Endomyocardial Biopsy of Right Atrial Angiosarcoma Guided by Intracardiac Echocardiography

We report a case of a 22-year-old female who presented with pericardial effusion and cardiac tamponade. She was diagnosed with a right atrial mass by computed tomography and was referred to our institution for biopsy of this mass. Transcatheter biopsy was performed with intracardiac echocardiography (ICE) guidance, avoiding the need for transesophageal echocardiography or surgery to obtain the biopsy. ICE for transcatheter biopsy of an intracardiac mass is an attractive modality which provides precise localization of the cardiac structures

On the edge of a new frontier: Is gerontological social work in the UK ready to meet twenty-first-century challenges?

This article is available open access through the publisher’s website. Copyright @ 2013 The Authors.This article explores the readiness of gerontological social work in the UK for meeting the challenges of an ageing society by investigating the focus on work with older people in social work education and the scope of gerontological social work research. The discussion draws on findings from two exploratory studies: a survey of qualifying master's programmes in England and a survey of the content relating to older people over a six-year period in four leading UK social work journals. The evidence from master's programmes suggests widespread neglect of ageing in teaching content and practice learning. Social work journals present a more nuanced picture. Older people emerge within coverage of generic policy issues for adults, such as personalisation and safeguarding, and there is good evidence of the complexity of need in late life. However, there is little attention to effective social work interventions, with an increasingly diverse older population, or to the quality of gerontological social work education. The case is made for infusing content on older people throughout the social work curriculum, for extending practice learning opportunities in social work with older people and for increasing the volume and reporting of gerontological social work research.Brunel Institute for Ageing Studie

Microwave Electronics

Contains reports on three research projects.U.S Navy (Office of Naval Research) under Contract Nonr-1841(49)U.S. Air Force under Air Force Contract AF19(604)-5200Lincoln Laboratory, Purchase Order DDL-B22

The Case for Learned Index Structures

Indexes are models: a B-Tree-Index can be seen as a model to map a key to the position of a record within a sorted array, a Hash-Index as a model to map a key to a position of a record within an unsorted array, and a BitMap-Index as a model to indicate if a data record exists or not. In this exploratory research paper, we start from this premise and posit that all existing index structures can be replaced with other types of models, including deep-learning models, which we term learned indexes. The key idea is that a model can learn the sort order or structure of lookup keys and use this signal to effectively predict the position or existence of records. We theoretically analyze under which conditions learned indexes outperform traditional index structures and describe the main challenges in designing learned index structures. Our initial results show, that by using neural nets we are able to outperform cache-optimized B-Trees by up to 70% in speed while saving an order-of-magnitude in memory over several real-world data sets. More importantly though, we believe that the idea of replacing core components of a data management system through learned models has far reaching implications for future systems designs and that this work just provides a glimpse of what might be possible

Microwave Electronics

Contains research objectives and reports on three research projects.Department of the ArmyDepartment of the NavyDepartment of the Air Force under Contract AF19(122)-458U. S. Navy (Office of Naval Research) under Contract Nonr-1841(49)Lincoln Laboratory, Purchase Order DDL-B22

An ellipsoidal mirror for focusing neutral atomic and molecular beams

Manipulation of atomic and molecular beams is essential to atom optics applications including atom lasers, atom lithography, atom interferometry and neutral atom microscopy. The manipulation of charge-neutral beams of limited polarizability, spin or excitation states remains problematic, but may be overcome by the development of novel diffractive or reflective optical elements. In this paper, we present the first experimental demonstration of atom focusing using an ellipsoidal mirror. The ellipsoidal mirror enables stigmatic off-axis focusing for the first time and we demonstrate focusing of a beam of neutral, ground-state helium atoms down to an approximately circular spot, (26.8±0.5) μm×(31.4±0.8) μm in size. The spot area is two orders of magnitude smaller than previous reflective focusing of atomic beams and is a critical milestone towards the construction of a high-intensity scanning helium microscope

An ellipsoidal mirror for focusing neutral atomic and molecular beams

Manipulation of atomic and molecular beams is essential to atom optics applications including atom lasers, atom lithography, atom interferometry and neutral atom microscopy. The manipulation of charge-neutral beams of limited polarizability, spin or excitation states remains problematic, but may be overcome by the development of novel diffractive or reflective optical elements. In this paper, we present the first experimental demonstration of atom focusing using an ellipsoidal mirror. The ellipsoidal mirror enables stigmatic off-axis focusing for the first time and we demonstrate focusing of a beam of neutral, ground-state helium atoms down to an approximately circular spot, (26.8±0.5) μm×(31.4±0.8) μm in size. The spot area is two orders of magnitude smaller than previous reflective focusing of atomic beams and is a critical milestone towards the construction of a high-intensity scanning helium microscope

Force-Free Models of Magnetically Linked Star-Disk Systems

Disk accretion onto a magnetized star occurs in a variety of astrophysical contexts, from young stars to X-ray pulsars. The magnetohydrodynamic interaction between the stellar field and the accreting matter can have a strong effect on the disk structure, the transfer of mass and angular momentum between the disk and the star, and the production of bipolar outflows, e.g., plasma jets. We study a key element of this interaction - the time evolution of the magnetic field configuration brought about by the relative rotation between the disk and the star - using simplified, largely semianalytic, models. We first discuss the rapid inflation and opening up of the magnetic field lines in the corona above the accretion disk, which is caused by the differential rotation twisting. Then we consider additional physical effects that tend to limit this expansion, such as the effect of plasma inertia and the possibility of reconnection in the disk's corona, the latter possibly leading to repeated cycles in the evolution. We also derive the condition for the existence of a steady state for a resistive disk and conclude that a steady state configuration is not realistically possible. Finally, we generalize our analysis of the opening of magnetic field lines by using a non-self-similar numerical model that applies to an arbitrarily rotating (e.g. keplerian) disk.Comment: 75 pages, 22 figures, 2 tables. Submitted to Astrophysical Journa