Design-thinking, making, and innovating: Fresh tools for the physician\u27s toolbox

Medical school education should foster creativity by enabling students to become \u27makers\u27 who prototype and design. Healthcare professionals and students experience pain points on a daily basis, but are not given the tools, training, or opportunity to help solve them in new, potentially better ways. The student physician of the future will learn these skills through collaborative workshops and having dedicated \u27innovation time.\u27 This pre-clinical curriculum would incorporate skills centered on (1) Digital Technology and Small Electronics (DTSE), (2) Textiles and Medical Materials (TMM), and (3) Rapid Prototyping Technologies (RPT). Complemented by an on-campus makerspace, students will be able to prototype and iterate on their ideas in a fun and accessible space. Designing and making among and between patients and healthcare professionals would change the current dynamic of medical education, empowering students to solve problems in healthcare even at an early stage in their career. By doing so, they will gain empathy, problem-solving abilities, and communication skills that will extend into clinical practice. Our proposed curriculum will equip medical students with the skills, passion, and curiosity to impact the future of healthcare

Behavioral Phenotyping of Juvenile Long-Evans and Sprague-Dawley Rats: Implications for Preclinical Models of Autism Spectrum Disorders.

The laboratory rat is emerging as an attractive preclinical animal model of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), allowing investigators to explore genetic, environmental and pharmacological manipulations in a species exhibiting complex, reciprocal social behavior. The present study was carried out to compare two commonly used strains of laboratory rats, Sprague-Dawley (SD) and Long-Evans (LE), between the ages of postnatal day (PND) 26-56 using high-throughput behavioral phenotyping tools commonly used in mouse models of ASD that we have adapted for use in rats. We detected few differences between young SD and LE strains on standard assays of exploration, sensorimotor gating, anxiety, repetitive behaviors, and learning. Both SD and LE strains also demonstrated sociability in the 3-chamber social approach test as indexed by spending more time in the social chamber with a constrained age/strain/sex matched novel partner than in an identical chamber without a partner. Pronounced differences between the two strains were, however, detected when the rats were allowed to freely interact with a novel partner in the social dyad paradigm. The SD rats in this particular testing paradigm engaged in play more frequently and for longer durations than the LE rats at both juvenile and young adult developmental time points. Results from this study that are particularly relevant for developing preclinical ASD models in rats are threefold: (i) commonly utilized strains exhibit unique patterns of social interactions, including strain-specific play behaviors, (ii) the testing environment may profoundly influence the expression of strain-specific social behavior and (iii) simple, automated measures of sociability may not capture the complexities of rat social interactions

Rabi oscillations of a qubit coupled to a two-level system

The problem of Rabi oscillations in a qubit coupled to a fluctuator and in contact with a heath bath is considered. A scheme is developed for taking into account both phase and energy relaxation in a phenomenological way, while taking full account of the quantum dynamics of the four-level system subject to a driving AC field. Significant suppression of the Rabi oscillations is found when the qubit and fluctuator are close to resonance. The effect of the fluctuator state on the read-out signal is discussed. This effect is shown to modify the observed signal significantly. This may be relevant to recent experiments by Simmonds et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 077003 (2004)].Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Association between actigraphy-derived physical activity and cognitive performance in patients with schizophrenia

An association between low levels of physical activity and impaired cognitive performance in schizophrenia has been proposed, but most studies have relied on self-report measures of activity. This study examined the association between actigraphy-derived physical activity and cognitive performance adjusting for multiple covariates in patients with schizophrenia. Patients with schizophrenia (n = 199) were recruited from chronic psychiatric wards, and 60 age-, sex- and body mass index-matched comparison participants were recruited from the staff of two hospitals and universities. Physical activity was assessed objectively for 7 days using an ActiGraph. Cognitive performance was assessed with the Cognitrone test from the Vienna Test System and the Grooved Pegboard Test. Demographic variables, metabolic parameters, positive and negative symptoms, duration of illness and hospitalization, and medication use were included as covariates. Pearson correlations and multivariable linear regressions were conducted to examine the associations between physical activity levels and cognitive performance. Patients with schizophrenia were less physically active and had poorer performance on attention/concentration and speed of processing than the comparison group. Patients with schizophrenia who spent more time in light physical activity showed better performance on attention/concentration (β = 0.198, p = 0.020) and speed of processing (β= −0.169, p = 0.048) tasks than those who were less active. Cognitive performance was also associated with moderate-vigorous physical activity, but the effect was no longer significant once light physical activity had been taken into account. This study provides evidence for a positive association between objectively measured light physical activity and cognitive performance in people with schizophrenia, after adjustment for multiple confounders