Use of AR to Bring Medical Simulation to Life

Use of simulation facilities and equipment in medical training has become the fabric of curricula across nearly all professions, most notably medical school, nursing, and related medical sciences programs. The gold standard for simulators is SimMan3G, Laerdal Inc., which offers a static electronic mannequin that affords the opportunity to create disease states, signs/symptoms, and real physiological/vital sign data complemented by voice interactions between faculty (within the control room) and student. All sessions are videotaped and, through a 15-30 minute debriefing, students exchange thoughts and impressions with faculty and engage in a deep reflective learning experience. The other option for medical simulation training is the use of “standardized patients”; people who serve as mock patients to mimic signs and symptoms but, clearly, cannot mimic real disease states or physiological changes. To bridge the gap between static mannequin and real human as patient, we have begun work on the utilization of AR to bring our SimMan3G mannequin to life

Combined grazing incidence RBS and TEM analysis of luminescent nano-SiGe/SiO2 multilayers.

Multilayer structures with five periods of amorphous SiGe nanoparticles/SiO2 layers with different thickness were deposited by Low Pressure Chemical Vapor Deposition and annealed to crystallize the SiGe nanoparticles. The use of grazing incidence RBS was necessary to obtain sufficient depth resolution to separate the signals arising from the individual layers only a few nm thick. The average size and areal density of the embedded SiGe nanoparticles as well as the oxide interlayer thickness were determined from the RBS spectra. Details of eventual composition changes and diffusion processes caused by the annealing processes were also studied. Transmission Electron Microscopy was used to obtain complementary information on the structural parameters of the samples in order to check the information yielded by RBS. The study revealed that annealing at 900 °C for 60 s, enough to crystallize the SiGe nanoparticles, leaves the structure unaltered if the interlayer thickness is around 15 nm or higher

Resolving long-range spatial correlations in jammed colloidal systems using photon correlation imaging

We introduce a new dynamic light scattering method, termed photon correlation imaging, which enables us to resolve the dynamics of soft matter in space and time. We demonstrate photon correlation imaging by investigating the slow dynamics of a quasi two-dimensional coarsening foam made of highly packed, deformable bubbles and a rigid gel network formed by dilute, attractive colloidal particles. We find the dynamics of both systems to be determined by intermittent rearrangement events. For the foam, the rearrangements extend over a few bubbles, but a small dynamical correlation is observed up to macroscopic length scales. For the gel, dynamical correlations extend up to the system size. These results indicate that dynamical correlations can be extremely long-ranged in jammed systems and point to the key role of mechanical properties in determining their nature.Comment: Published version (Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 085702 (2009)) The Dynamical Activity Mapsprovided as Supplementary Online Material are also available on http://w3.lcvn.univ-montp2.fr/~lucacip/dam/movies.ht

Phase Stable RF-over-fiber Transmission using Heterodyne Interferometry

New scientific applications require phase-stabilized RF distribution to multiple remote locations. These include phased-array radio telescopes and short pulse free electron lasers. RF modulated onto a CW optical carrier and transmitted via fiber is capable of low noise, but commercially available systems aren't long term stable enough for these applications. Typical requirements are for less than 50fs long term temporal stability between receivers, which is 0.05 degrees at 3GHz. Good results have been demonstrated for RF distribution schemes based on transmission of short pulses, but these require specialized free-space optics and high stability mechanical infrastructure. We report a method which uses only standard telecom optical and RF components, and achieves less than 20fs RMS error over 300m of standard single-mode fiber. We demonstrate stable transmission of 3GHz over 300m of fiber with less than 0.017 degree (17fs) RMS phase error. An interferometer measures optical phase delay, providing information to a feed-forward correction of RF phase

Reforestation of harvested Timberlands in Mississippi: Behavior and Attitudes of Non-Industrial, Private Forest Landowners

Southern forests play an increasingly important role in the timber economy as per capita demand for wood continues to expand. Moreover, harvest restrictions in the Pacific Northwest in the early 1990s shifted a large portion of United States demand for softwoods to the South. In Mississippi, most of the forestland is owned by non-industrial private forest (NIPF) landowners. Approximately 314,000 NIPF landowners control 66 percent of the state’s forestland base (Hartsell and London 1995). The sizable acreage of timberland held by NIPF landowners nationally and in-state underscores the importance of their role in the timber economy and weighs heavily in the supply of raw material to the state’s $11.4 billion forest products industry (Munn 1998)

An Empirical Chart Analysis of the Suitability of Telemedicine for Hospice Visits

This is the publisher's version, also available electronically from http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/tmj.2005.11.90.Telehospice® (TH) utilizes telemedicine technology to provide care at the end of life. A bistate project was launched in 1998 to study the use of home-based telemedicine for routine hospice care. Videophones were deployed for telenursing visits and evaluations by social workers. In order to determine what proportion of home hospice visits could be performed using currently available telemedicine technology, we reviewed clinical records retrospectively for hospice nurse home visits. Clinical notes documenting home nursing visits were obtained from two large hospices, one based in Kansas, and the other in Michigan. Records were randomly selected for patients who received hospice nurse visits during the month of January 2000. The charts were reviewed for patient demographic information, patient assessments, teaching activities, and interventions. Five hundred ninety-seven nursing notes were analyzed using an 85-item coding instrument. After careful review of the records, the coders also made a subjective observation regarding the suitability of each visit for telemedicine. As part of this analysis, we found that 64.5% of home hospice nursing visits could be performed by telemedicine. Using TH, it is possible to reduce the number of in-person visits, thereby significantly decreasing the cost of providing hospice care