Documenting Nursing and Medical Students’ Stereotypes about Hispanic and American Indian Patients

Objective: Hispanic Americans and American Indians face significant health disparities compared with White Americans. Research suggests that stereotyping of minority patients by members of the medical community is an important antecedent of race and ethnicity-based health disparities. This work has primarily focused on physicians’ perceptions, however, and little research has examined the stereotypes healthcare personnel associate with Hispanic and American Indian patients. The present study assesses: 1) the health-related stereotypes both nursing and medical students hold about Hispanic and American Indian patients, and 2) nursing and medical students’ motivation to treat Hispanic and American Indian patients in an unbiased manner. Design: Participants completed a questionnaire assessing their awareness of stereotypes that healthcare professionals associate with Hispanic and American Indian patients then completed measures of their motivation to treat Hispanics and American Indians in an unbiased manner. Results: Despite being highly motivated to treat Hispanic and American Indian individuals fairly, the majority of participants reported awareness of stereotypes associating these patient groups with noncompliance, risky health behavior, and difficulty understanding and/or communicating health-related information. Conclusion: This research provides direct evidence for negative health-related stereotypes associated with two understudied minority patient groups—Hispanics and American Indians—among both nursing and medical personnel

Functional MRI of Rehabilitation in Chronic Stroke Patients Using Novel MR-Compatible Hand Robots

We monitored brain activation after chronic stroke by combining functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with a novel MR-compatible, hand-induced, robotic device (MR_CHIROD). We evaluated 60 fMRI datasets on a 3 T MR system from five right-handed patients with left-sided stroke ≥6 months prior and mild to moderate hemiparesis. Patients trained the paretic right hand at approximately 75% of maximum strength with an exercise ball for 1 hour/day, 3 days/week for 4 weeks. Multi-level fMRI data were acquired before, during training, upon completion of training, and after a non-training period using parallel imaging employing GeneRalized Autocalibrating Partially Parallel Acquisitions (GRAPPA) while the participant used the MR_CHIROD. Training increased the number of activated sensorimotor cortical voxels, indicating functional cortical plasticity in chronic stroke patients. The effect persisted four weeks after training completion, indicating the potential of rehabilitation in inducing cortical plasticity in chronic stroke patients

Quantum Monte Carlo calculation of Compton profiles of solid lithium

Recent high resolution Compton scattering experiments in lithium have shown significant discrepancies with conventional band theoretical results. We present a pseudopotential quantum Monte Carlo study of electron-electron and electron-ion correlation effects on the momentum distribution of lithium. We compute the correlation correction to the valence Compton profiles obtained within Kohn-Sham density functional theory in the local density approximation and determine that electronic correlation does not account for the discrepancy with the experimental results. Our calculations lead do different conclusions than recent GW studies and indicate that other effects (thermal disorder, core-valence separation etc.) must be invoked to explain the discrepancy with experiments.Comment: submitted to Phys. Rev.

Talbot Oscillations and Periodic Focusing in a One-Dimensional Condensate

An exact theory for the density of a one-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensate with hard core particle interactions is developed in second quantization and applied to the scattering of the condensate by a spatially periodic impulse potential. The boson problem is mapped onto a system of free fermions obeying the Pauli exclusion principle to facilitate the calculation. The density exhibits a spatial focusing of the probability density as well as a periodic self-imaging in time, or Talbot effect. Furthermore, the transition from single particle to many body effects can be measured by observing the decay of the modulated condensate density pattern in time. The connection of these results to classical and atom optical phase gratings is made explicit

A Constrained Path Monte Carlo Method for Fermion Ground States

We describe and discuss a recently proposed quantum Monte Carlo algorithm to compute the ground-state properties of various systems of interacting fermions. In this method, the ground state is projected from an initial wave function by a branching random walk in an over-complete basis of Slater determinants. By constraining the determinants according to a trial wave function $|\psi_T\rangle$, we remove the exponential decay of signal-to-noise ratio characteristic of the sign problem. The method is variational and is exact if $|\psi_T\rangle$ is exact. We illustrate the method by describing in detail its implementation for the two-dimensional one-band Hubbard model. We show results for lattice sizes up to $16\times 16$ and for various electron fillings and interaction strengths. Besides highly accurate estimates of the ground-state energy, we find that the method also yields reliable estimates of other ground-state observables, such as superconducting pairing correlation functions. We conclude by discussing possible extensions of the algorithm.Comment: 29 pages, RevTex, 3 figures included; submitted to Phys. Rev.

Lithium atom interferometer using laser diffraction : description and experiments

We have built and operated an atom interferometer of the Mach-Zehnder type. The atomic wave is a supersonic beam of lithium seeded in argon and the mirrors and beam-splitters for the atomic wave are based on elastic Bragg diffraction on laser standing waves at 671 nm. We give here a detailed description of our experimental setup and of the procedures used to align its components. We then present experimental signals, exhibiting atomic interference effects with a very high visibility, up to 84.5 %. We describe a series of experiments testing the sensitivity of the fringe visibility to the main alignment defects and to the magnetic field gradient.Comment: 8 avril 200

Functional MRI of Rehabilitation in Chronic Stroke Patients Using Novel MR-Compatible Hand Robots

We monitored brain activation after chronic stroke by combining functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with a novel MR-compatible, hand-induced, robotic device (MR_CHIROD). We evaluated 60 fMRI datasets on a 3 T MR system from five right-handed patients with left-sided stroke ≥6 months prior and mild to moderate hemiparesis. Patients trained the paretic right hand at approximately 75% of maximum strength with an exercise ball for 1 hour/day, 3 days/week for 4 weeks. Multi-level fMRI data were acquired before, during training, upon completion of training, and after a non-training period using parallel imaging employing GeneRalized Autocalibrating Partially Parallel Acquisitions (GRAPPA) while the participant used the MR_CHIROD. Training increased the number of activated sensorimotor cortical voxels, indicating functional cortical plasticity in chronic stroke patients. The effect persisted four weeks after training completion, indicating the potential of rehabilitation in inducing cortical plasticity in chronic stroke patients

Noncovalent Interactions by QMC: Speedup by One-Particle Basis-Set Size Reduction

While it is empirically accepted that the fixed-node diffusion Monte-Carlo (FN-DMC) depends only weakly on the size of the one-particle basis sets used to expand its guiding functions, limits of this observation are not settled yet. Our recent work indicates that under the FN error cancellation conditions, augmented triple zeta basis sets are sufficient to achieve a benchmark level of 0.1 kcal/mol in a number of small noncovalent complexes. Here we report on a possibility of truncation of the one-particle basis sets used in FN-DMC guiding functions that has no visible effect on the accuracy of the production FN-DMC energy differences. The proposed scheme leads to no significant increase in the local energy variance, indicating that the total CPU cost of large-scale benchmark noncovalent interaction energy FN-DMC calculations may be reduced.Comment: ACS book chapter, accepte

Effect of Pulsed or Continuous Delivery of Salt on Sensory Perception Over Short Time Intervals

Salt in the human diet is a major risk factor for hypertension and many countries have set targets to reduce salt consumption. Technological solutions are being sought to lower the salt content of processed foods without altering their taste. In this study, the approach was to deliver salt solutions in pulses of different concentrations to determine whether a pulsed delivery profile affected sensory perception of salt. Nine different salt profiles were delivered by a Dynataste device and a trained panel assessed their saltiness using time–intensity and single-score sensory techniques. The profile duration (15 s) was designed to match eating conditions and the effects of intensity and duration of the pulses on sensory perception were investigated. Sensory results from the profiles delivered in either water or in a bouillon base were not statistically different. Maximum perceived salt intensities and the area under the time– intensity curves correlated well with the overall perceived saltiness intensity despite the stimulus being delivered as several pulses. The overall saltiness scores for profiles delivering the same overall amount of sodium were statistically not different from one another suggesting that, in this system, pulsed delivery did not enhance salt perception but the overall amount of salt delivered in each profile did affect sensory perception