Minecraft and Montessori: Connecting In-class and Remote Students During COVID-19 Restrictions

The purpose of this study was to find out whether playing Minecraft: Education Edition would help in-class and remote students make personal connections. This action research project took place in a Grade 3, 4 and 5 public Montessori school during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. Of the 23 students, 14 were present in the classroom, while nine others were transitional learners with separate online teachers. Students were asked to reflect on their interactions with other players through interviews, journals and surveys. Parents participated by completing a pre-and post-survey. Students reported an increase in friends and acquaintances matching quantitative data collected by the teacher. Remote learners did not make as many connections as in-class students, likely due to technical difficulties with software and scheduling differences. Implications around the game\u27s colonial mission, racial and gender bias as well as environmental sustainability, need further research

Prenatal diagnosis of proximal focal femoral deficiency: Literature review of prenatal sonographic findings

Proximal focal femoral deficiency (PFFD) is a rare musculoskeletal malformation that occurs in 0.11-0.2 per 10,000 live births. This congenital anomaly involves the pelvis and proximal femur with widely variable manifestations, from mild femoral shortening and hypoplasia to the absence of any functional femur and acetabular aplasia. Prenatal diagnosis of PFFD is still a challenge, but early recognition of this malformation could provide useful information to both parents and physicians concerning management and therapeutic planning. For this review, we analyzed all the cases of prenatally diagnosed PFFD that were reported in the literature from 1990 to 2014 and provide a description of the most common prenatal sonographic findings

Evaluation Of The University Of Calgary Cogeneration Plant

With greenhouse gas (GHG) intensity of electrical power in Alberta being among the highest in Canada, facilities are adopting cogeneration technology to achieve reductions in GHG emissions while also benefiting from decreased energy costs. In 2011 the University of Calgary (U of C) completed construction of a $48 million cogeneration plant to work in conjunction with the campus district energy system with expectations of cutting emissions and reducing energy costs. The objective of this evaluation is to provide a high level review of the operation of: cogeneration technology, the U of C cogeneration plant, and energy consumption on the U of C Campus. Data reviewed and analyzed is from a sample operating year from November 2012 to October 2013. This evaluation will identify potential opportunities for system optimization that offer economic or environmental benefits as well as provide a detailed understanding of performance achievements and shortfalls

Perception of quality of life for adults with hearing impairment in Aotearoa / New Zealand.

AIMS: This study investigated the perception of generic and disease-specific Health-Related Quality of Life (HRQoL) for adults living with hearing impairment (HI) in Aotearoa/New Zealand (NZ). This study aimed to answer three questions: (1) What is the perception of HRQoL amongst adults with hearing impairment in NZ? (2) How do these perceptions compare to adults with HI living in other countries for which we have data? (3) What are the demographic and audiometric variables related to device ownership? METHOD: HRQoL, demographic, and audiometric information was collected from 126 adults in NZ. The following demographic information was collected: age, relationship length, hours worked per week, income, ancestry, sex, level of education, city size, and sexual orientation. The following audiologic information was also collected: ownership of hearing aids (HA), ownership of hearing assistance technology (HAT), better-ear pure-tone average (BEPTA), worse-ear pure-tone average (WEPTA), and signal-to-noise ratio loss (SNR loss). HRQoL information was collected using the Medical Outcomes Study 36-Item Short-Form Health Survey (SF-36; Ware & Sherbourne, 1992), and the Hearing Handicap Inventory (HHI) for both elderly (HHIE) and adults (HHIA; Ventry & Weinstein, 1982; Newman, Weinstein, Jacobson, & Hug, 1991). Variables discriminating HA and HAT owners from non-owners were also analysed. RESULTS: The relationship between demographic variables and HRQoL scores revealed that only age and income were significant. Audiometric variables had significant relationships with disease-specific HRQoL scores, as well as HA and HAT ownership. Finally, disease-specific HRQoL scores and all audiometric variables differentiated HA owners from non- owners, but demographic variables did not. Generic HRQoL scores and all audiometric variables differentiated HAT owners from non-owners. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that the negative impacts of HI on HRQoL as reported overseas are also present in NZ, and that not only do audiometric variables including SNR loss are related to HRQoL, but HRQoL is a significant predictor for HA and HAT ownership. Further QoL research is warranted amongst the HI population in NZ to identify and understand any causal relationships present amongst these variables. Furthermore, HRQoL instruments and a test of speech understanding in noise have been shown to provide additional meaningful information, and therefore clinicians might consider including them during consultation

Adaptive spatial compounding for improving ultrasound images of the epidural space

Epidural anesthesia can be a difficult procedure, especially for inexperienced physicians. The use of ultrasound imaging can help by depicting the location of the epidural space to choose the needle trajectory appropriately. Anatomical features in the lower back are not always clearly visible because of speckle poor reflection from structures at certain angles, and shadows from bony surfaces. Spatial compounding has the potential to reduce speckle and emphasize structures by averaging a number of images taken at different isonation angles. However, the beam-steered images are not perfectly aligned due to non-constant speed of sound causing refraction errors. This means compounding can blur features. A non-rigid registration method, called warping, shifts each block of pixels of the beam-steered images in order to find the best alignment to the reference image without beam-steering. By applying warping, the features become sharper after compounding. To emphasize features further, edge detection is also applied to the individual images in order to select the best features for compounding. The warping and edge detection parameters are calculated in real-time for each acquired image. In order to reduce computational complexity, linear prediction of the warping vectors is used. The algorithm is tested on a phantom of the lower back with a linear probe. Qualitative comparisons are made among the original plus combinations of compounding, warping, edge detection and linear prediction. The linear gradient and Laplacian of a Gaussian are used to quantitatively assess the visibility of the bone boundaries and ligamentum flavum on the processed images. The results show a significant improvement in quality. Copyright 2007 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers. One print or electronic copy may be made for personal use only. Systematic reproduction and distribution, duplication of any material in this paper for a fee or for commercial purposes, or modification of the content of the paper are prohibited.Applied Science, Faculty ofElectrical and Computer Engineering, Department ofMechanical Engineering, Department ofReviewedFacult

The Kidneys Are Not All Normal: Investigating the Speckle Distributions of Transplanted Kidneys

Modelling ultrasound speckle has generated considerable interest for its ability to characterize tissue properties. As speckle is dependent on the underlying tissue architecture, modelling it may aid in tasks like segmentation or disease detection. However, for the transplanted kidney where ultrasound is commonly used to investigate dysfunction, it is currently unknown which statistical distribution best characterises such speckle. This is especially true for the regions of the transplanted kidney: the cortex, the medulla and the central echogenic complex. Furthermore, it is unclear how these distributions vary by patient variables such as age, sex, body mass index, primary disease, or donor type. These traits may influence speckle modelling given their influence on kidney anatomy. We are the first to investigate these two aims. N=821 kidney transplant recipient B-mode images were automatically segmented into the cortex, medulla, and central echogenic complex using a neural network. Seven distinct probability distributions were fitted to each region. The Rayleigh and Nakagami distributions had model parameters that differed significantly between the three regions (p <= 0.05). While both had excellent goodness of fit, the Nakagami had higher Kullbeck-Leibler divergence. Recipient age correlated weakly with scale in the cortex (Omega: rho = 0.11, p = 0.004), while body mass index correlated weakly with shape in the medulla (m: rho = 0.08, p = 0.04). Neither sex, primary disease, nor donor type demonstrated any correlation. We propose the Nakagami distribution be used to characterize transplanted kidneys regionally independent of disease etiology and most patient characteristics based on our findings.Comment: 25 pages, 2 figures, 3 table

The Open Kidney Ultrasound Data Set

Ultrasound use is because of its low cost, non-ionizing, and non-invasive characteristics, and has established itself as a cornerstone radiological examination. Research on ultrasound applications has also expanded, especially with image analysis with machine learning. However, ultrasound data are frequently restricted to closed data sets, with only a few openly available. Despite being a frequently examined organ, the kidney lacks a publicly available ultrasonography data set. The proposed Open Kidney Ultrasound Data Set is the first publicly available set of kidney B-mode ultrasound data that includes annotations for multi-class semantic segmentation. It is based on data retrospectively collected in a 5-year period from over 500 patients with a mean age of 53.2 +/- 14.7 years, body mass index of 27.0 +/- 5.4 kg/m2, and most common primary diseases being diabetes mellitus, IgA nephropathy, and hypertension. There are labels for the view and fine-grained manual annotations from two expert sonographers. Notably, this data includes native and transplanted kidneys. Initial benchmarking measurements are performed, demonstrating a state-of-the-art algorithm achieving a Dice Sorenson Coefficient of 0.74 for the kidney capsule. This data set is a high-quality data set, including two sets of expert annotations, with a larger breadth of images than previously available. In increasing access to kidney ultrasound data, future researchers may be able to create novel image analysis techniques for tissue characterization, disease detection, and prognostication.Comment: 18 pages, 5 table

Adaptive spatial compounding for improving ultrasound images of the epidural space on human subjects

Administering epidural anesthesia can be a difficult procedure, especially for inexperienced physicians. The use of ultrasound imaging can help by showing the location of the key surrounding structures: the ligamentum flavum and the lamina of the vertebrae. The anatomical depiction of the interface between ligamentum flavum and epidural space is currently limited by speckle and anisotropic reflection. Previous work on phantoms showed that adaptive spatial compounding with non-rigid registration can improve the depiction of these features. This paper describes the development of an updated compounding algorithm and results from a clinical study. Average-based compounding may obscure anisotropic reflectors that only appear at certain beam angles, so a new median-based compounding technique is developed. In order to reduce the computational cost of the registration process, a linear prediction algorithm is used to reduce the search space for registration. The algorithms are tested on 20 human subjects. Comparisons are made among the reference image plus combinations of different compounding methods, warping and linear prediction. The gradient of the bone surfaces, the Laplacian of the ligamentum flavum, and the SNR and CNR are used to quantitatively assess the visibility of the features in the processed images. The results show a significant improvement in quality when median-based compounding with warping is used to align the set of beam-steered images and combine them. The improvement of the features makes detection of the epidural space easier. Copyright 2008 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers. One print or electronic copy may be made for personal use only. Systematic reproduction and distribution, duplication of any material in this paper for a fee or for commercial purposes, or modification of the content of the paper are prohibited.Applied Science, Faculty ofElectrical and Computer Engineering, Department ofMechanical Engineering, Department ofReviewedFacult