The relationship between students’ engagement and the development of Transactive Memory Systems in MUVE: An experience report

Student engagement is a very important topic in higher education hence, it drew a lot of research interest over the years. The use of educational Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) that provide synchronous interaction, dynamic, interactive and social learning experiences have the potential to increase student engagement and contribute to their learning experience. Due to increased social and cognitive presence, the use of such environments can result in greater student engagement when compared to traditional asynchronous learning environments. In this work, we hypothesized that students’ engagement in collaborative learning activities will increase if Transactive Memory System (TMS) constructs are present. Thus, we employed the theory of TMS that emphasizes the importance of Specialization, Coordination and Credibility between members in a team. The results show that there is a significant correlation between the development of TMS and students’ engagement. In addition, further quantitative and observation analysis reveals some interesting facts about students’ engagement with respect to their collaboration in group activities

Ultrasound Asymptomatic Carotid Plaque Image Analysis for the Prediction of the Risk of Stroke

High-resolution vascular B-mode and Doppler ultrasound provide information not only on the degree of carotid artery stenosis but also on the characteristics of the arterial wall including the size and consistency of atherosclerotic plaques [1]. Carotid stenosis alone has limitations in predicting risk and does not show plaque vulnerability and instability, thus other ultrasonographic plaque morphologic characteristics have been studied for better prediction of the risk stroke. Plaque echogenicity as assessed by B-mode ultrasound has been found to reliably predict the content of soft tissue and the amount of calcification in carotid plaques. Additionally, it has been reported that subjects with echolucent atherosclerotic plaques have increased risk of ischemic cerebrovascular events [2]. More recent studies by Nicolaides et al. [3] Topakian et al. [4] and Kyriacou et al. [5], showed that plaque echolucency and plaque morphology can be used to predict stroke. Other studies have reported that plaques that are more echolucent and heterogeneous are often associated with higher cerebrovascular risk and the development of ipsilateral neurological symptoms [3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]. In contrast, homogeneous hypoechoic and hyperechoic plaques without evidence of ulceration usually remain asymptomatic