14 research outputs found

    Assessing North Atlantic Right Whale (Eubalaena glacialis) Welfare

    No full text
    Welfare assessments have been largely successful in improving management and quality of life for animals in human care. This has prompted an increased interest in their use for free-ranging wild animals to assess health, environment, and human-induced impacts that influence policy decisions. The North Atlantic Right Whale (NARW, Eubalaena glacialis) is one of the most endangered whale species. NARWs constantly face serious injuries and mortalities due to human activities, which poses both a species conservation and an individual welfare concern. Establishing a standardized welfare assessment for the NARW is a holistic way to understand the cumulative effects of anthropogenic activities at both the individual and population levels. To investigate the potential use of welfare assessments in NARWs, we performed a brief literature review to explore the history and utility of animal welfare assessments. Following the review, we developed a welfare assessment tool specific to the NARW. The goal is for biologists to apply this tool to understand NARW welfare in conjunction with research in the field. Ultimately, the information gained from this review can aid in public dissemination of the results of human impacts on NARW welfare and may help influence future conservation policies

    Assessing North Atlantic Right Whale (<i>Eubalaena glacialis)</i> Welfare

    No full text
    Welfare assessments have been largely successful in improving management and quality of life for animals in human care. This has prompted an increased interest in their use for free-ranging wild animals to assess health, environment, and human-induced impacts that influence policy decisions. The North Atlantic Right Whale (NARW, Eubalaena glacialis) is one of the most endangered whale species. NARWs constantly face serious injuries and mortalities due to human activities, which poses both a species conservation and an individual welfare concern. Establishing a standardized welfare assessment for the NARW is a holistic way to understand the cumulative effects of anthropogenic activities at both the individual and population levels. To investigate the potential use of welfare assessments in NARWs, we performed a brief literature review to explore the history and utility of animal welfare assessments. Following the review, we developed a welfare assessment tool specific to the NARW. The goal is for biologists to apply this tool to understand NARW welfare in conjunction with research in the field. Ultimately, the information gained from this review can aid in public dissemination of the results of human impacts on NARW welfare and may help influence future conservation policies

    Atlas-based methods for efficient characterization of patient-specific ventricular activation patterns.

    No full text
    AIMS: Ventricular activation patterns can aid clinical decision-making directly by providing spatial information on cardiac electrical activation or indirectly through derived clinical indices. The aim of this work was to derive an atlas of the major modes of variation of ventricular activation from model-predicted 3D bi-ventricular activation time distributions and to relate these modes to corresponding vectorcardiograms (VCGs). We investigated how the resulting dimensionality reduction can improve and accelerate the estimation of activation patterns from surface electrogram measurements. METHODS AND RESULTS: Atlases of activation time (AT) and VCGs were derived using principal component analysis on a dataset of simulated electrophysiology simulations computed on eight patient-specific bi-ventricular geometries. The atlases provided significant dimensionality reduction, and the modes of variation in the two atlases described similar features. Utility of the atlases was assessed by resolving clinical waveforms against them and the VCG atlas was able to accurately reconstruct the patient VCGs with fewer than 10 modes. A sensitivity analysis between the two atlases was performed by calculating a compact Jacobian. Finally, VCGs generated by varying AT atlas modes were compared with clinical VCGs to estimate patient-specific activation maps, and the resulting errors between the clinical and atlas-based VCGs were less than those from more computationally expensive method. CONCLUSION: Atlases of activation and VCGs represent a new method of identifying and relating the features of these high-dimensional signals that capture the major sources of variation between patients and may aid in identifying novel clinical indices of arrhythmia risk or therapeutic outcome
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