Initial management of potential occult scaphoid fracture in Australasia

AIM: To characterise current management of adult patients with possible occult scaphoid fracture in Australasian emergency departments. METHODS: Internet-based survey of Directors of Emergency Medicine Training throughout Australasia. Data collected included the most common management used in ED for patients with possible occult scaphoid fracture and whether there was a guideline regarding management of such cases. Data are reported as descriptive statistics. RESULTS: 61 responses were received (response rate 73%). The most common management reported was immobilisation in a backslab (23, 38%) or full cast (19, 32%) with clinical assessment and re-X-ray in 7-10 days. CT scan within 7 days was used by 9 (15%), bone scan within 7 days by 6 (10%) and MRI within 7 days by 3 (5%). Very few sites were using same day/next day CT or MRI. Eighty-three percent of sites reported not having a guideline/protocol for this condition. CONCLUSION: The traditional approach to management of possible occult scaphoid fracture of immobilisation with re-X-ray at 7-10 days remains the most commonly used in Australasia, despite evidence that this is probably over-treatment with significant consequences for patients. The place of advanced imaging for investigation of potential scaphoid fractures requires further research

TECHNETIUM SORPTION MEDIA REVIEW

This report presents information and references to aid in the selection of 99Tc sorption media for feasibility studies regarding the removal of 99Tc from Hanford's low activity waste. The report contains literature search material for sorption media (including ion exchange media) for the most tested media to date, including SuperLig 639, Reillex HPQ, TAM (Kruion), Purolite A520E and A530E, and Dowex 1X8. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of River Protection (ORP) is responsible for management and completion of the River Protection Project (RPP) mission, which comprises both the Hanford Site tank farms and the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP). The RPP mission is to store, retrieve and treat Hanford's tank waste; store and dispose of treated wastes; and close the tank farm waste management areas and treatment facilities in a safe, environmentally compliant, cost-effective and energy-effective manner

Psychometric precision in phenotype definition is a useful step in molecular genetic investigation of psychiatric disorders

Affective disorders are highly heritable, but few genetic risk variants have been consistently replicated in molecular genetic association studies. The common method of defining psychiatric phenotypes in molecular genetic research is either a summation of symptom scores or binary threshold score representing the risk of diagnosis. Psychometric latent variable methods can improve the precision of psychiatric phenotypes, especially when the data structure is not straightforward. Using data from the British 1946 birth cohort, we compared summary scores with psychometric modeling based on the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-28) scale for affective symptoms in an association analysis of 27 candidate genes (249 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs)). The psychometric method utilized a bi-factor model that partitioned the phenotype variances into five orthogonal latent variable factors, in accordance with the multidimensional data structure of the GHQ-28 involving somatic, social, anxiety and depression domains. Results showed that, compared with the summation approach, the affective symptoms defined by the bi-factor psychometric model had a higher number of associated SNPs of larger effect sizes. These results suggest that psychometrically defined mental health phenotypes can reflect the dimensions of complex phenotypes better than summation scores, and therefore offer a useful approach in genetic association investigations

Continuous Interaction with a Virtual Human

Attentive Speaking and Active Listening require that a Virtual Human be capable of simultaneous perception/interpretation and production of communicative behavior. A Virtual Human should be able to signal its attitude and attention while it is listening to its interaction partner, and be able to attend to its interaction partner while it is speaking – and modify its communicative behavior on-the-fly based on what it perceives from its partner. This report presents the results of a four week summer project that was part of eNTERFACE’10. The project resulted in progress on several aspects of continuous interaction such as scheduling and interrupting multimodal behavior, automatic classification of listener responses, generation of response eliciting behavior, and models for appropriate reactions to listener responses. A pilot user study was conducted with ten participants. In addition, the project yielded a number of deliverables that are released for public access

Determinants of Dwell Time in Visual Search: Similarity or Perceptual Difficulty?

The present study examined the factors that determine the dwell times in a visual search task, that is, the duration the gaze remains fixated on an object. It has been suggested that an item’s similarity to the search target should be an important determiner of dwell times, because dwell times are taken to reflect the time needed to reject the item as a distractor, and such discriminations are supposed to be harder the more similar an item is to the search target. In line with this similarity view, a previous study shows that, in search for a target ring of thin line-width, dwell times on thin linewidth Landolt C’s distractors were longer than dwell times on Landolt C’s with thick or medium linewidth. However, dwell times may have been longer on thin Landolt C’s because the thin line-width made it harder to detect whether the stimuli had a gap or not. Thus, it is an open question whether dwell times on thin line-width distractors were longer because they were similar to the target or because the perceptual decision was more difficult. The present study de-coupled similarity from perceptual difficulty, by measuring dwell times on thin, medium and thick line-width distractors when the target had thin, medium or thick line-width. The results showed that dwell times were longer on target-similar than target-dissimilar stimuli across all target conditions and regardless of the line-width. It is concluded that prior findings of longer dwell times on thin linewidth-distractors can clearly be attributed to target similarity. As will be discussed towards the end, the finding of similarity effects on dwell times has important implications for current theories of visual search and eye movement control

Mutually exclusive sense–antisense transcription at FLC facilitates environmentally induced gene repression

Antisense transcription through genic regions is pervasive in most genomes; however, its functional significance is still unclear. We are studying the role of antisense transcripts (COOLAIR) in the cold-induced, epigenetic silencing of Arabidopsis FLOWERING LOCUS C (FLC), a regulator of the transition to reproduction. Here we use single-molecule RNA FISH to address the mechanistic relationship of FLC and COOLAIR transcription at the cellular level. We demonstrate that while sense and antisense transcripts can co-occur in the same cell they are mutually exclusive at individual loci. Cold strongly upregulates COOLAIR transcription in an increased number of cells and through the mutually exclusive relationship facilitates shutdown of sense FLC transcription in cis. COOLAIR transcripts form dense clouds at each locus, acting to influence FLC transcription through changed H3K36me3 dynamics. These results may have general implications for other loci showing both sense and antisense transcription