MedSocket: a personalized medical meta-search engine for questions at the point of care

In the U.S., healthcare is a $2.4 trillion industry, and health information technology costs exceed$65 billion per year. Healthcare expenditures are currently at 17% of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product and are expected to rise to 20% by 2017. Improving the information available to physicians and streamlining the delivery of quality care can help stem rising healthcare costs. Through enormous investment in research, the needed information is often available but located in a variety of sources that are difficult and time consuming to use. Due to time constraints, physicians are rarely able to conduct online searches to sufficiently answer patient-specific, clinical or administrative questions at the point of care. Existing search engines don't fit the particular physician needs and preferences giving either too little or too much information. MedSocket is an innovative and patent-pending search engine that implements an information retrieval system from a physician's point-of-view. Also accessible from mobile devices, it will provide convenient and useful access to medical information sources to answer all types of questions. MedSocket offers a single user interface and is highly customized to search medical information, enabling a simultaneous search of the best online resources; a user's personal digitized knowledge stored in notes, emails or documents; and a hospital or departmental intranet. To achieve an optimal search experience, it integrates into electronic health record systems and offers many levels of personalization. MedSocket will utilize the user's medical context, query different content sources (set by user), and deliver only results most relevant to the user. Allowing easy and instant access to current research results, MedSocket will speed the information delivery to the patient's bedside, which currently could take as long as 17 years. MedSocket has the capability to greatly improve care delivered by physicians and make a significant impact on the U.S. healthcare system. Potential Areas of Applications: * Point of Care * Medical Research Patent Status: Pending Inventor(s): Karl Kochendorfer, MD, FAAFP [email protected] - MedSocket LLC Contact Info: Paul Hippenmeyer, Ph.D., M.B.A. [email protected] (573)-882-047

Modeling the monthly mean soil-water balance with a statistical-dynamical ecohydrology model as coupled to a two-component canopy model

The statistical-dynamical annual water balance model of Eagleson (1978) is a pioneering work in the analysis of climate, soil and vegetation interactions. This paper describes several enhancements and modifications to the model that improve its physical realism at the expense of its mathematical elegance and analytical tractability. In particular, the analytical solutions for the root zone fluxes are re-derived using separate potential rates of transpiration and bare-soil evaporation. Those potential rates, along with the rate of evaporation from canopy interception, are calculated using the two-component Shuttleworth-Wallace (1985) canopy model. In addition, the soil column is divided into two layers, with the upper layer representing the dynamic root zone. The resulting ability to account for changes in root-zone water storage allows for implementation at the monthly timescale. This new version of the Eagleson model is coined the Statistical-Dynamical Ecohydrology Model (SDEM). The ability of the SDEM to capture the seasonal dynamics of the local-scale soil-water balance is demonstrated for two grassland sites in the US Great Plains. Sensitivity of the results to variations in peak green leaf area index (LAI) suggests that the mean peak green LAI is determined by some minimum in root zone soil moisture during the growing season. That minimum appears to be close to the soil matric potential at which the dominant grass species begins to experience water stress and well above the wilting point, thereby suggesting an ecological optimality hypothesis in which the need to avoid water-stress-induced leaf abscission is balanced by the maximization of carbon assimilation (and associated transpiration). Finally, analysis of the sensitivity of model-determined peak green LAI to soil texture shows that the coupled model is able to reproduce the so-called "inverse texture effect", which consists of the observation that natural vegetation in dry climates tends to be most productive in sandier soils despite their lower water holding capacity. Although the determination of LAI based on complete or near-complete utilization of soil moisture is not a new approach in ecohydrology, this paper demonstrates its use for the first time with a new monthly statistical-dynamical model of the water balance. Accordingly, the SDEM provides a new framework for studying the controls of soil texture and climate on vegetation density and evapotranspiration

Ecohydrologic controls on vegetation density and evapotranspiration partitioning across the climatic gradients of the central United States

International audienceThe soil-water balance and plant water use are investigated over a domain encompassing the central United States using the Statistical-Dynamical Ecohydrology Model (SDEM). The seasonality in the model and its use of the two-component Shuttleworth-Wallace canopy model allow for application of an ecological optimality hypothesis in which vegetation density, in the form of peak green leaf area index (LAI), is maximized, within upper and lower bounds, such that, in a typical season, soil moisture in the latter half of the growing season just reaches the point at which water stress is experienced. Another key feature of the SDEM is that it partitions evapotranspiration into transpiration, evaporation from canopy interception, and evaporation from the soil surface. That partitioning is significant for the soil-water balance because the dynamics of the three processes are very different. The partitioning and the model-determined peak in green LAI are validated based on observations in the literature, as well as through the calculation of water-use efficiencies with modeled transpiration and large-scale estimates of grassland productivity. Modeled-determined LAI are seen to be at least as accurate as the unaltered satellite-based observations on which they are based. Surprising little dependence on climate and vegetation type is found for the percentage of total evapotranspiration that is soil evaporation, with most of the variation across the study region attributable to soil texture and the resultant differences in vegetation density. While empirical evidence suggests that soil evaporation in the forested regions of the most humid part of the study region is somewhat overestimated, model results are in excellent agreement with observations from croplands and grasslands. The implication of model results for water-limited vegetation is that the higher (lower) soil moisture content in wetter (drier) climates is more-or-less completely offset by the greater (lesser) amount of energy available at the soil surface. This contrasts with other modeling studies which show a strong dependence of evapotranspiration partitioning on climate

Modeling the monthly mean soil-water balance with a statistical-dynamical ecohydrology model as coupled to a two-component canopy model

International audienceThe statistical-dynamical annual water balance model of Eagleson (1978) is a pioneering work in the analysis of climate, soil and vegetation interactions. This paper describes several enhancements and modifications to the model that improve its physical realism at the expense of its mathematical elegance and analytical tractability. In particular, the analytical solutions for the root zone fluxes are re-derived using separate potential rates of transpiration and bare-soil evaporation. Those potential rates, along with the rate of evaporation from canopy interception, are calculated using the two-component Shuttleworth-Wallace (1985) canopy model. In addition, the soil column is divided into two layers, with the upper layer representing the dynamic root zone. The resulting ability to account for changes in root-zone water storage allows for implementation at the monthly timescale. This new version of the Eagleson model is coined the Statistical-Dynamical Ecohydrology Model (SDEM). The ability of the SDEM to capture the seasonal dynamics of the local-scale soil-water balance is demonstrated for two grassland sites in the US Great Plains. Sensitivity of the results to variations in peak green Leaf Area Index (LAI) suggests that the mean peak green LAI is determined by some minimum in root zone soil moisture during the growing season. That minimum appears to be close to the soil matric potential at which the dominant grass species begins to experience water stress and well above the wilting point, thereby suggesting an ecological optimality hypothesis in which the need to avoid water-stress-induced leaf abscission is balanced by the maximization of carbon assimilation (and associated transpiration). Finally, analysis of the sensitivity of model-determined peak green LAI to soil texture shows that the coupled model is able to reproduce the so-called "inverse texture effect", which consists of the observation that natural vegetation in dry climates tends to be most productive in sandier soils despite their lower water holding capacity. Although the determination of LAI based on near-complete utilization of soil moisture is not a new approach in ecohydrology, this paper demonstrates its use for the first time with a new monthly statistical-dynamical model of the water balance. Accordingly, the SDEM provides a new framework for studying the controls of soil texture and climate on vegetation density and evapotranspiration

Velocity and Temperature Fields in Circular Jet Expanding from Choked Nozzle into Quiescent Air

The Mach number and temperature profiles in jets expanding from convergent and convergent-divergent nozzles are presented for several values of nozzle-exit pressure ratio. The effects of jet temperature, Reynolds number, and humidity on jet spreading are briefly evaluated. The results indicated that the downstream Mach number profiles for a heated jet are slightly narrower than those for a unheated jet, whereas the downstream temperature profiles were unaffected by nozzle temperature change, and that the effects of Reynolds number and humidity were negligible

Performance characteristics of aircraft cooling ejectors having short cylindrical shrouds

The factors affecting the performance of ejector suitable for aircraft cooling are investigated theoretically and experimentally. The investigation covers a range of shroud-to-nozzle diameter ratios from 1.1 to 1.6, of shroud lengths from 0.2 to 2.28 nozzle diameters, of secondary-to-primary weight-flow ratios from 0 to 0.12, and of ambient-to-nozzle pressure ratios from 0.7 to 0.06. The results of a simplified theoretical analysis based on each type of flow are in good agreement with those experimentally obtained