Switching perspectives: Physicians meet Engineers in a Novel Lab on Medical Device Development

[EN] Education nowadays often still lacks in seeing the big picture. While becoming an expert in a certain, narrow field is naturally desirable, switching disciplinary perspectives is mandatory for an overall understanding. Next to benefiting from the knowledge of other disciplines itself, the merging of two disciplines and their actors leads to a synergy effect through the exchange of their knowledge and experience. Therefore a mixed course structure consisting of theoretical and practical parts seems most feasible to guarantee varying degrees of didactic approaches including co-operative course designs. In this paper our already well established advanced lab on medical device development (part of the Bachelor's degree in Computer Science) and its enhancement towards an interdisciplinary lab and lecture with medical students is presented. Based on the existing lab, we analyze the prior knowledge of physicians and computer scientists and derive contents, structure and necessary competence goals for a four-week block course. The main objective of the lab is to enable the students of both disciplines to share a common language and a common understanding of the procedures, approaches and tools.Gruenewald, A.; Kroenert, D.; Buechner, S.; Brueck, R. (2019). Switching perspectives: Physicians meet Engineers in a Novel Lab on Medical Device Development. En HEAD'19. 5th International Conference on Higher Education Advances. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 1079-1086. https://doi.org/10.4995/HEAD19.2019.9269OCS1079108

The Level of Surface Coverage of Surgical Site Disinfection Depends on the Visibility of the Antiseptic Agent—A Virtual Reality Randomized Controlled Trial

Background: Surgical site infections (SSIs) have a significant impact on outcome associated with surgical treatment. Therefore, skin antisepsis has evolved as a standard preoperative procedure in the operating room to reduce the perioperative risk of an SSI. In their “Global Guidelines for the prevention of surgical site infections”, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommend the use of an agent with remanent additives and considers colored agents as helpful. However, colored and remanent disinfectants are not available in Germany. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether using a colored antiseptic solution increases the quality of preoperative skin antisepsis. Methods: This study was designed as a randomized, double-blinded controlled trial. To examine the level of coverage of skin antisepsis, an appropriate virtual reality (VR) environment was generated. Participants could see a movable surgical clamp with a swab in their hand. When touching the skin, the participants recognized an optical change in the appearance of the skin: Using a colored antiseptic solution resulted in orange-colored skin. Using an uncolored agent, a shiny wet look was visible without a change in natural skin color. Results: Data of 141 participants (female: 61.0% (n = 86); mean age: 28 y (Range 18–58 y, SD = 7.53 y)) were included in the study. The level of disinfection coverage was higher in the group using the colored disinfectant. On average, 86.5% (sd = 10.0) of the leg skin was covered when a colored disinfectant was used, whereas only 73.9% (sd = 12.8) of the leg skin was covered when the participants had to use an uncolored agent (p f = 0.56, η2 = 0.24). Conclusions: The use of an uncolored disinfectant leads to a lower surface coverage of the perioperative skin disinfection. Thus far, it is unclear whether using uncolored disinfectants is associated with higher risks for perioperative infections compared with the use of non-remanent disinfectants. Therefore, further research is necessary and current German guidelines should be re-evaluated accordingly

Search for the standard model Higgs boson at LEP

The four LEP Collaborations, ALEPH, DELPHI, L3 and OPAL, have collected a total of 2461 pb(-1) of e(+)e(-) collision data at centre-of-mass energies between 189 and 209 GeV. The data are used to search for the Standard Model Higgs boson. The search results of the four Collaborations are combined and examined in a likelihood test for their consistency with two hypotheses: the background hypothesis and the signal plus background hypothesis. The corresponding confidences have been computed as functions of the hypothetical Higgs boson mass. A lower bound of 114.4 GeV/c(2) is established, at the 95% confidence level, on the mass of the Standard Model Higgs boson. The LEP data are also used to set upper bounds on the HZZ coupling for various assumptions concerning the decay of the Higgs boson. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved