Injury Risk Estimation Expertise Assessing the ACL Injury Risk Estimation Quiz

Background: Available methods for screening anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury risk are effective but limited in application as they generally rely on expensive and time-consuming biomechanical movement analysis. A potential efficient alternative to biomechanical screening is skilled movement analysis via visual inspection (ie, having experts estimate injury risk factors based on observations of athletes’ movements). Purpose: To develop a brief, valid psychometric assessment of ACL injury risk factor estimation skill: the ACL Injury Risk Estimation Quiz (ACL-IQ). Study Design: Cohort study (diagnosis); Level of evidence, 3. Methods: A total of 660 individuals participated in various stages of the study, including athletes, physicians, physical therapists, athletic trainers, exercise science researchers/students, and members of the general public in the United States. The ACL-IQ was fully computerized and made available online (www.ACL-IQ.org). Item sampling/reduction, reliability analysis, cross-validation, and convergent/discriminant validity analysis were conducted to optimize the efficiency and validity of the assessment. Results: Psychometric optimization techniques identified a short (mean time, 2 min 24 s), robust, 5-item assessment with high reliability (test-retest: r = 0.90) and consistent discriminability (average difference of exercise science professionals vs general population: Cohen d = 1.98). Exercise science professionals and general population individuals scored 74% and 53% correct, respectively. Convergent and discriminant validity was demonstrated. Scores on the ACL-IQ were most associated with ACL knowledge and various cue utilities and were least associated with domain-general spatial/decision-making ability, personality, or other demographic variables. Overall, 23% of the total sample (40% exercise science professionals; 6% general population) performed better than or equal to the ACL nomogram. Conclusion: This study presents the results of a systematic approach to assess individual differences in ACL injury risk factor estimation skill; the assessment approach is efficient (ie, it can be completed in\3 min) and psychometrically robust. The results provide evidence that some individuals have the ability to visually estimate ACL injury risk factors more accurately than other instrument-based ACL risk estimation methods (ie, ACL nomogram). The ACL-IQ provides the foundation for assessing the efficacy of observational ACL injury risk factor assessment (ie, does simple skilled visual inspection reduce ACL injuries?). It also provides a representative task environment that can be used to increase our understanding of the perceptual-cognitive mechanisms underlying observational movement analysis and to improve injury risk assessment performance

The role of the innate immune system in microbially induced intestinal inflammation and neoplasia

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is one of the most common immune-mediated diseases in the United States costing the average patient tens of thousands of dollars annually, and greatly diminishing quality-of-life. While there is no universal cure for IBD, recently developed treatments targeting the immunological basis of disease have proven successful in managing clinical symptoms. However, these pharmaceutical therapies such as infliximab (Remicade[registered trademark]) carry several side effects and are not efficacious in all patients. Thus, more selective treatments are needed. One necessary step in the development of such agents is a more precise understanding of which cells in the gastrointestinal tract are primary contributors to the pathogenesis of IBD. We demonstrate that a rare subset of dendritic cells expressing CD8[alpha] is present in significantly different numbers in mouse strains considered susceptible or resistant to a microbially induced model of IBD. Additionally, we show that cells derived from the target organ of susceptible mice prior to and shortly after induction of the disease process are prone to production of greater levels of certain inflammatory mediators including IL-12/23p40, IP-10, RANTES, and TNF-[alpha]. Lastly, we describe the generation of a mouse strain susceptible to the disease model but selectively lacking the subset of dendritic cells expressing CD8[alpha], to be used in future studies. One of the most serious sequela to IBD is colitis-associated colorectal cancer (CAC). Diagnosis of colorectal cancer in general is reliant on tests that suffer from either poor sensitivity or specificity (such as fecal occult blood tests), or invasiveness (such as colonoscopy). Newer genetic tests have been developed for the identification of hereditary risk factors, however CAC follows a molecular pathway distinct from that of familial forms of colorectal cancer. Thus, the development of noninvasive screening assays for CAC with high sensitivity and specificity would increase compliance

Development of outbred CD1 mouse colonies with distinct standardized gut microbiota profiles for use in complex microbiota targeted studies.

Studies indicate that the gut microbiota (GM) can significantly influence both local and systemic host physiologic processes. With rising concern for optimization of experimental reproducibility and translatability, it is essential to consider the GM in study design. However, GM profiles can vary between rodent producers making consistency between models challenging. To circumvent this, we developed outbred CD1 mouse colonies with stable, complex GM profiles that can be used as donors for a variety of GM transfer techniques including rederivation, co-housing, cross-foster, and fecal microbiota transfer (FMT). CD1 embryos were surgically transferred into CD1 or C57BL/6 surrogate dams that varied by GM composition and complexity to establish four separate mouse colonies harboring GM profiles representative of contemporary mouse producers. Using targeted 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing, subsequent female offspring were found to have similar GM profiles to surrogate dams. Furthermore, breeding colonies of CD1 mice with distinct GM profiles were maintained for nine generations, demonstrating GM stability within these colonies. To confirm GM stability, we shipped cohorts of these four colonies to collaborating institutions and found no significant variation in GM composition. These mice are an invaluable experimental resource that can be used to investigate GM effects on mouse model phenotype

Evaluating the outcomes of collaborative wildlife governance: The role of social-ecological system context and collaboration dynamics

The acknowledgement of uncertainty and complexity in social-ecological systems has increased the implementation of collaborative governance regimes for environmental issues. The performance of these new regimes to deliver favourable social and ecological outcomes must therefore be evaluated. We focus on the case of Swedish wildlife governance, which has a tradition of using collaborative elements. In relation to moose (Alces alces), these collaborative aspects were recently formalized in an amended policy. We aim to assess some aspects of this new regime's performance with respect to intermediate ecological outcomes (i.e. quota fulfilment). We use path analysis to test the causal effects of system context and collaboration dynamics on governance outcomes. Collaboration dynamics were assessed using a web-based survey sent to all stakeholders in Moose Management Groups (response rate = 82 %). Our originally specified model yielded a good fit (SRMR of .030 and robust TLI of .996) and explained 20 % of the variation in outcomes. Context variables revealed significant direct effects on collaboration dynamics and outcomes. Larger Moose Management Areas and fluctuations in forage availability required more time investment from actors, while high land use diversity and density of other ungulate species negatively affected moose quota fulfilment. Moose Management Groups that invested more time and perceived to have a good knowledge base achieved better quota fulfilment. Collaboration dynamics thus had a positive direct effect on outcomes. From a policy perspective, our results raise questions regarding institutional fit because context factors had significant negative effects on collaboration dynamics and the outcomes of the collaborative process

Scaling of the low temperature dephasing rate in Kondo systems

We present phase coherence time measurements in quasi-one-dimensional Ag wires doped with Fe Kondo impurities of different concentrations $n_s$. Due to the relatively high Kondo temperature $T_{K}\approx 4.3K$ of this system, we are able to explore a temperature range from above $T_{K}$ down to below $0.01 T_{K}$. We show that the magnetic contribution to the dephasing rate $\gamma_m$ per impurity is described by a single, universal curve when plotted as a function of $(T/T_K)$. For $T>0.1 T_K$, the dephasing rate is remarkably well described by recent numerical results for spin $S=1/2$ impurities. At lower temperature, we observe deviations from this theory. Based on a comparison with theoretical calculations for $S>1/2$, we discuss possible explanations for the observed deviations.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. Let

Collisional Plasma Models with APEC/APED: Emission Line Diagnostics of Hydrogen-like and Helium-like Ions

New X-ray observatories (Chandra and XMM-Newton) are providing a wealth of high-resolution X-ray spectra in which hydrogen- and helium-like ions are usually strong features. We present results from a new collisional-radiative plasma code, the Astrophysical Plasma Emission Code (APEC), which uses atomic data in the companion Astrophysical Plasma Emission Database (APED) to calculate spectral models for hot plasmas. APED contains the requisite atomic data such as collisional and radiative rates, recombination cross sections, dielectronic recombination rates, and satellite line wavelengths. We compare the APEC results to other plasma codes for hydrogen- and helium-like diagnostics, and test the sensitivity of our results to the number of levels included in the models. We find that dielectronic recombination with hydrogen-like ions into high (n=6-10) principal quantum numbers affects some helium-like line ratios from low-lying (n=2) transitions.Comment: 5 pages, 6 figures, accepted by ApJ Letter

Expertise Shapes Multimodal Imagery for Wine

Although taste and smell seem hard to imagine, some people nevertheless report vivid imagery in these sensory modalities. We investigate whether experts are better able to imagine smells and tastes because they have learned the ability, or whether they are better imaginers in the first place, and so become experts. To test this, we first compared a group of wine experts to yoked novices using a battery of questionnaires. We show for the first time that experts report greater vividness of wine imagery, with no difference in vividness across sensory modalities. In contrast, novices had more vivid color imagery than taste or odor imagery for wines. Experts and novices did not differ on other vividness of imagery measures, suggesting a domain-specific effect of expertise. Critically, in a second study, we followed a group of students commencing a wine course and a group of matched control participants. Students and controls did not differ before the course, but after the wine course students reported more vivid wine imagery. We provide evidence that expertise improves imagery, exemplifying the extent of plasticity of cognition underlying the chemical senses

Relation between geometric phases of entangled bi-partite systems and their subsystems

This paper focuses on the geometric phase of entangled states of bi-partite systems under bi-local unitary evolution. We investigate the relation between the geometric phase of the system and those of the subsystems. It is shown that (1) the geometric phase of cyclic entangled states with non-degenerate eigenvalues can always be decomposed into a sum of weighted non-modular pure state phases pertaining to the separable components of the Schmidt decomposition, though the same cannot be said in the non-cyclic case, and (2) the geometric phase of the mixed state of one subsystem is generally different from that of the entangled state even by keeping the other subsystem fixed, but the two phases are the same when the evolution operator satisfies conditions where each component in the Schmidt decomposition is parallel transported