An overview of geospatial methods used in unintentional injury epidemiology

BACKGROUND: Injuries are a leading cause of death and disability around the world. Injury incidence is often associated with socio-economic and physical environmental factors. The application of geospatial methods has been recognised as important to gain greater understanding of the complex nature of injury and the associated diverse range of geographically-diverse risk factors. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to provide an overview of geospatial methods applied in unintentional injury epidemiological studies. METHODS: Nine electronic databases were searched for papers published in 2000-2015, inclusive. Included were papers reporting unintentional injuries using geospatial methods for one or more categories of spatial epidemiological methods (mapping; clustering/cluster detection; and ecological analysis). Results describe the included injury cause categories, types of data and details relating to the applied geospatial methods. RESULTS: From over 6,000 articles, 67 studies met all inclusion criteria. The major categories of injury data reported with geospatial methods were road traffic (n = 36), falls (n = 11), burns (n = 9), drowning (n = 4), and others (n = 7). Grouped by categories, mapping was the most frequently used method, with 62 (93%) studies applying this approach independently or in conjunction with other geospatial methods. Clustering/cluster detection methods were less common, applied in 27 (40%) studies. Three studies (4%) applied spatial regression methods (one study using a conditional autoregressive model and two studies using geographically weighted regression) to examine the relationship between injury incidence (drowning, road deaths) with aggregated data in relation to explanatory factors (socio-economic and environmental). CONCLUSION: The number of studies using geospatial methods to investigate unintentional injuries has increased over recent years. While the majority of studies have focused on road traffic injuries, other injury cause categories, particularly falls and burns, have also demonstrated the application of these methods. Geospatial investigations of injury have largely been limited to mapping of data to visualise spatial structures. Use of more sophisticated approaches will help to understand a broader range of spatial risk factors, which remain under-explored when using traditional epidemiological approaches

The T2K experiment and downstream electromagnetic calorimeter.

T2K (Tokai to Kamioka) is a 295km long-baseline experiment in Japan, which is due to start taking commissioning data late in 2009. It is designed to measure muon-neutrino oscillations to other flavours. This will enable the measurement of some of the components of the MNSP mixing matrix. One of the UK's main contributions is the construction of an Electromagnetic Calorimeter (ECal) for the near detector, ND280, situated 280m downstream from the neutrino production target. This poster focuses on the Downstream ECal. Construction of this key module is due to begin in October 2007. It is then to be packaged and shipped to CERN in Spring 2009 for calibration tests and it is the aim that it will be installed in Tokai later in 2009. Lancaster University is responsible for the construction of the DS-ECal

Button battery lodged in Meckel's diverticulum

Meckel's diverticulum is the most common congenital anomaly of the gastrointestinal tract. It is relatively uncommon, however, for patients to become symptomatic and rarer still for foreign bodies to become lodged within a Meckel's diverticulum. Here we present one such case in which a button battery was lodged in a Meckel's diverticulum, along with the patient's subsequent interdisciplinary management and review of the relevant literature. Keywords: Foreign body ingestion, Button battery, Meckel's diverticulu

The T2K experiment

The T2K experiment is a long baseline neutrino oscillation experiment. Its main goal is to measure the last unknown lepton sector mixing angle θ13 by observing νe appearance in a νμ beam. It also aims to make a precision measurement of the known oscillation parameters, and sin22θ23, via νμ disappearance studies. Other goals of the experiment include various neutrino cross-section measurements and sterile neutrino searches. The experiment uses an intense proton beam generated by the J-PARC accelerator in Tokai, Japan, and is composed of a neutrino beamline, a near detector complex (ND280), and a far detector (Super-Kamiokande) located 295 km away from J-PARC. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the instrumentation aspect of the T2K experiment and a summary of the vital information for each subsystem