High dives and parallel plans: Relationships between medical student elective strategies and residency match outcomes

Background: Medical students are anxious about not getting a preferred residency position.  We described elective patterns of two recent cohorts and examined associated match outcomes. Methods: We conducted a retrospective review of the final-year electives of all students who participated in the residency match (first iteration) at one school for 2017 and 2018.  We categorized elective patterns and associated them with aggregated match outcomes. We examined high-demand/low-supply (HDLS) disciplines separately. Results: We described three elective patterns: High Dive, Parallel Plan(s), and No Clear Pattern. Many students had High Dive and Parallel Plans patterns; only a few showed No Clear Pattern. Match rates for High Dive and Parallel Plan patterns were high but many students matched to Family and Internal Medicine.  When we separated out HDLS predominance, the match rate remained high but a significant number matched to disciplines in which they did not have a majority of electives. Most High Dive and Parallel Plan students who went unmatched did so with HDLS discipline electives.  Conclusion: Many students chose High Dive and Parallel Plan strategies to both high-capacity and HDLS disciplines. Match rates were high for both patterns but students also matched to non-primary disciplines.  Back-up planning may reside in the entire application, and not just electives selection

Regulator control of a short-radius centrifuge and subjective responses to head movements in a rotating environment

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2000.Also available online at the MIT Theses Online homepage .Includes bibliographical references (p. 109-112).Artificial gravity is made through the centripetal force from a rotating chair or short-radius centrifuge. It is a very promising countermeasure, as it alone should remove all the adverse effects of microgravity. In order to effectively use artificial gravity as a long-duration space flight countermeasure, the effects of artificial gravity on the human body must be investigated. If artificial gravity is created by use of a short-radius centrifuge, the high angular velocity required, about 23 rpm, causes unexpected and illusory body motions when making head turns. My work in artificial gravity consisted of two parts, a study that investigated the vestibular response to head movements during centrifugation and regulator feedback control of the centrifuge. This experiment studied the perceived illusory body sensations and heart rate changes induced by head movements in both the yaw and pitch planes while supine during centrifugation. Yaw right, yaw left, and pitch head movements yielded successively significantly higher heart rate than baseline. Results show that 68% of subjects in the yaw plane and 48% of subjects in the pitch plane experienced illusory body tilt as predicted by a model of the vestibular system while 13% in yaw and 40% in pitch experienced body tilt in the opposite direction from the predicted model. Pitch head movements yielded significantly higher magnitude and duration of illusory tilt. These side effects are serious and will need to be controlled if short-radius centrifugation is to be a successful countermeasure. Regulator feedback control has been implemented on the centrifuge with both an optical encoder and an accelerometer. Tachometer development, automatic control, and classical PID control theory was used to develop the gain and integrator time constants, which lead to K=1.5 and Ti=1 sec. This results in an improved steady state error by 99.8% and a more accurate response of the centrifuge by 5.7% for the accelerometer and 52% for the encoder feedback system from the open loop system.by Carol C. Cheung.S.M

Service-learning model at Lingnan University : development strategies and outcome assessment

Background: The Service-Learning and Research Scheme (SLRS) is the showcase of Lingnan’s Service-Learning model, which is the manifestation of Lingnan University’s Liberal Arts education and mission “Education for Service”. The scheme was a pilot project, from 2004 to 2005, which led to the development of a Universitywide protocol for Service-Learning at Lingnan University. Aims: This paper highlights the processes and the strategies of incorporating Service-Learning into courses, based on the experiences in Lingnan University. Implementation and evaluation models are suggested to provide a framework for other interested parties to apply Service-Learning in their learning and teaching. Results: This is a descriptive analysis, associating outcome measurement (three outcomes: “ABC” quality– Adaptability, Brainpower and Creativity) through the process of Service-Learning. Evaluation contents and guidelines for doing Service-Learning are developed based on the past experience in doing Service-Learning at Lingnan. The research element procedures offer instructors with guidance as well as a well-defined protocol and evaluation for Service-Learning programs in Lingnan. Conclusion: In consolidating the above experience and in detailing the validity of the Lingnan Model of Service-Learning, a manual is produced documenting our efforts. This is the first manual which can be the protocol of applying Service-Learning in higher education for students’ whole-person development

The Complete Sequence of a Human Parainfluenzavirus 4 Genome

Although the human parainfluenza virus 4 (HPIV4) has been known for a long time, its genome, alone among the human paramyxoviruses, has not been completely sequenced to date. In this study we obtained the first complete genomic sequence of HPIV4 from a clinical isolate named SKPIV4 obtained at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto (Ontario, Canada). The coding regions for the N, P/V, M, F and HN proteins show very high identities (95% to 97%) with previously available partial sequences for HPIV4B. The sequence for the L protein and the non-coding regions represent new information. A surprising feature of the genome is its length, more than 17 kb, making it the longest genome within the genus Rubulavirus, although the length is well within the known range of 15 kb to 19 kb for the subfamily Paramyxovirinae. The availability of a complete genomic sequence will facilitate investigations on a respiratory virus that is still not completely characterized

Classification of SD-OCT Volumes for DME Detection: An Anomaly Detection Approach

International audienceDiabetic Macular Edema (DME) is the leading cause of blindness amongst diabetic patients worldwide. It is characterized by accumulation of water molecules in the macula leading to swelling. Early detection of the disease helps prevent further loss of vision. Naturally, automated detection of DME from Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) volumes plays a key role. To this end, a pipeline for detecting DME diseases in OCT volumes is proposed in this paper. The method is based on anomaly detection using Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM). It starts with pre-processing the B-scans by resizing, flattening, filtering and extracting features from them. Both intensity and Local Binary Pattern (LBP) features are considered. The dimensionality of the extracted features is reduced using PCA. As the last stage, a GMM is fitted with features from normal volumes. During testing, features extracted from the test volume are evaluated with the fitted model for anomaly and classification is made based on the number of B-scans detected as outliers. The proposed method is tested on two OCT datasets and achieved a sensitivity and a specificity of 80% and 93% on the first dataset, and 100% and 80% on the second one. Moreover, the experiments show that the proposed method achieves better classification performances than other recently published works

Classifying DME vs Normal SD-OCT volumes: A review

International audienceThis article reviews the current state of automatic classification methodologies to identify Diabetic Macular Edema (DME) versus normal subjects based on Spectral Domain OCT (SD-OCT) data. Addressing this classification problem has valuable interest since early detection and treatment of DME play a major role to prevent eye adverse effects such as blindness. The main contribution of this article is to cover the lack of a public dataset and benchmark suited for classifying DME and normal SD-OCT volumes, providing our own implementation of the most relevant methodologies in the literature. Subsequently, 6 different methods were implemented and evaluated using this common benchmark and dataset to produce reliable comparison

Hypertensive eye disease

Hypertensive eye disease includes a spectrum of pathological changes, the most well known being hypertensive retinopathy. Other commonly involved parts of the eye in hypertension include the choroid and optic nerve, sometimes referred to as hypertensive choroidopathy and hypertensive optic neuropathy. Together, hypertensive eye disease develops in response to acute and/or chronic elevation of blood pressure. Major advances in research over the past three decades have greatly enhanced our understanding of the epidemiology, systemic associations and clinical implications of hypertensive eye disease, particularly hypertensive retinopathy. Traditionally diagnosed via a clinical funduscopic examination, but increasingly documented on digital retinal fundus photographs, hypertensive retinopathy has long been considered a marker of systemic target organ damage (for example, kidney disease) elsewhere in the body. Epidemiological studies indicate that hypertensive retinopathy signs are commonly seen in the general adult population, are associated with subclinical measures of vascular disease and predict risk of incident clinical cardiovascular events. New technologies, including development of non-invasive optical coherence tomography angiography, artificial intelligence and mobile ocular imaging instruments, have allowed further assessment and understanding of the ocular manifestations of hypertension and increase the potential that ocular imaging could be used for hypertension management and cardiovascular risk stratification