs in matrigel (n=10), matrigel control (n=10), or were not injected (n=10). At 4 weeks post-injection (10 weeks post-burn) animals were sacrificed and tissue samples were harvested for histological molecular analysis. Results: Oxygenation and perfusion profiles from hyperspectral imaging and scar wound area correlated between groups suggesting methodological consistency of burns prior to any intervention. Oxygenated hemoglobin at 10 weeks in scars treated with lipoaspirate increased significantly more compared to 6-week pre-treatment baseline than all other groups (1.57x vs. 0.85x, p Conclusion: A consistent model of burn injury and scar maturation is described. Preliminary HSI and scar area data suggest scar improvement in lipoaspirate treated scars compared to ADSCs and controls