Communities of Practice: An International Learning Experience

Excerpt: Collaborative inquiry through communities of practice has long been recognized by SoTL scholars as a powerful way for teachers to improve the teaching and learning processes for their students. Communities of practice provide teachers the opportunity to share educational practices, the challenges..

Evaluation of person-level heterogeneity of treatment effects in published multiperson N-of-1 studies: systematic review and reanalysis.

OBJECTIVE:Individual patients with the same condition may respond differently to similar treatments. Our aim is to summarise the reporting of person-level heterogeneity of treatment effects (HTE) in multiperson N-of-1 studies and to examine the evidence for person-level HTE through reanalysis. STUDY DESIGN:Systematic review and reanalysis of multiperson N-of-1 studies. DATA SOURCES:Medline, Cochrane Controlled Trials, EMBASE, Web of Science and review of references through August 2017 for N-of-1 studies published in English. STUDY SELECTION:N-of-1 studies of pharmacological interventions with at least two subjects. DATA SYNTHESIS:Citation screening and data extractions were performed in duplicate. We performed statistical reanalysis testing for person-level HTE on all studies presenting person-level data. RESULTS:We identified 62 multiperson N-of-1 studies with at least two subjects. Statistical tests examining HTE were described in only 13 (21%), of which only two (3%) tested person-level HTE. Only 25 studies (40%) provided person-level data sufficient to reanalyse person-level HTE. Reanalysis using a fixed effect linear model identified statistically significant person-level HTE in 8 of the 13 studies (62%) reporting person-level treatment effects and in 8 of the 14 studies (57%) reporting person-level outcomes. CONCLUSIONS:Our analysis suggests that person-level HTE is common and often substantial. Reviewed studies had incomplete information on person-level treatment effects and their variation. Improved assessment and reporting of person-level treatment effects in multiperson N-of-1 studies are needed

Nano-scavengers for blood biomarker discovery in ovarian carcinoma

The development and implementation of biomarker-based screening tools for ovarian cancer require novel analytical platforms to enable the discovery of biomarker panels that will overcome the limitations associated with the clinically used CA-125.The systematic discovery of protein biomarkers directly from human plasma using proteomics remains extremely challenging, due to the wide concentration range of plasma proteins. Here, we describe the use of lipid-based nanoparticles (NPs) as an 'omics' enrichment tool to amplify cancer signals in the blood and to uncover disease specific signatures. We aimed to exploit the spontaneous interaction of clinically-used liposomes (Caelyx®) with plasma proteins, also known as' protein corona' formation, in order to facilitate the discovery of previously unreported differentially abundant molecules. Caelyx® liposomes were incubated with plasma samples obtained from advanced ovarian carcinoma patients and healthy donors and corona-coated liposomes were subsequently recovered. Comprehensive comparison between 'healthy' and 'diseased' corona samples by label-free proteomics resulted in the identification of multiple differentially abundant proteins. Moreover, immunoassay-based validation of selected proteins demonstrated the potential of nanoparticle-platform proposed to discover novel molecules with great diagnostic potential. This study proposes a nanoparticle-enabled workflow for plasma proteomic analysis in healthy and diseased states and paves the way for further work needed to discover and validate panels of novel biomarkers for disease diagnosis and monitoring

Attosecond electron-spin dynamics in Xe 4d photoionization

The photoionization of xenon atoms in the 70-100 eV range reveals several fascinating physical phenomena such as a giant resonance induced by the dynamic rearrangement of the electron cloud after photon absorption, an anomalous branching ratio between intermediate Xe$^+$ states separated by the spin-orbit interaction and multiple Auger decay processes. These phenomena have been studied in the past, using in particular synchrotron radiation, but without access to real-time dynamics. Here, we study the dynamics of Xe 4d photoionization on its natural time scale combining attosecond interferometry and coincidence spectroscopy. A time-frequency analysis of the involved transitions allows us to identify two interfering ionization mechanisms: the broad giant dipole resonance with a fast decay time less than 50 as and a narrow resonance at threshold induced by spin-flip transitions, with much longer decay times of several hundred as. Our results provide new insight into the complex electron-spin dynamics of photo-induced phenomena

A Novel Approach to Contamination Suppression in Transmission Detectors for Radiotherapy

The current trend in X-ray radiotherapy is to treat cancers that are in difficult locations in the body using beams with a complex intensity profile. Intensity Modulated Radiotherapy (IMRT) is a treatment which improves the dose distribution to the tumour whilst reducing the dose to healthy tissue. Such treatments administer a larger dose per treatment fraction and hence require more complex methods to verify the accuracy of the treatment delivery. Measuring beam intensity fluctuations is difficult as the beam is heavily distorted after leaving thepatient and transmission detectors will attenuate the beam and change the energy spectrum of the beam. Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors (MAPS) are ideal solid-state detectors to measure the 2D beam profile of a radiotherapy beam upstream of the patient. MAPS sensors can be made very thin (∼ 30 μm) with still very good signal-to-noise performance. This means that the beam would pass through the sensor virtually undisturbed(< 1% attenuation). Pixel pitches of between 2 μm to 100 μm are commercially available. Large area devices (∼ 15 × 15 cm 2 ) have been produced. MAPS can be made radiation hard enough to befully functional after a large number of fractions. All this makes MAPS a very realistic transmission detector candidate for beam monitoring upstream of the patient. A remaining challenge for thin, upstream sensors is that the detectors are sensitive to the signal of both therapeutic photons and electron contamination. Here a method is presented to distinguish between the signal due to electrons and photons and thus provide real-time dosimetric information in very thin sensors that does not require Monte Carlo simulation of each linear accelerator treatment head