Development of a Guide to Recommended Print Materials for Diabetes Patient Education

There are hundreds of current booklets, pamphlets, and manuals available for diabetes patient educa tion. Everyone, it seems, is writing them from large pharmaceutical com panies and publishing houses to small rural hospitals. A national review of those materials has led to the development of an an notated resource booklet entitled "Recommended Print Materials for Diabetes Patient Education, 1984. " This article discusses the overall results of the review and the methodology used in its formation.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68926/2/10.1177_014572178401000311.pd

Diabetes Patient Education in The Office Setting

The diabetes patient education provided in ran domly chosen primary care physician offices in small and large com munities was compared with hospital-based patient education programs in those same communities. The office programs were usually physician-de livered, informal, and in terwoven with the clinical care offered. They usually did not include a sys tematic needs assessment, were not recorded, used educational materials sparsely, and often lacked evaluation. The time spent on education is approx imately 48 minutes per year per patient in the of fice setting. The study suggested several develop mental activities that might improve patient education in physician of fices where the majority of patients with diabetes receive most of their care.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/69027/2/10.1177_014572178601200307.pd

The Biggest Problem in Diabetes

An assessment of the big gest problem in diabetes care from the viewpoint of 115 health care profes sionals and 428 diabetic patients was obtained. There was substantial agreement by health pro fessionals and patients alike that diet and diet- related issues constituted the most difficult problem faced by persons with diabetes and by health professionals caring for those persons. These find ings may be important in organizing diabetes patient education and in the selection of research efforts within the overall field of diabetes.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68782/2/10.1177_014572178601200107.pd

Pigmentation, Melanocyte Colonization, and p53 Status in Basal Cell Carcinoma

Basal cell carcinoma (BCC) is the most common neoplasm in the Caucasian population. Only a fraction of BCC exhibits pigmentation. Lack of melanocyte colonization has been suggested to be due to p53-inactivating mutations in the BCC cells interfering with the p53-proopiomelanocortin pathway and the production of alpha melanocyte-stimulating hormone in the tumor. To evaluate this, we determined tumor pigmentation as well as expression of melan-A and of p53 in 49 BCC tissues by means of immunohistochemistry. As expected, we observed a positive relation between tumor pigmentation and melan-A positive intra-tumoral melanocytes. Melanocyte colonization and, to a lesser extent, p53 overexpression showed intraindividual heterogeneity in larger tumors. p53 overexpression, which is indicative of p53 mutations, was not correlated to melanocyte colonization of BCC. Sequencing of exon 5–8 of the p53 gene in selected BCC cases revealed that colonization by melanocytes and BCC pigmentation is neither ablated by p53 mutations nor generally present in BCCs with wild-type p53

Development and use of a Restorative Justice Ideology Instrument: Assessing beliefs

Researchers have noted that restorative justice (RJ) practices in schools seem to improve targeted outcomes (e.g. decreased office visits, increased grades, etc.). It has been acknowledged that a ‘grassroots’ (beliefs level) buy-in from teachers is necessary for the creation of a school environment that is in line with the ideals of RJ. In the current study, an operational definition for restorative justice ideology (RJI) was developed and used as the basis for the creation of a RJI measurement instrument. This is intended to facilitate understandings of the influence that RJ training has on individuals at the beliefs level, and whether the degree to which an individual holds an RJI is associated with the degree to which RJ practices are carried out at the classroom and school level. An exploratory factor analysis was conducted, a three-factor model was selected, and the instrument was tested for reliability and validity. The RJI was then used to investigate whether other individual differences were related to the RJI of teachers. The outcome of this study was the development of a psychometrically sound RJI instrument. Perspective taking, empathic concern, pupil control ideology, personal distress, and self-efficacy were identified as important characteristics of RJI

Continual Adaptation of Semantic Segmentation using Complementary 2D-3D Data Representations

Semantic segmentation networks are usually pre-trained once and not updated during deployment. As a consequence, misclassifications commonly occur if the distribution of the training data deviates from the one encountered during the robot's operation. We propose to mitigate this problem by adapting the neural network to the robot's environment during deployment, without any need for external supervision. Leveraging complementary data representations, we generate a supervision signal, by probabilistically accumulating consecutive 2D semantic predictions in a volumetric 3D map. We then train the network on renderings of the accumulated semantic map, effectively resolving ambiguities and enforcing multi-view consistency through the 3D representation. In contrast to scene adaptation methods, we aim to retain the previously-learned knowledge, and therefore employ a continual learning experience replay strategy to adapt the network. Through extensive experimental evaluation, we show successful adaptation to real-world indoor scenes both on the ScanNet dataset and on in-house data recorded with an RGB-D sensor. Our method increases the segmentation accuracy on average by 9.9% compared to the fixed pre-trained neural network, while retaining knowledge from the pre-training dataset.Comment: Accepted for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (R-AL 2022

Progression of pulmonary hyperinflation and trapped gas associated with genetic and environmental factors in children with cystic fibrosis

BACKGROUND: Functional deterioration in cystic fibrosis (CF) may be reflected by increasing bronchial obstruction and, as recently shown, by ventilation inhomogeneities. This study investigated which physiological factors (airway obstruction, ventilation inhomogeneities, pulmonary hyperinflation, development of trapped gas) best express the decline in lung function, and what role specific CFTR genotypes and different types of bronchial infection may have upon this process. METHODS: Serial annual lung function tests, performed in 152 children (77 males; 75 females) with CF (age range: 6–18 y) provided data pertaining to functional residual capacity (FRC(pleth), FRC(MBNW)), volume of trapped gas (V(TG)), effective specific airway resistance (sR(eff)), lung clearance index (LCI), and forced expiratory indices (FVC, FEV(1), FEF(50)). RESULTS: All lung function parameters showed progression with age. Pulmonary hyperinflation (FRC(pleth )> 2SDS) was already present in 39% of patients at age 6–8 yrs, increasing to 67% at age 18 yrs. The proportion of patients with V(TG )> 2SDS increased from 15% to 54% during this period. Children with severe pulmonary hyperinflation and trapped gas at age 6–8 yrs showed the most pronounced disease progression over time. Age related tracking of lung function parameters commences early in life, and is significantly influenced by specific CFTR genotypes. The group with chronic P. aeruginosa infection demonstrated most rapid progression in all lung function parameters, whilst those with chronic S. aureus infection had the slowest rate of progression. LCI, measured as an index of ventilation inhomogeneities was the most sensitive discriminator between the 3 types of infection examined (p < 0.0001). CONCLUSION: The relationships between lung function indices, CFTR genotypes and infective organisms observed in this study suggest that measurement of other lung function parameters, in addition to spirometry alone, may provide important information about disease progression in CF

Glucocorticoid sensitivity of circulating monocytes in essential hypertension

Background: Essential hypertension ranks among the strongest cardiovascular risk factors. Cytokine production by monocytes plays a key role in atherosclerosis development and acute coronary syndromes. We investigated whether stimulated monocyte cytokine release and its inhibition by glucocorticoids would differ between hypertensive and normotensive subjects. Methods: Study participants were 222 middle-aged male employees with industrial jobs. Following the criteria of the World Health Organization/International Society for Hypertension, 76 subjects were classified as being hypertensive (systolic blood pressure ≥140 mm Hg or diastolic blood pressure ≥90 mm Hg). In vitro monocyte tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α release after lipopolysaccharide (LPS) stimulation was assessed with and without coincubation with incremental doses of dexamethasone. Monocyte glucocorticoid sensitivity was defined as the dexamethasone concentration inhibiting TNF-α release by 50%. Results: Hypertensive subjects showed 11% higher LPS-stimulated TNF-α release than normotensive subjects (F1,181= 5.21, P = .024). In hypertensive subjects, monocyte glucocorticoid sensitivity was 21% lower than in normotensive subjects (F1,178= 4.94, P = .027), indicating that dexamethasone inhibited relatively less TNF-α release in hypertensive subjects. Results held significance when a set of classic cardiovascular risk factors was controlled for. Conclusion: The findings suggest that proinflammatory activity of circulating monocytes is higher in hypertensive than in normotensive men, providing one potential pathway to explain the increased atherosclerotic risk with essential hypertension. Am J Hypertens 2004;17:489-494 © 2004 American Journal of Hypertension, Lt

Koalas use a novel vocal organ to produce unusually low-pitched mating calls

SummaryDuring the breeding season, male koalas produce ‘bellow’ vocalisations that are characterised by a continuous series of inhalation and exhalation sections, and an extremely low fundamental frequency (the main acoustic correlate of perceived pitch) [1]. Remarkably, the fundamental frequency (F0) of bellow inhalation sections averages 27.1 Hz (range: 9.8–61.5 Hz [1]), which is 20 times lower than would be expected for an animal weighing 8 kg [2] and more typical of an animal the size of an elephant (Supplemental figure S1A). Here, we demonstrate that koalas use a novel vocal organ to produce their unusually low-pitched mating calls

Unsupervised Continual Semantic Adaptation through Neural Rendering

An increasing amount of applications rely on data-driven models that are deployed for perception tasks across a sequence of scenes. Due to the mismatch between training and deployment data, adapting the model on the new scenes is often crucial to obtain good performance. In this work, we study continual multi-scene adaptation for the task of semantic segmentation, assuming that no ground-truth labels are available during deployment and that performance on the previous scenes should be maintained. We propose training a Semantic-NeRF network for each scene by fusing the predictions of a segmentation model and then using the view-consistent rendered semantic labels as pseudo-labels to adapt the model. Through joint training with the segmentation model, the Semantic-NeRF model effectively enables 2D-3D knowledge transfer. Furthermore, due to its compact size, it can be stored in a long-term memory and subsequently used to render data from arbitrary viewpoints to reduce forgetting. We evaluate our approach on ScanNet, where we outperform both a voxel-based baseline and a state-of-the-art unsupervised domain adaptation method.Comment: Zhizheng Liu and Francesco Milano share first authorship. Hermann Blum and Cesar Cadena share senior authorship. 18 pages, 7 figures, 10 table