The Impact of a Brief Intervention on Medical Students\u27 Readiness to Screen for DV - Changes in Decisional Balance and Self-Efficacy

Introduction: Domestic violence (DV) affects millions of Americans each year. Yet, there is a dearth of theory-based DV curricula, resulting in physicians unprepared to screen for DV. This study utilized a survey based on constructs from the Transtheoretical Model to assess the readiness of first- and second-year medical students to screen for DV. Information from this survey will be used to help institutionalize DV education into the medical curriculum. [See PDF for complete abstract

Combination of DROOL rules and Protégé knowledge bases in the ONTO-H annotation tool

ONTO-H is a semi-automatic collaborative tool for the semantic annotation of documents, built as a Protégé 3.0 tab plug-in. Among its multiple functionalities aimed at easing the document annotation process, ONTO-H uses a rule-based system to create cascading annotations out from a single drag and drop operation from a part of a document into an already existing concept or instance of the domain ontology being used for annotation. It also gives support to the detection of name conflicts and instance duplications in the creation of the annotations. The rule system runs on top of the open source rule engine DROOLS and is connected to the domain ontology used for annotation by means of an ad-hoc programmed Java proxy

Iuriservice : un FAQ Inteligente para los jueces en su primer destino

En esta presentación describimos el uso de ontologías legales como base para la mejora del soporte para jueces. El uso de la tecnología de procesamiento de lenguaje natural permite obtener respuestas a los jóvenes jueces en tiempo real y mejorar así su trabajo día a día.We present an intelligent FAQ system for junior judges that intensively uses the ontology and allows a free text input for querying. We describe the use of legal ontologies as a basis to improve IT support for professional judges. As opposed to most legal ontologies designed so far, which are mostly based on dogmatic and normative knowledge, we emphasize the importance of professional knowledge and experience as an important pillar for constructing the ontolog

A Semantic Portal for Fund Finding in the EU: Semantic Upgrade, Integration and Publication of Heterogeneous Legacy Data

FundFinder is a Semantic Web portal that allows searching for and navigating through information about funding opportunities. This application has been created following a set of techniques and using a set of tools for the upgrade of legacy content to the Semantic Web, including databases and semi-structured documents. This process consists in extracting and populating knowledge from heterogeneous information sources and making it available on the Web

A Semantic Portal for the International Affairs Sector

The Royal Institute Elcano(dagger) (Real Instituto Elcano) in Spain is a prestigious independent political institute whose mission is to comment on the political situation in the world focusing on its relation to Spain. As part of its dissemination strategy it operates a public website. The online content can be accessed by navigating through categories or by a keyword-based, full text search engine. The work described in this paper aims at improving access to the content. We describe an approach, tools and techniques that allow building a semantic portal, where access is based on the meaning of concepts and relations of the International Affairs domain. The approach comprises an automatic ontology-based annotator, a semantic search engine with a natural language inter-face, a web publication tool allowing semantic navigation, and a 3D visualization component. The semantic portal is currently being tested by the Institute

Modeling Small Scale Impacts of Multi-Purpose Platforms: An Ecosystem Approach

Aquaculture and marine renewable energy are two expanding sectors of the Blue Economy in Europe. Assessing the long-term environmental impacts in terms of eutrophication and noise is a priority for both the EU Water Framework Directive and the Marine Strategy Framework Directive, and cumulative impacts will be important for the Maritime Spatial Planning under the Integrated Maritime Policy. With the constant expansion of aquaculture production, it is expected that farms might be established further offshore in more remote areas, as high-energy conditions offer an opportunity to generate more power locally using Marine Renewable Energy (MRE) devices. A proposed solution is the co-location of MRE devices and aquaculture systems using Multi-Purpose Platforms (MPPs) comprising offshore wind turbines (OWTs) that will provide energy for farm operations as well as potentially shelter the farm. Disentangling the impacts, conflicts and synergies of MPP elements on the surrounding marine ecosystem is challenging. Here we created a high-resolution spatiotemporal Ecospace model of the West of Scotland, in order to assess impacts of a simple MPP configuration on the surrounding ecosystem and how these impacts can cascade through the food web. The model evaluated the following specific ecosystem responses: (i) top-down control pathways due to distribution changes among top-predators (harbor porpoise, gadoids and seabirds) driven by attraction to the farming sites and/or repulsion/killing due to OWT operations; (ii) bottom-up control pathways due to salmon farm activity providing increasing benthic enrichment predicated by a fish farm particle dispersal model, and sediment nutrient fluxes to the water column by early diagenesis of organic matter (recycled production). Weak responses of the food-web were found for top-down changes, whilst the results showed high sensitivity to increasing changes of bottom-up drivers that cascaded through the food-web from primary producers and detritus to pelagic and benthic consumers, respectively. We assessed the sensitivity of the model to each of these impacts and the cumulative effects on the ecosystem, discuss the capabilities and limitations of the Ecospace modeling approach as a potential tool for marine spatial planning and the impact that these results could have for the Blue Economy and the EU’s New Green Deal

High rate of failed visual-acuity measurements with the Amsterdam Picture Chart in screening at the age of 36 months

Purpose: In the Netherlands, youth health care physicians and nurses screen all children for general health disorders at Child Health Care Centers. As part of this, the eyes are screened seven times, with the first visual acuity (VA) measurement at 36 months with the Amsterdam Picture Chart (APK). The suitability of the APK has been questioned. Methods: Children born between July 2011 and June 2012 born in the provinces Drenthe, Gelderland and Flevoland and invited for screening at 36 months were eligible. Parents were sent the APK picture optotypes to practise with their children in advance. Data were collected from electronic screening records. The Dutch vision screening guideline prescribes that children with VA <5/6, or one line interocular difference (not logMAR, however) should be retested or referred. Results: Of 10 809 eligible children, 1546 did not attend and 602 attended but had no VA measurement at age 36 months, 247 of these were under orthoptic treatment. Of the 8448 children examined, VA was sufficient in 5663 (67.0%) and insufficient in 1312 (15.5%). In 1400 (16.6%), the measurement of VA itself failed. In 73 (0.9%), data were missing. Of the 216 children with 2 failed VA measurements, 150 (69%) were not referred, and measurement of VA was deferred to the next general screening examination at 45 months. Conclusion: Although most parents had practised the APK picture optotypes at home with their children, the rate of failed APK measurements plus the measurements with insufficient VA was 32.1% at 36 months. Similar rates have previously been reported for Lea Symbols and HOTV, permitting the conclusion that measurement of VA at the age of 36 months cannot be recommended as a screening test in the general population

The Genetic Makeup of the Electrocardiogram

The electrocardiogram (ECG) is one of the most useful non-invasive diagnostic tests for a wide array of cardiac disorders. Traditional approaches to analyzing ECGs focus on individual segments. Here, we performed comprehensive deep phenotyping of 77,190 ECGs in the UK Biobank across the complete cycle of cardiac conduction, resulting in 500 spatial-temporal datapoints, across 10 million genetic variants. In addition to characterizing polygenic risk scores for the traditional ECG segments, we identified over 300 genetic loci that are statistically associated with the high-dimensional representation of the ECG. We established the genetic ECG signature for dilated cardiomyopathy, associated the BAG3, HSPB7/CLCNKA, PRKCA, TMEM43, and OBSCN loci with disease risk and confirmed this association in an independent cohort. In total, our work demonstrates that a high-dimensional analysis of the entire ECG provides unique opportunities for studying cardiac biology and disease and furthering drug development. A record of this paper's transparent peer review process is included in the Supplemental Information

A primer in artificial intelligence in cardiovascular medicine

Driven by recent developments in computational power, algorithms and web-based storage resources, machine learning (ML)-based artificial intelligence (AI) has quickly gained ground as the solution for many technological and societal challenges. AI education has become very popular and is oversubscribed at Dutch universities. Major investments were made in 2018 to develop and build the first AI-driven hospitals to improve patient care and reduce healthcare costs. AI has the potential to greatly enhance traditional statistical analyses in many domains and has been demonstrated to allow the discovery of 'hidden' information in highly complex datasets. As such, AI can also be of significant value in the diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular disease, and the first applications of AI in the cardiovascular field are promising. However, many professionals in the cardiovascular field involved in patient care, education or science are unaware of the basics behind AI and the existing and expected applications in their field. In this review, we aim to introduce the broad cardiovascular community to the basics of modern ML-based AI and explain several of the commonly used algorithms. We also summarise their initial and future applications relevant to the cardiovascular field

Quantitative predictions on auxin-induced polar distribution of PIN proteins during vein formation in leaves

The dynamic patterning of the plant hormone auxin and its efflux facilitator the PIN protein are the key regulator for the spatial and temporal organization of plant development. In particular auxin induces the polar localization of its own efflux facilitator. Due to this positive feedback auxin flow is directed and patterns of auxin and PIN arise. During the earliest stage of vein initiation in leaves auxin accumulates in a single cell in a rim of epidermal cells from which it flows into the ground meristem tissue of the leaf blade. There the localized auxin supply yields the successive polarization of PIN distribution along a strand of cells. We model the auxin and PIN dynamics within cells with a minimal canalization model. Solving the model analytically we uncover an excitable polarization front that triggers a polar distribution of PIN proteins in cells. As polarization fronts may extend to opposing directions from their initiation site we suggest a possible resolution to the puzzling occurrence of bipolar cells, such we offer an explanation for the development of closed, looped veins. Employing non-linear analysis we identify the role of the contributing microscopic processes during polarization. Furthermore, we deduce quantitative predictions on polarization fronts establishing a route to determine the up to now largely unknown kinetic rates of auxin and PIN dynamics.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, supplemental information included, accepted for publication in Eur. Phys. J.