An Integrated XRF/XRD Instrument for Mars Exobiology and Geology Experiments

By employing an integrated x-ray instrument on a future Mars mission, data obtained will greatly augment those returned by Viking; details characterizing the past and present environment on Mars and those relevant to the possibility of the origin and evolution of life will be acquired. A combined x-ray fluorescence/x-ray diffraction (XRF/XRD) instrument was breadboarded and demonstrated to accommodate important exobiology and geology experiment objectives outlined for MESUR and future Mars missions. Among others, primary objectives for the exploration of Mars include the intense study of local areas on Mars to establish the chemical, mineralogical, and petrological character of different components of the surface material; to determine the distribution, abundance, and sources and sinks of volatile materials, including an assessment of the biologic potential, now and during past epoches; and to establish the global chemical and physical characteristics of the Martian surface. The XRF/XRD breadboard instrument identifies and quantifies soil surface elemental, mineralogical, and petrological characteristics and acquires data necessary to address questions on volatile abundance and distribution. Additionally, the breadboard is able to characterize the biogenic element constituents of soil samples providing information on the biologic potential of the Mars environment. Preliminary breadboard experiments confirmed the fundamental instrument design approach and measurement performance

Demonstration of the feasibility of an integrated x ray laboratory for planetary exploration

The identification of minerals and elemental compositions is an important component in the geological and exobiological exploration of the solar system. X ray diffraction and fluorescence are common techniques for obtaining these data. The feasibility of combining these analytical techniques in an integrated x ray laboratory compatible with the volume, mass, and power constraints imposed by many planetary missions was demonstrated. Breadboard level hardware was developed to cover the range of diffraction lines produced by minerals, clays, and amorphous; and to detect the x ray fluorescence emissions of elements from carbon through uranium. These breadboard modules were fabricated and used to demonstrate the ability to detect elements and minerals. Additional effort is required to establish the detection limits of the breadboard modules and to integrate diffraction and fluorescence techniques into a single unit. It was concluded that this integrated x ray laboratory capability will be a valuable tool in the geological and exobiological exploration of the solar system

Evaluation of critical congenital heart defects screening using pulse oximetry in the neonatal intensive care unit.

ObjectiveTo evaluate the implementation of early screening for critical congenital heart defects (CCHDs) in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) and potential exclusion of sub-populations from universal screening.Study designProspective evaluation of CCHD screening at multiple time intervals was conducted in 21 NICUs across five states (n=4556 infants).ResultsOf the 4120 infants with complete screens, 92% did not have prenatal CHD diagnosis or echocardiography before screening, 72% were not receiving oxygen at 24 to 48 h and 56% were born ⩾2500 g. Thirty-seven infants failed screening (0.9%); none with an unsuspected CCHD. False positive rates were low for infants not receiving oxygen (0.5%) and those screened after weaning (0.6%), yet higher among infants born at <28 weeks (3.8%). Unnecessary echocardiograms were minimal (0.2%).ConclusionGiven the majority of NICU infants were ⩾2500 g, not on oxygen and not preidentified for CCHD, systematic screening at 24 to 48 h may be of benefit for early detection of CCHD with minimal burden

Combining cytotoxicity assessment and Xenopus laevis phenotypic abnormality assay as a predictor of nanomaterial safety

The African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis, has been used as an efficient pre-clinical screening tool to predict drug safety during the early stages of the drug discovery process. X. laevis is a relatively inexpensive model that can be used in whole organism high-throughput assays whilst maintaining a high degree of homology to the higher vertebrate models often used in scientific research. Despite an ever-increasing volume of biomedical nanoparticles (NPs) in development, their unique physico-chemical properties challenge the use of standard toxicology assays. Here, we present a protocol that directly compares the sensitivity of X. laevis development as a tool to assess potential NP toxicity by observation of embryo phenotypic abnormalities/lethality after NP exposure to in vitro cytotoxicity obtained using mammalian cell lines. In combination with conventional cytotoxicity assays, the X. laevis phenotypic assay provides accurate data to efficiently assess the safety of a novel biomedical NP

Recent trends in digital text forensics and its evaluation

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40802-1_28This paper outlines the concepts and achievements of our evaluation lab on digital text forensics, PAN 13, which called for original research and development on plagiarism detection, author identification, and author profiling. We present a standardized evaluation framework for each of the three tasks and discuss the evaluation results of the altogether 58 submitted contributions. For the first time, instead of accepting the output of software runs, we collected the softwares themselves and run them on a computer cluster at our site. As evaluation and experimentation platform we use TIRA, which is being developed at the Webis Group in Weimar. TIRA can handle large-scale software submissions by means of virtualization, sandboxed execution, tailored unit testing, and staged submission. In addition to the achieved evaluation results, a major achievement of our lab is that we now have the largest collection of state-of-the-art approaches with regard to the mentioned tasks for further analysis at our disposal.This work was partially supported by the WIQ-EI IRSES project (Grant No. 269180) within the FP7 Marie Curie action.Gollub, T.; Potthast, M.; Beyer, A.; Busse, M.; Rangel Pardo, FM.; Rosso, P.; Stamatatos, E.... (2013). Recent trends in digital text forensics and its evaluation. En Information Access Evaluation. Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Visualization. Springer Verlag (Germany). 282-302. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40802-1_28S282302Aleman, Y., Loya, N., Vilarino Ayala, D., Pinto, D.: Two Methodologies Applied to the Author Profiling Task—Notebook for PAN at CLEF 2013. In: Forner, et al. (eds.) [15]Argamon, S., Juola, P.: Overview of the International Authorship Identification Competition at PAN-2011. 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Eval. 45, 5–24 (2011)Clough, P., Gaizauskas, R., Piao, S.S.L., Wilks, Y.: METER: MEasuring TExt Reuse. In: Proc. ACL 2002 (2002)De Roure, D., Goble, C., Stevens, R.: The Design and Realisation of the myExperiment Virtual Research Environment for Social Sharing of Workflows. Future Gener. Comp. Sy. 25, 561–567 (2009)Caurcel Diaz, A.A., Gomez Hidalgo, J.M.: Experiments with SMS Translation and Stochastic Gradient Descent in Spanish Text Author Profiling—Notebook for PAN at CLEF 2013. In: Forner, et al. (eds.) [15]Downie, J.S.: The Music Information Retrieval Evaluation Exchange (2005–2007): A Window into Music Information Retrieval Research. Acoust. Sc. and Tech. 29(4), 247–255 (2008)Hernandez Farias, D.I., Guzman-Cabrera, R., Reyes, A., Rocha, M.A.: Semantic-based Features for Author Profiling Identification: First Insights—Notebook for PAN at CLEF 2013. In: Forner, et al. (eds.) [15]Flekova, L., Gurevych, I.: Can We Hide in the Web? Large Scale Simultaneous Age and Gender Author Profiling in Social Media–Notebook for PAN at CLEF 2013. In: Forner, et al. (eds.) [15]Forner, P., Navigli, R., Tufis, D. (eds.): CLEF 2013 Evaluation Labs and Workshop – Working Notes Papers (2013)Gillam, L.: Readability for author profiling?—Notebook for PAN at CLEF 2013. In: Forner, et al. (eds.) [15]Gollub, T., Burrows, S., Stein, B.: First Experiences with TIRA for Reproducible Evaluation in Information Retrieval. In: Proc. of OSIR at SIGIR 2012 (August 2012)Gollub, T., Stein, B., Burrows, S.: Ousting Ivory Tower Research: Towards a Web Framework for Providing Experiments as a Service. In: Proc. of SIGIR 2012 (2012)Gollub, T., Stein, B., Burrows, S., Hoppe, D.: TIRA: Configuring, Executing, and Disseminating Information Retrieval Experiments. In: Proc. of TIR at DEXA 2012. IEEE (2012)Goswami, S., Sarkar, S., Rustagi, M.: Stylometric Analysis of Bloggers’ Age and Gender. In: Proc. of ICWSM 2009 (2009)Haggag, O., El-Beltagy, S.: Plagiarism Candidate Retrieval Using Selective Query Formulation and Discriminative Query Scoring—Notebook for PAN at CLEF 2013. In: Forner, et al. (eds.) [15]Holmes, J., Meyerhoff, M.: The Handbook of Language and Gender. Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics. Wiley (2003)Inches, G., Crestani, F.: Overview of the International Sexual Predator Identification Competition at PAN-2012. In: Proc. of CLEF 2012 (2012)Juola, P.: Authorship Attribution. Found. and Trends in IR 1, 234–334 (2008)Juola, P.: Ad-hoc Authorship Attribution Competition. In: Proc. of ALLC 2004 (2004)Juola, P.: An Overview of the Traditional Authorship Attribution Subtask. In: Proc. of CLEF 2012 (2012)Koppel, M., Winter, Y.: Determining if Two Documents are by the Same Author. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (to appear)Koppel, M., Argamon, S., Shimoni, A.R.: Automatically Categorizing Written Texts by Author Gender. Literary and Linguistic Computing 17(4), 401–412 (2002)Koppel, M., Schler, J., Bonchek-Dokow, E.: Measuring Differentiability: Unmasking Pseudonymous Authors. Journal of Machine Learning Research 8, 1261–1276 (2007)Koppel, M., Schler, J., Argamon, S.: Authorship Attribution in the Wild. Language Resources and Evaluation 45, 83–94 (2011)Kong, L., Qi, H., Du, C., Wang, M., Han, Z.: Approaches for Source Retrieval and Text Alignment of Plagiarism Detection—Notebook for PAN at CLEF 2013. In: Forner, et al. (eds.) [15]Lim, W.Y., Goh, J., Thing, V.L.L.: Content-centric age and gender profiling—Notebook for PAN at CLEF 2013. In: Forner, et al. (eds.) [15]Pastor Lopez-Monroy, A., Montes-Y-Gomez, M., Jair Escalante, H., Villasenor-Pineda, L., Villatoro-Tello, E.: INAOE’s participation at PAN’13: Author Profiling task—Notebook for PAN at CLEF 2013. In: Forner, et al. (eds.) [15]Meina, M., Brodzinska, K., Celmer, B., Czokow, M., Patera, M., Pezacki, J., Wilk, M.: Ensemble-based Classification for Author Profiling using Various Features—Notebook for PAN at CLEF 2013. In: Forner, et al. (eds.) [15]Nguyen, D., Gravel, R., Trieschnigg, D., Meder, T.: “How Old Do You Think I Am?”; A Study of Language and Age in Twitter. In: Proc. of ICWSM 2013 (2013)Nguyen, D., Smith, N.A., Rosé, C.P.: Author Age Prediction from Text Using Linear Regression. In: Proc. of LaTeCH at ACL-HLTGopal Patra, B., Banerjee, S., Das, D., Saikh, T., Bandyopadhyay, S.: Automatic Author Profiling Based on Linguistic and Stylistic Features—Notebook for PAN at CLEF 2013. In: Forner, et al. (eds.) [15]Peersman, C., Daelemans, W., Van Vaerenbergh, L.: Predicting Age and Gender in Online Social Networks. In: Proc. of SMUC 2011 (2011)Pennebaker, J.W.: The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us. Bloomsbury, USA (2013)Pennebaker, J.W., Mehl, M.R., Niederhoffer, K.G.: Psychological Aspects of Natural Language Use: Our Words, Our Selves. Annual Review of Psychology 54(1), 547–577 (2003)Potthast, M., Stein, B., Eiselt, A., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Rosso, P.: Overview of the 1st International Competition on Plagiarism Detection. In: Proc. of PAN at SEPLN 2009 (2009)Potthast, M., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Eiselt, A., Stein, B., Rosso, P.: Overview of the 2nd International Competition on Plagiarism Detection. In: Proc. of CLEF 2010 (2010)Potthast, M., Stein, B., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Rosso, P.: An Evaluation Framework for Plagiarism Detection. In: Proc. of COLING 2010 (2010)Potthast, M., Eiselt, A., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Stein, B., Rosso, P.: Overview of the 3rd International Competition on Plagiarism Detection. In: Proc. of CLEF 2011 (2011)Potthast, M., Gollub, T., Hagen, M., Graßegger, J., Kiesel, J., Michel, M., Oberländer, A., Tippmann, M., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Gupta, P., Rosso, P., Stein, B.: Overview of the 4th International Competition on Plagiarism Detection. In: Proc. of CLEF 2012 (2012)Potthast, M., Hagen, M., Stein, B., Graßegger, J., Michel, M., Tippmann, M., Welsch, C.: ChatNoir: A Search Engine for the ClueWeb09 Corpus. In: Proc. of SIGIR 2012 (2012)Potthast, M., Gollub, T., Hagen, M., Tippmann, M., Kiesel, J., Rosso, P., Stamatatos, E., Stein, B.: Overview of the 5th International Competition on Plagiarism Detection. In: Proc. of CLEF 2013 (2013)Potthast, M., Hagen, M., Völske, M., Stein, B.: Crowdsourcing Interaction Logs to Understand Text Reuse from the Web. In: Proc. of ACL 2013. ACM (to appear, August 2013b)Rodíguez Torrejón, D.A., Martín Ramos, J.M.: Text Alignment Module in CoReMo 2.1 Plagiarism Detector—Notebook for PAN at CLEF 2013. In: Forner, et al. (eds.) 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Disease variants in genomes of 44 centenarians

To identify previously reported disease mutations that are compatible with extraordinary longevity, we screened the coding regions of the genomes of 44 Ashkenazi Jewish centenarians. Individual genome sequences were generated with 30x coverage on the Illumina HiSeq 2000 and single-nucleotide variants were called with the genome analysis toolkit (GATK). We identified 130 coding variants that were annotated as pathogenic or likely pathogenic based on the ClinVar database and that are infrequent in the general population. These variants were previously reported to cause a wide range of degenerative, neoplastic, and cardiac diseases with autosomal dominant, autosomal recessive, and X-linked inheritance. Several of these variants are located in genes that harbor actionable incidental findings, according to the recommendations of the American College of Medical Genetics. In addition, we found risk variants for late-onset neurodegenerative diseases, such as the APOE epsilon4 allele that was even present in a homozygous state in one centenarian who did not develop Alzheimer\u27s disease. Our data demonstrate that the incidental finding of certain reported disease variants in an individual genome may not preclude an extraordinarily long life. When the observed variants are encountered in the context of clinical sequencing, it is thus important to exercise caution in justifying clinical decisions

Investigating and learning lessons from early experiences of implementing ePrescribing systems into NHS hospitals:a questionnaire study

Background: ePrescribing systems have significant potential to improve the safety and efficiency of healthcare, but they need to be carefully selected and implemented to maximise benefits. Implementations in English hospitals are in the early stages and there is a lack of standards guiding the procurement, functional specifications, and expected benefits. We sought to provide an updated overview of the current picture in relation to implementation of ePrescribing systems, explore existing strategies, and identify early lessons learned.Methods: a descriptive questionnaire-based study, which included closed and free text questions and involved both quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data generated.Results: we obtained responses from 85 of 108 NHS staff (78.7% response rate). At least 6% (n = 10) of the 168 English NHS Trusts have already implemented ePrescribing systems, 2% (n = 4) have no plans of implementing, and 34% (n = 55) are planning to implement with intended rapid implementation timelines driven by high expectations surrounding improved safety and efficiency of care. The majority are unclear as to which system to choose, but integration with existing systems and sophisticated decision support functionality are important decisive factors. Participants highlighted the need for increased guidance in relation to implementation strategy, system choice and standards, as well as the need for top-level management support to adequately resource the project. Although some early benefits were reported by hospitals that had already implemented, the hoped for benefits relating to improved efficiency and cost-savings remain elusive due to a lack of system maturity.Conclusions: whilst few have begun implementation, there is considerable interest in ePrescribing systems with ambitious timelines amongst those hospitals that are planning implementations. In order to ensure maximum chances of realising benefits, there is a need for increased guidance in relation to implementation strategy, system choice and standards, as well as increased financial resources to fund local activitie

Interprofessional Education: An evaluation of a joint learning workshop for podiatry and pharmacy students

"Interprofessional Education occurs when two or more professionals learn with, from and about each other to improve collaboration and the quality of care" (CAIPE 2002). Interprofessional education forms part of the Standards for the Initial Education and Training of Pharmacists. Working with and understanding the role of another profession has been shown to positively impact on the quality of care of the patient. Following positive pharmacy student feedback from visits to podiatry clinics an interprofessional learning workshop with case - based scenarios was developed. These were based on patients with high risk medical conditions that would impact on the work of both professions. Data from the feedback forms was evaluated and analysed to determine whether the workshop increased knowledge of the British National Formulary (BNF), the prescribing process and gave an insight in to the role of other healthcare professionals. We discuss how the student’s learning has been enhanced by the contribution of another professional group. The workshop was positively received. Students were observed working together discussing the patients’ conditions and issues relating to their care. This initially revolved around the students’ area of knowledge; however, as the session progressed it became apparent that the students were learning with, from and about each other for the benefit of patient care

Fast flowing populations are not well mixed

In evolutionary dynamics, well-mixed populations are almost always associated with all-to-all interactions; mathematical models are based on complete graphs. In most cases, these models do not predict fixation probabilities in groups of individuals mixed by flows. We propose an analytical description in the fast-flow limit. This approach is valid for processes with global and local selection, and accurately predicts the suppression of selection as competition becomes more local. It provides a modelling tool for biological or social systems with individuals in motion.Comment: 19 pages, 8 figure

Clinical decision support of therapeutic drug monitoring of phenytoin: measured versus adjusted phenytoin plasma concentrations

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Therapeutic drug monitoring of phenytoin by measurement of plasma concentrations is often employed to optimize clinical efficacy while avoiding adverse effects. This is most commonly accomplished by measurement of total phenytoin plasma concentrations. However, total phenytoin levels can be misleading in patients with factors such as low plasma albumin that alter the free (unbound) concentrations of phenytoin. Direct measurement of free phenytoin concentrations in plasma is more costly and time-consuming than determination of total phenytoin concentrations. An alternative to direct measurement of free phenytoin concentrations is use of the Sheiner-Tozer equation to calculate an adjusted phenytoin that corrects for the plasma albumin concentration. Innovative medical informatics tools to identify patients who would benefit from adjusted phenytoin calculations or from laboratory measurement of free phenytoin are needed to improve safety and efficacy of phenytoin pharmacotherapy. The electronic medical record for an academic medical center was searched for the time period from August 1, 1996 to November 30, 2010 for patients who had total phenytoin and free phenytoin determined on the same blood draw, and also a plasma albumin measurement within 7 days of the phenytoin measurements. The measured free phenytoin plasma concentration was used as the gold standard.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In this study, the standard Sheiner-Tozer formula for calculating an estimated (adjusted) phenytoin level more frequently underestimates than overestimates the measured free phenytoin relative to the respective therapeutic ranges. Adjusted phenytoin concentrations provided superior classification of patients than total phenytoin measurements, particularly at low albumin concentrations. Albumin plasma concentrations up to 7 days prior to total phenytoin measurements can be used for adjusted phenytoin concentrations.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The results suggest that a measured free phenytoin should be obtained where possible to guide phenytoin dosing. If this is not feasible, then an adjusted phenytoin can supplement a total phenytoin concentration, particularly for patients with low plasma albumin.</p