Supporting multilingual identities in the English classroom to prevent socio-emotional difficulties of minority language pupils.

Master i tilpasset opplæring - 202

Endodontic treatment regimens and their application in practice - survey and comparative study

Introduction: Endodontics is a rapidly developing field of dentistry. Dentists have an increasing selection of techniques, tools, and materials to ensure therapeutic success.Aim: The aim of the study was to analyze the endodontic treatment regimens and their application in the daily practice of dentists. Material and Methods: A dentist survey was conducted through a Google Doc. The link to the form was placed on online dental groups, sent by e-mail to the offices and the questionnaire was also delivered to the dental offices in a printed form.Results: The majority of respondents always perform endodontic treatment procedures on pregnant women, take three X-rays and use a rubber dam during the treatment. Almost all respondents have the opportunity to take an X-ray in the workplace, and the working length is usually measured by the electronic method. The most commonly used methods of root canal preparation are the traditional and crown-down methods, and the most commonly used root canal filling method - the thermal method. Most of the respondents declared the following rinsing protocol: NaOCl and CA or EDTA.  Apex locator, ultrasounds, and microscopes are used in most dental offices, and more than half of the dentists responded that they perform procedures like broken tools removal or obliterated canals enlargement.Conclusions: Polish endodontics has developed over the years. Modern solutions are used more and more often. The canals are filled with the thermal method, and the popularity of performing complex endodontic procedures has increased. However, it is necessary to conduct further studies comparing the effectiveness of the canal preparation methods and the standardization of the root canal irrigation protocol

Online User Assessment for Minimal Intervention During Task-Based Robotic Assistance

We propose a novel criterion for evaluating user input for human-robot interfaces for known tasks. We use the mode insertion gradient (MIG)---a tool from hybrid control theory---as a filtering criterion that instantaneously assesses the impact of user actions on a dynamic system over a time window into the future. As a result, the filter is permissive to many chosen strategies, minimally engaging, and skill-sensitive---qualities desired when evaluating human actions. Through a human study with 28 healthy volunteers, we show that the criterion exhibits a low, but significant, negative correlation between skill level, as estimated from task-specific measures in unassisted trials, and the rate of controller intervention during assistance. Moreover, a MIG-based filter can be utilized to create a shared control scheme for training or assistance. In the human study, we observe a substantial training effect when using a MIG-based filter to perform cart-pendulum inversion, particularly when comparing improvement via the RMS error measure. Using simulation of a controlled spring-loaded inverted pendulum (SLIP) as a test case, we observe that the MIG criterion could be used for assistance to guarantee either task completion or safety of a joint human-robot system, while maintaining the system's flexibility with respect to user-chosen strategies.Comment: 10 page

Immune-cell BDNF expression in treatment-naïve relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis patients and following one year of immunomodulation therapy

Although neurons are the main source of neurotrophins in the healthy brain, neurotrophins can also be expressed in the immune system. We have previously shown that in relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis (RRMS) lower immune-cell neurotrophin levels are associated with brain atrophy and cognitive impairment. The aim of the present study was to assess if immune-cell neurotrophin expression is impaired in MS as compared with the healthy controls, and to describe if these levels change in treatment-naïve RRMS patients, following one year of immunomodulation. Fifty treatment-naïve RRMS patients were assessed at baseline and after one year of immunomodulation (beta-interferons/glatiramer acetate). The control group included 39 healthy subjects matched according to age and gender. Peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) were isolated from heparinized blood using Ficoll-Histopaque gradient. The levels of brain-derived-neurotrophic-factor (BDNF), beta-nerve-growth-factor (beta-NGF), neurotrophin-3 (NT-3) and neurotrophin-4/5 (NT-4/5) were measured in PBMC lysates with ELISA. BDNF levels were significantly lower in MS than in the healthy controls (median 613 vs. 1657pg/mg protein, p<0.001). After one year of immunomodulation, BDNF expression did not change significantly (p=0.06) on the group level. In 70% of patients there was no increase in BDNF level, and in 30% it increased. We observed no differences between treatment groups. Other neurotrophins were detected in a minority of MS samples (as opposed to the controls). To conclude, we have shown that immune-cell production of neurotrophins is impaired in MS patients. In our MS cohort standard immunomodulation failed to restore normal BDNF levels in PBMCs within one year of therapy

Delay in diagnosis and treatment of patients with cases of imported malaria in Poland : one center’s experience

Background . Increasingly, Polish citizens are traveling to malaria endemic regions; thus, physicians, especially primary care physicians, should be educated to recognize and treat malaria. Diagnosis and treatment of malaria encounters many difficulties in Poland. Objectives . The aim of the study was to analyze malaria chemoprophylaxis, the time from first symptoms to hospitalization and the process of diagnosis and treatment of patients with malaria. Material and methods . The medical records of patients diagnosed with malaria, hospitalized between 2012 and 2016 in the Department of Infectious Diseases of the University Hospital, Cracow, Poland, were analyzed. Results . 37 subjects with a median age of 32 years (interquartile range IQR: 28–40), mostly returning from Africa (78%, n = 29), were studied. Proper chemoprophylaxis was used in 6 cases (16%). The median length of stay in malaria endemic countries was one month. Plasmodium falciparum was the most frequent species (74%). The mean time to treatment after symptom onset was 5 days (range: 1–27 days). Conclusions . The clinical presentation of malaria in the study group was usually typical. Diagnostic delay resulted from not taking malaria into consideration during the initial differential diagnosis of fever. Few travelers use chemoprophylaxis, hence the awareness of malaria in individuals who have traveled to endemic zones should be enhanced. In a patient presenting with fever, malaria should always be considered in a differential diagnosis if there is a history of travel to a malaria-endemic zone

Exploring the Customer Trust Building Strategies used by Fintech Firms

The Fintech industry remains broadly un-regulated compared to their banking counterparts; however, Fintech firms are aware that customer trust plays a vital role in defining success and failure within this industry. In this paper, we discuss the measures taken by Fintech firms to establish trust and self-regulate consumer protection methods for their customers. Our research explores the approaches used by Fintech organisations to create and maintain consumer trust in their services and examines the depth of safeguarding and protection provided by these approaches. To achieve this, the literature review was used to derive twelve grading factors across five thematic areas creating a multi-element grading framework for determining Fintech success or failure regarding building consumer confidence. This was then applied to assessing the practices of 16 Fintech firms (divided into four groups) selected using a multiple case studies strategy through secondary data and the results were further benchmarked against a traditional financial institution as our proxy. The majority of Fintech companies are not required by law to follow financial regulatory guidelines; however, our results show that most of the Fintech organisations studied closely align with the guidelines on consumer protection and financial crime prevention. The Fintech firms also adequately report on their compliance to general consumers. This appears to be contradictory to the literature on Fintech, which broadly focuses on the insufficient regulations overseeing financial technologies. Our results show that the best practices in safeguarding and protection measures practised within Fintech operating within the Transfer field are similar to that of traditional financial institutions. In contrast, the most inadequate consumer protection is essentially embedded within Cryptocurrency and Blockchain

Over-communicate no more: Situated RL agents learn concise communication protocols

While it is known that communication facilitates cooperation in multi-agent settings, it is unclear how to design artificial agents that can learn to effectively and efficiently communicate with each other. Much research on communication emergence uses reinforcement learning (RL) and explores unsituated communication in one-step referential tasks -- the tasks are not temporally interactive and lack time pressures typically present in natural communication. In these settings, agents may successfully learn to communicate, but they do not learn to exchange information concisely -- they tend towards over-communication and an inefficient encoding. Here, we explore situated communication in a multi-step task, where the acting agent has to forgo an environmental action to communicate. Thus, we impose an opportunity cost on communication and mimic the real-world pressure of passing time. We compare communication emergence under this pressure against learning to communicate with a cost on articulation effort, implemented as a per-message penalty (fixed and progressively increasing). We find that while all tested pressures can disincentivise over-communication, situated communication does it most effectively and, unlike the cost on effort, does not negatively impact emergence. Implementing an opportunity cost on communication in a temporally extended environment is a step towards embodiment, and might be a pre-condition for incentivising efficient, human-like communication

Dual-Phase Cardiac Diffusion Tensor Imaging with Strain Correction

Purpose In this work we present a dual-phase diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) technique that incorporates a correction scheme for the cardiac material strain, based on 3D myocardial tagging. Methods: In vivo dual-phase cardiac DTI with a stimulated echo approach and 3D tagging was performed in 10 healthy volunteers. The time course of material strain was estimated from the tagging data and used to correct for strain effects in the diffusion weighted acquisition. Mean diffusivity, fractional anisotropy, helix, transverse and sheet angles were calculated and compared between systole and diastole, with and without strain correction. Data acquired at the systolic sweet spot, where the effects of strain are eliminated, served as a reference. Results: The impact of strain correction on helix angle was small. However, large differences were observed in the transverse and sheet angle values, with and without strain correction. The standard deviation of systolic transverse angles was significantly reduced from 35.9±3.9° to 27.8°±3.5° (p<0.001) upon strain-correction indicating more coherent fiber tracks after correction. Myocyte aggregate structure was aligned more longitudinally in systole compared to diastole as reflected by an increased transmural range of helix angles (71.8°±3.9° systole vs. 55.6°±5.6°, p<0.001 diastole). While diastolic sheet angle histograms had dominant counts at high sheet angle values, systolic histograms showed lower sheet angle values indicating a reorientation of myocyte sheets during contraction. Conclusion: An approach for dual-phase cardiac DTI with correction for material strain has been successfully implemented. This technique allows assessing dynamic changes in myofiber architecture between systole and diastole, and emphasizes the need for strain correction when sheet architecture in the heart is imaged with a stimulated echo approach