An application of a proposed airdrop planning system

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2004.Includes bibliographical references (p. 117).The United States military has always had an increasing need for more accurate airdrops, whether the drops are being implemented for various special operations missions, or for basic humanitarian relief. Improving the delivery accuracy of airdrops will result in numerous benefits. In attempting to improve airdrop accuracy, it is helpful to know what errors will arise throughout the course of a drop. This information is effective in revealing to the airdrop personnel what steps can be taken to improve the airdrop, as well as what the expected landing accuracy of the airdrop will be. This research converges on tools to assist in the estimation and improvement of airdrop landing errors. Wind estimation was studied to better understand the landing errors that stem from different wind prediction methods, as well as from onboard wind measurement systems. Other uncertainties, throughout each phase of an airdrop, are also known to produce landing errors, such as uncertainties in release conditions and parachute dynamics. These errors were implemented in airdrop simulations, for both unguided air release planning systems and guided airdrop systems, to determine the effects of these uncertainties on landing error. Error in wind estimation was found to be the largest source of error in the airdrop simulations. Guided systems were hypothesized to have much smaller landing errors than the unguided systems, and that hypothesis was confirmed in this study. One major benefit of using guidance was the ability to implement onboard wind measurement systems. Using the data from the simulation results, this information was combined to produce an airdrop planning aid to assist airdrop personnel in their aerial deliveries.(cont.) While the tool developed in this study is not a complete product, it represents a template on which to base further airdrop planning aids.by Lucas Jonathan Fortier.S.M

Effects of OEF/OIF-Related Physical and Emotional Co-Morbidities on Associative Learning: Concurrent Delay and Trace Eyeblink Classical Conditioning

This study examined the performance of veterans and active duty personnel who served in Operation Enduring Freedom and/or Operation Iraqi Freedom (OEF/OIF) on a basic associative learning task. Eighty-eight individuals participated in this study. All received a comprehensive clinical evaluation to determine the presence and severity of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI). The eyeblink conditioning task was composed of randomly intermixed delay and trace conditioned stimulus (CS) and unconditioned stimulus (US) pairs (acquisition) followed by a series of CS only trials (extinction). Results revealed that those with a clinical diagnosis of PTSD or a diagnosis of PTSD with comorbid mTBI acquired delay and trace conditioned responses (CRs) to levels and at rates similar to a deployed control group, thus suggesting intact basic associative learning. Differential extinction impairment was observed in the two clinical groups. Acquisition of CRs for both delay and trace conditioning, as well as extinction of trace CRs, was associated with alcoholic behavior across all participants. These findings help characterize the learning and memory function of individuals with PTSD and mTBI from OEF/OIF and raise the alarming possibility that the use of alcohol in this group may lead to more significant cognitive dysfunction

Silent Trace Eliminates Differential Eyeblink Learning in Abstinent Alcoholics

Chronic alcoholism has profound effects on the brain, including volume reductions in regions critical for eyeblink classical conditioning (EBCC). The current study challenged abstinent alcoholics using delay (n = 20) and trace (n = 17) discrimination/reversal EBCC. Comparisons revealed a significant difference between delay and trace conditioning performance during reversal (t (35) = 2.08, p < 0.05). The difference between the two tasks for discrimination was not significant (p = 0.44). These data support the notion that alcoholics are increasingly impaired in the complex task of reversing a previously learned discrimination when a silent trace interval is introduced. Alcoholics’ impairment in flexibly altering learned associations may be central to their continued addiction

Parental Satisfaction of Child\u27s Perioperative Care

Background Satisfaction in the hospital setting is an important component of both hospital funding and patient experience. When it comes to a child\u27s hospital experience, parent satisfaction of their child\u27s perioperative care is also necessary to understand. However, little research has been conducted on the predictors of this outcome. Therefore, the purpose of this current study was to validate a priori selected predictors for parental satisfaction in their child\u27s perioperative process. Methods Eight hundred and ten pediatric patients who underwent tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy surgery and their parents were included in this study. The primary outcome was assessed using a 21‐item parent satisfaction questionnaire resulting in three satisfaction scores: overall care satisfaction, OR/induction satisfaction, and total satisfaction. Results Descriptive statistics and correlational analysis found that sedative‐premedication, parental presence at anesthesia induction, child social functioning, parental anxiety, and language were all significant predictors of various components of the satisfaction score. Regression models, however, revealed that only parent anxiety and child social functioning remained significant predictors such that parents who reported lower state anxiety (OR/induction satisfaction: OR = 0.975, 95% CI [0.957, 0.994]; total satisfaction: OR = 0.968, 95% CI [0.943, 0.993]) and who had higher socially functioning children (overall care satisfaction: OR = 1.019, 95% CI [1.005, 1.033]; OR/induction satisfaction: OR = 1.011, 95% CI [1.000, 1.022]) were significantly more satisfied with the perioperative care they received. Conclusion Lower parent anxiety and higher child social functioning were predictive of higher parental satisfaction scores

Spatial learning by mice in three dimensions

We tested whether mice can represent locations distributed throughout three-dimensional space, by developing a novel three-dimensional radial arm maze. The three-dimensional radial maze, or “radiolarian” maze, consists of a central spherical core from which arms project in all directions. Mice learn to retrieve food from the ends of the arms without omitting any arms or re-visiting depleted ones. We show here that mice can learn both a standard working memory task, in which all arms are initially baited, and also a reference memory version in which only a subset are ever baited. Comparison with a two-dimensional analogue of the radiolarian maze, the hexagon maze, revealed equally good working-memory performance in both mazes if all the arms were initially baited, but reduced working and reference memory in the partially baited radiolarian maze. This suggests intact three-dimensional spatial representation in mice over short timescales but impairment of the formation and/or use of long-term spatial memory of the maze. We discuss potential mechanisms for how mice solve the three-dimensional task, and reasons for the impairment relative to its two-dimensional counterpart, concluding with some speculations about how mammals may represent three-dimensional space

DataSHIELD – new directions and dimensions

In disciplines such as biomedicine and social sciences, sharing and combining sensitive individual-level data is often prohibited by ethical-legal or governance constraints and other barriers such as the control of intellectual property or the huge sample sizes. DataSHIELD (Data Aggregation Through Anonymous Summary-statistics from Harmonised Individual-levEL Databases) is a distributed approach that allows the analysis of sensitive individual-level data from one study, and the co-analysis of such data from several studies simultaneously without physically pooling them or disclosing any data. Following initial proof of principle, a stable DataSHIELD platform has now been implemented in a number of epidemiological consortia. This paper reports three new applications of DataSHIELD including application to post-publication sensitive data analysis, text data analysis and privacy protected data visualisation. Expansion of DataSHIELD analytic functionality and application to additional data types demonstrate the broad applications of the software beyond biomedical sciences

BiobankUniverse:Automatic matchmaking between datasets for biobank data discovery and integration

Motivation: Biobanks are indispensable for large-scale genetic/epidemiological studies, yet it remains difficult for researchers to determine which biobanks contain data matching their research questions. Results: To overcome this, we developed a new matching algorithm that identifies pairs of related data elements between biobanks and research variables with high precision and recall. It integrates lexical comparison, Unified Medical Language System ontology tagging and semantic query expansion. The result is BiobankUniverse, a fast matchmaking service for biobanks and researchers. Biobankers upload their data elements and researchers their desired study variables, BiobankUniverse automatically shortlists matching attributes between them. Users can quickly explore matching potential and search for biobanks/data elements matching their research. They can also curate matches and define personalized data-universes