Impacts of an Inclusive Education Program for Adults with Intellectual/Developmental Disabilities Within a Postsecondary Environment

Over the last two decades, postsecondary institutions in Canada and globally have created programs to include persons with intellectual/developmental disabilities (IDD) in higher education. These programs vary in their scope but generally aim to provide an inclusive opportunity for persons with IDD to attend postsecondary education alongside their same-aged peers. This research study focused on one program at a university in Southern Ontario that has been providing an inclusive campus experience for over 25 years. The study was guided by the research question, “What are the impacts realized by former program participants, their parents/caregivers, former student volunteers, and university partners from involvement with an inclusive education program within a postsecondary environment”? Interview data were derived from 17 semi-structured interviews across four stakeholder groups and were examined using thematic analyses. Findings indicated three major areas of impact: friendship, growth, and belonging. Implications describe steps for broader implementation and a call-to-action for postsecondary institutions to push for greater inclusivity of persons with IDD within higher education

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Objective Evaluation of Multiple Sclerosis Lesion Segmentation using a Data Management and Processing Infrastructure

International audienceWe present a study of multiple sclerosis segmentation algorithms conducted at the international MICCAI 2016 challenge. This challenge was operated using a new open-science computing infrastructure. This allowed for the automatic and independent evaluation of a large range of algorithms in a fair and completely automatic manner. This computing infrastructure was used to evaluate thirteen methods of MS lesions segmentation, exploring a broad range of state-of-the-art algorithms, against a high-quality database of 53 MS cases coming from four centers following a common definition of the acquisition protocol. Each case was annotated manually by an unprecedented number of seven different experts. Results of the challenge highlighted that automatic algorithms, including the recent machine learning methods (random forests, deep learning,...), are still trailing human expertise on both detection and delineation criteria. In addition, we demonstrate that computing a statistically robust consensus of the algorithms performs closer to human expertise on one score (segmentation) although still trailing on detection scores