Does the Use of a Regional Nerve Block Decrease the Incidence of Post Operative Nausea and Vomiting, Decrease Pain Scores, or Decrease Discharge Time Compared to General Anesthesia Alone?

Problem Statement: The use of regional anesthesia in orthopedic surgeries has been shown to decrease the rate of postoperative nausea and vomiting (PONV), postoperative pain, and decrease postoperative discharge time. However, some healthcare facilities continue to provide anesthesia for these procedures without the use of regional anesthesia techniques. Purpose: The purpose of this capstone project was to determine if the addition of a regional anesthetic technique would be beneficial to the patient and cost efficient to the healthcare facility. Methods: A retrospective chart review was conducted and data collected on the population of interest. Inclusion criteria were patients undergoing orthopedic surgery of the upper extremity during January 2015 through August 2015, ages 35-65, and patient status classification I, II, or III. A total of 24 charts were reviewed with 12 charts in the general anesthesia group and 12 charts in the regional anesthesia group. PONV, postoperative pain, anesthesia time, and length of stay in the post anesthesia care unit (PACU) were compared between the groups. Analysis: Unpaired t-tests were used to compare the anesthesia time, PACU length of stay, antiemetic medication requirements, and opioid medication dosage between the two groups. There were no significant differences found between the groups. Conclusion: This retrospective chart review found no significant differences between the groups related to antiemetic medications, opioid medication dosages, or length of stay in PACU

Application of induction heating to high temperature fatigue testing

Accelerated activity in the development of hypersonic aircraft and spacecraft has created new problems of materials testing. Testing equipment must be capable of simulating higher temperatures as well as severe thermal cycling superimposed upon the cyclic application of stress. Among the materials under study requiring this testing equipment are the heavy refractory metals such as tungsten and molybdenum, which are capable to operating at very high temperatures while maintaining strength

Source parameters of moderate size earthquakes and the importance of receiver crustal structure in interpreting observations of local earthquakes

Broadband observations of three central California earthquakes as recorded on opposite sides of the San Andreas fault zone are studied. The earthquake mechanisms are of the strike-slip type occurring along the fault at epicentral distances between 15 and 30 km. The seismograms obtained at the two sites are distinctly dissimilar in both amplitude and wave shape even though they are at roughly the same azimuth. We suppose that the earthquake excitation is identical for the two sites and that the differences in seismograms are caused by the receiver structure. The problem is idealized by assuming that the first 10 sec of each record can be modeled synthetically with a point shear dislocation embedded in a half-space with a two-layer upper-crustal model appropriate for each site. The results determined by matching the observations indicate that the durations for these events with M_L = 4 to 5 are about 0.3 to 0.6 sec. Furthermore, the results demonstrate that accurate estimate of source parameters can only be accomplished after a detailed appreciation of crustal structure

Some Major Structural Features of the Taconic Allochthon in the Hoosick Falls Area, New York - Vermont

Guidebook for field trips in New York, Massachusetts and Vermont: 61st annual meeting at the State University of New York at Albany, Albany, New York October 10, 11, 12, 1969: Trip 1

What Will it Take to Make Solar Panels Cool?

With the predicted results of climate change looming, humanity must do all it can to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Maintaining a habitable environment along with the high quality of living associated with developed nations requires investment in renewable energy. Because national governments often fail to make responsible decisions for their country\u27s future, this burden falls to institutions like UMass Amherst. Although costly investments like solar panels substantially improve the sustainability of campus, some innovative improvements of existing solar energy infrastructure can go a long way. For example, when solar panels heat up they lose photovoltaic efficiency. We propose that UMass institute cooling systems on current and future solar panel structures. This may sound extravagant, but in this paper we outline a plan for a simple and affordable cooling system that can be constructed from supplies bought at a local hardware store. The University spent approximately $1.5 million dollars on the new solar canopy atop the Robsham’s Visitor Center. This structure generates an estimated$40,000 worth of electricity each year, with a 38 year return on investment. We expect a cooling system for each canopy to cost around $500 and to improve power output by more than 10 percent. This means that by the most conservative estimate, a$500 investment will generate an additional $4,000 worth of electricity, reducing the return on investment time by 4 years. Compared with the initial solar canopy investment, this magnitude of electricity generation would have cost$150,000. By comparison, $500 is peanuts. Read on to see how a little ingenuity can go a long way to save money and the environment

ZeroFL: Efficient On-Device Training for Federated Learning with Local Sparsity

When the available hardware cannot meet the memory and compute requirements to efficiently train high performing machine learning models, a compromise in either the training quality or the model complexity is needed. In Federated Learning (FL), nodes are orders of magnitude more constrained than traditional server-grade hardware and are often battery powered, severely limiting the sophistication of models that can be trained under this paradigm. While most research has focused on designing better aggregation strategies to improve convergence rates and in alleviating the communication costs of FL, fewer efforts have been devoted to accelerating on-device training. Such stage, which repeats hundreds of times (i.e. every round) and can involve thousands of devices, accounts for the majority of the time required to train federated models and, the totality of the energy consumption at the client side. In this work, we present the first study on the unique aspects that arise when introducing sparsity at training time in FL workloads. We then propose ZeroFL, a framework that relies on highly sparse operations to accelerate on-device training. Models trained with ZeroFL and 95% sparsity achieve up to 2.3% higher accuracy compared to competitive baselines obtained from adapting a state-of-the-art sparse training framework to the FL setting.Comment: Published as a conference paper at ICLR 202

Altered regulation of metabolic pathways in human lung cancer discerned by 13C stable isotope-resolved metabolomics (SIRM)

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Metabolic perturbations arising from malignant transformation have not been systematically characterized in human lung cancers <it>in situ</it>. Stable isotope resolved metabolomic analysis (SIRM) enables functional analysis of gene dysregulations in lung cancer. To this purpose, metabolic changes were investigated by infusing uniformly labeled ¹³C-glucose into human lung cancer patients, followed by resection and processing of paired non-cancerous lung and non small cell carcinoma tissues. NMR and GC-MS were used for ¹³C-isotopomer-based metabolomic analysis of the extracts of tissues and blood plasma.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Many primary metabolites were consistently found at higher levels in lung cancer tissues than their surrounding non-cancerous tissues. ¹³C-enrichment in lactate, Ala, succinate, Glu, Asp, and citrate was also higher in the tumors, suggesting more active glycolysis and Krebs cycle in the tumor tissues. Particularly notable were the enhanced production of the Asp isotopomer with three ¹³C-labeled carbons and the buildup of ¹³C-2,3-Glu isotopomer in lung tumor tissues. This is consistent with the transformations of glucose into Asp or Glu via glycolysis, anaplerotic pyruvate carboxylation (PC), and the Krebs cycle. PC activation in tumor tissues was also shown by an increased level of pyruvate carboxylase mRNA and protein.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>PC activation – revealed here for the first time in human subjects – may be important for replenishing the Krebs cycle intermediates which can be diverted to lipid, protein, and nucleic acid biosynthesis to fulfill the high anabolic demands for growth in lung tumor tissues. We hypothesize that this is an important event in non-small cell lung cancer and possibly in other tumor development.</p

Pharmacologic Atrial Natriuretic Peptide Reduces Human Leg Capillary Filtration

Atrial natriuretic peptide (ANP) is produced and secreted by atrial cells. We measured calf capillary filtration rate with prolonged venous-occlusion plethys-mography of supine health male subjects during pharmacologic infusion of ANP (48 pmol/kg/min for 15 min; n equals 6) and during placebo infusion (n equals 7). Results during infusions were compared to prior control measurements. ANP infusion increased plasma (ANP) from 30 plus or minus 4 to 2,568 plus or minus 595 pmol/L. Systemic hemoconcentration occurred during ANP infusion; mean hematocrit and plasma colloid osmotic pressure increased 4.6 and 11.3 percent respectively, relative to pre-infusion baseline values (p is less than 0.05). Mean calf filtration, however was significantly reduced from 0.15 to 0.08 ml/100 ml/min with ANP. Heart rate increased 20 percent with ANP infusion, wheras blood pressure was unchanged. Calf conductance (blood flow/arterial pressure) and venous compliance were unaffected by ANP infusion. Placebo infusion had no effect relative to prior baseline control measurements. Although ANP induced systemic capillary filtration, in the calf, filtration was reduced with ANP. Therefore, phamacologic ANP infusion enhances capillary filtration from the systemic circulation, perhaps at upper body or splanchic sites or both, while having the opposite effect in the leg

The Ultraviolet-to-Mid-Infrared Spectral Energy Distribution of Weak Emission Line Quasars

We present Spitzer Space Telescope photometry of 18 Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) quasars at 2.7 <= z <= 5.9 which have weak or undetectable high-ionization emission lines in their rest-frame ultraviolet (UV) spectra (hereafter weak-lined quasars, or WLQs). The Spitzer data are combined with SDSS spectra and ground-based, near-infrared (IR) photometry of these sources to produce a large inventory of spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of WLQs across the rest-frame ~0.1-5 mum spectral band. The SEDs of our sources are inconsistent with those of BL Lacertae objects which are dominated by synchrotron emission due to a jet aligned close to our line-of-sight, but are consistent with the SED of ordinary quasars with similar luminosities and redshifts that exhibit a near-to-mid-IR 'bump', characteristic of hot dust emission. This indicates that broad emission lines in WLQs are intrinsically weak, rather than suffering continuum dilution from a jet, and that such sources cannot be selected efficiently from traditional photometric surveys.Comment: 10 pages (emulateapj), 4 figures. Accepted for publication in Ap