Development and Pilot of a Checklist for Management of Acute Liver Failure in the Intensive Care Unit

Introduction Acute liver failure (ALF) is an ideal condition for use of a checklist. Our aims were to develop a checklist for the management of ALF in the intensive care unit (ICU) and assess the usability of the checklist among multiple providers. Methods The initial checklist was developed from published guidelines and expert opinion. The checklist underwent pilot testing at 11 academic liver transplant centers in the US and Canada. An anonymous, written survey was used to assess the usability and quality of the checklist. Written comments were used to improve the checklist following the pilot testing period. Results We received 81 surveys involving the management of 116 patients during the pilot testing period. The overall quality of the checklist was judged to be above average to excellent by 94% of users. On a 5-point Likert scale, the majority of survey respondents agreed or agreed strongly with the following checklist characteristics: the checklist was easy to read (99% agreed/agreed strongly), easy to use (97%), items are categorized logically (98%), time to complete the checklist did not interfere with delivery of appropriate and safe patient care (94%) and was not excessively burdensome (92%), the checklist allowed the user the freedom to use his or her clinical judgment (80%), it is a useful tool in the management of acute liver failure (98%). Web-based and mobile apps were developed for use of the checklist at the point of care. Conclusion The checklist for the management of ALF in the ICU was shown in this pilot study to be easy to use, helpful and accepted by a wide variety of practitioners at multiple sites in the US and Canada

Towards bounded wait-free PASIS

The PASIS read/write protocol implements a Byzantine fault-tolerant erasure-coded atomic register. The prototype PASIS storage system implementation provides excellent best-case performance. Writes require two round trips and contention- and failure-free reads require one. Unfortunately, even though writes and reads are wait-free in PASIS, Byzantine components can induce correct clients to perform an unbounded amount of work. In this extended abstract, we enumerate the avenues by which Byzantine servers and clients can induce correct clients to perform an unbounded amount of work in PASIS. We sketch extensions to the PASIS protocol and Lazy Verification that bound the amount of work Byzantine components can induce correct clients to perform. We believe that the extensions provide bounded wait-free reads and writes. We also believe that an implementation that incorporates these extensions will preserve the excellent best-case performance of the original PASIS prototype

Decentralizing UNIX abstractions in the exokernel architecture

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1997.Includes bibliographical references (p. 49-51).by Héctor Manuel Briceño Pulido.M.Eng

Attribute-Based Prediction of File Properties

We present evidence that attributes that are known to the file system when a file is created, such as its name, permission mode, and owner, are often strongly related to future properties of the file such as its ultimate size, lifespan, and access pattern. More importantly, we show that we can exploit these relationships to automatically generate predictive models for these properties, and that these predictions are sufficiently accurate to enable optimizations.Engineering and Applied Science