Wireless Handheld Computers in the Preclinical Undergraduate Curriculum

This report presents the results of a pilot project using wireless PDAs as teaching tools in an undergraduate medical curriculum. This technology was used to foster a transition from a passive to an interactive learning environment in the classroom and provided a solution for the implementation of computer-based exams for a large class. Wayne State Medical School recently provided model e570 Toshiba PocketPCs® (personal digital assistants or PDAs), network interface cards, and application software developed by CampusMobility® to 20 sophomore medical students. The pilot group of preclinical students used the PDAs to access web-based course content, for communication, scheduling, to participate in interactive teaching sessions, and to complete course evaluations. Another part of this pilot has been to utilize the PDAs for computer-based exams in a wireless environment. Server authentication that restricted access during the exams and a proctoring console to monitor and record the PDA screens will be described in this report. Results of a student satisfaction survey will be present

Healthcare Event and Activity Logging.

The health of patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) can change frequently and inexplicably. Crucial events and activities responsible for these changes often go unnoticed. This paper introduces healthcare event and action logging (HEAL) which automatically and unobtrusively monitors and reports on events and activities that occur in a medical ICU room. HEAL uses a multimodal distributed camera network to monitor and identify ICU activities and estimate sanitation-event qualifiers. At the core is a novel approach to infer person roles based on semantic interactions, a critical requirement in many healthcare settings where individuals' identities must not be identified. The proposed approach for activity representation identifies contextual aspects basis and estimates aspect weights for proper action representation and reconstruction. The flexibility of the proposed algorithms enables the identification of people roles by associating them with inferred interactions and detected activities. A fully working prototype system is developed, tested in a mock ICU room and then deployed in two ICU rooms at a community hospital, thus offering unique capabilities for data gathering and analytics. The proposed method achieves a role identification accuracy of 84% and a backtracking role identification of 79% for obscured roles using interaction and appearance features on real ICU data. Detailed experimental results are provided in the context of four event-sanitation qualifiers: clean, transmission, contamination, and unclean

Women’s use of Preventive Primary Care in the Late Postpartum Period

The literature has limited data on how women access health care after the traditional postpartum period (postpartum). Modeled after a paper by Bryant (2016), this project assesses the prevalence of primary care visits in the late postpartum period (LPP)(60- 730 days postpartum). Study objectives included (1) Identify demographics of general delivering population at UVMMC compared to patients with UVM-affiliated primary care provider (UVMPCP). (2) Understand how the general delivering population uses the UVMHN LPP (3) Among women with a UVM-affiliated PCP, identify the prevalence of preventive care visits in the LPP. (4) Identify characteristics associated with LPP visit attendance. Hypothesis: Women with an established PCP prior to pregnancy are more likely to attend preventive PCP LPP visits. This was a retrospective cohort study for all women who delivered at UVMMC between 7/1/2015-6/30/2017. Data was extracted from Epic EMR. During the study period, 4169 women had one singleton pregnancy, 3413 (82%) had a known PCP, and 1279 (31%) had UVMPCP. 2535 (61%) of all delivering singleton women and 1112 (87%) of UVMPCP women had at least one clinical visit within UVMHN in the LPP. 959 (75%) of UVMPCP women had a LPP PCP visit, and 382 patients (30%) had preventative PCP LPP visits. Our hypothesis was rejected (OR 0.930), but attending any LPP PCP visit was associated with having a PCP established prior to pregnancy (OR 1.684). Attending preventive PCP visit was associated with having the same delivering provider as PCP (OR 1.742), a pre-pregnancy PCP visit (OR 1.460), a PCP visit during prenatal time (OR 1.459), ED visit early postpartum period (OR 0.402), a fetal or neonatal demise (OR 0.445), being single (0.601), and with public insurance (OR 0.489). Further work in understanding these associations will be important in developing improved transition of care models and increasing overall engagement in women’s preventive medicine

Assessment of mechanical properties and microstructure characterizing techniques in their ability to quantify amount of cold work in 316l alloy

Stress corrosion cracking (SCC) behavior is a matter of concern for structural materials, namely, stainless steels and nickel alloys, in nuclear power plants. High levels of cold work (CW) have shown to both reduce crack initiation times and increase crack growth rates. Cold working has numerous effects on a material, including changes in microstructure, mechanical properties, and residual stress state, yet it is typically reported as a simple percent change in geometry. There is need to develop a strategy for quantitative assessment of cold-work level in order to better understand stress corrosion cracking test data. Five assessment techniques, commonly performed alongside stress corrosion cracking testing (optical microscopy (OM), electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD), X-ray diffraction (XRD), tensile testing, and hardness testing) are evaluated with respect to their ability to quantify the level of CW in a component. The test material is stainless steel 316L that has been cold-rolled to three conditions: 0%, 20%, and 30% CW. Measurement results for each assessment method include correlation with CW condition and repeatability data. Measured values showed significant spatial variation, illustrating that CW level is not uniform throughout a component. Mechanical properties (tensile testing, hardness) were found to correlate most linearly with the amount of imparted CW

Strong One-Dimensional Characteristics of Hole-Carriers in ReS2 and ReSe2.

Each plane of layered ReS2 and ReSe2 materials has 1D chain structure, from which intriguing properties such as 1D character of the exciton states and linearly polarized photoluminescence originate. However, systematic studies on the 1D character of charge carriers have not been done yet. Here, we report on systematic and comparative studies on the energy-momentum dispersion relationships of layered transition metal dichalcogenides ReS2 and ReSe2 by angle resolved photoemission. We found that the valence band maximum or the minimum energy for holes is located at the high symmetric Z-point for both materials. However, the out-of-plane ([Formula: see text]) dispersion for ReSe2 (20 meV) is found to be much smaller than that of ReS2 (150 meV). We observe that the effective mass of the hole carriers along the direction perpendicular to the chain is about 4 times larger than that along the chain direction for both ReS2 and ReSe2. Remarkably, the experimentally measured hole effective mass is about twice heavier than that from first principles calculation for ReS2 although the in-plane anisotropy values from the experiment and calculations are comparable. These observation indicate that bulk ReS2 and ReSe2 are unique semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenides having strong one-dimensional characters

To Fib or Not to Fib: Misdiagnosis of Atrial Fibrillation on Telemetry Case Presentation and Root Cause Analysis

Case presentation, current practices of telemetry management, root cause analysis, goals for improvement, proposed intervention and next steps

On Special Re-quantization of a Black Hole

Quantized expressions for the gravitational energy and momentum are derived from a linearized theory of teleparallel gravity. The derivation relies on a second-quantization procedure that constructs annihilation and creation operators for the graviton. The resulting gravitational field is a collection of gravitons, each of which has precise energy and momentum. On the basis of the weak-field approximation of Schwarzschild's solution, a new form for the quantization of the mass of a black hole is derived.Comment: 4 page

Adaptive Measurement Network for CS Image Reconstruction

Conventional compressive sensing (CS) reconstruction is very slow for its characteristic of solving an optimization problem. Convolu- tional neural network can realize fast processing while achieving compa- rable results. While CS image recovery with high quality not only de- pends on good reconstruction algorithms, but also good measurements. In this paper, we propose an adaptive measurement network in which measurement is obtained by learning. The new network consists of a fully-connected layer and ReconNet. The fully-connected layer which has low-dimension output acts as measurement. We train the fully-connected layer and ReconNet simultaneously and obtain adaptive measurement. Because the adaptive measurement fits dataset better, in contrast with random Gaussian measurement matrix, under the same measuremen- t rate, it can extract the information of scene more efficiently and get better reconstruction results. Experiments show that the new network outperforms the original one.Comment: 11pages,8figure

Effects of network topology on the OpenAnswer’s Bayesian model of peer assessment

The paper investigates if and how the topology of the peer assessment network can affect the performance of the Bayesian model adopted in Ope nAnswer. Performance is evaluated in terms of the comparison of predicted grades with actual teacher’s grades. The global network is built by interconnecting smaller subnetworks, one for each student, where intra subnetwork nodes represent student's characteristics, and peer assessment assignments make up inter subnetwork connections and determine evidence propagation. A possible subset of teacher graded answers is dynamically determined by suitable selec tion and stop rules. The research questions addressed are: RQ1) “does the topology (diameter) of the network negatively influence the precision of predicted grades?”̀ in the affirmative case, RQ2) “are we able to reduce the negative effects of high diameter networks through an appropriate choice of the subset of students to be corrected by the teacher?” We show that RQ1) OpenAnswer is less effective on higher diameter topologies, RQ2) this can be avoided if the subset of corrected students is chosen considering the network topology

Knowledge and perception of women towards danger signs in pregnancy in Choma rural district, Zambia

Background: Pregnancy is usually an exciting time in the life of a family. It is a joyous event for most families as they anticipate bringing new life on earth. Sometimes a pregnant woman may experience signs and symptoms which signal danger. Danger signs in pregnancy are those signs that a pregnant woman will see, or those symptoms that she will feel which indicate that something is going wrong with her or with the pregnancy.Objective: the objective of the study was to determine women's knowledge and perception towards danger signs in pregnancy in Choma rural district, ZambiaDesign: a mixed method study design with both qualitative and quantitative approach was used. The study was conducted in Choma rural district. The study population was women of childbearing age residing in Choma rural district who had given birth before or those who were pregnant at the time of the study. One hundred and eighty-six (186) respondents were systematically sampled from three villages at Mapanza health centre catchment area. Two Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) were conducted at the health centre. Data were collected using interview schedules and focus group discussion guides. Data analysis was conducted using SPSS version 16 soft ware. Chi square test was used to test for associations between independent and dependent variables. FGDs were analysed using Contentanalysis. The cut-off point for statistical significance was 0.05Results: The study revealed that 66% of the respondents had heard about danger signs in pregnancy, and 66.7% had positive perception about them. The study revealed that majority (71%) of the respondents had low levels of knowledge about danger signs in pregnancy. The study showed significant associations between women's knowledge about danger signs in pregnancy and education level (40%, p value=0.006) and between age and knowledge about danger signs in pregnancy (37.5%, p value=0.017). Occupation was associated with women's knowledge of danger signs in pregnancy (45.5%, p value=0.002), as well as quality of services (80.8%, p value=0.000). Marital status was significantly associated with women's perception towards danger signs in pregnancy (82.7%, p value=0.009), as well as cultural beliefs (58.4%, p value=0.000).Conclusion: The study revealed that majority of the respondents had low levels of knowledge about danger signs in pregnancy. This could be contributing to women delaying to seek medical care, and increased maternal mortality in the district. Knowledge and perception of danger signs in pregnancy can be improved if Information, Education and Communication ( IEC) is given to all women to raise awareness, and this will in turn help them know when danger signs have occurred, and help them to seek medical care. The IEC should be conducted in such a way that there is time for questions and those questions should be adequately answered by the Health Workers. Male involvement should be encouraged to raise men's awareness so that they quickly seek medical care should their wives develop danger signs in pregnancy.Key words: Knowledge, Perception, Women, Danger signs in pregnancy