Attitudes Towards Sports Concussion in Australian Exercise Science Students. Does the Type and Level of Participation in Sport Matter?

International Journal of Exercise Science 11(5): 739-753, 2018. Concussion in sport is a growing public health issue. However, research suggests that under-reporting of concussion by student-athlete cohorts reflects conflicting attitudes compared to the wider community. Interestingly, previous studies have focused on the attitudes and beliefs irrespective of the type or level of sport played at. This study explored concussion beliefs and attitudes in a cohort of Australian exercise science students, analyzing responses based upon the type and the level of sport participated. Two-hundred and ninety-four students (m = 208; f = 86; age 22 ± 5.2 years) responded to a series of statements regarding their personal attitudes and beliefs towards concussion, risk playing with a concussion, and their views on elite/professional athletes who continue to play after a concussion. Data was compared between the type of sport played (team and individual, contact and non-contact) and the level of sport played at (elite, regional and recreational). Significant differences were reported in those experiencing a concussion, and the number of concussions sustained between different types of sports. Specifically, significant differences in attitudes between team-contact versus individual non-contact sports were found. Similarly, significant differences in attitudes were observed between team contact and individual non-contact sports. Conversely, similar attitudes were found between team contact, team non-contact and individual contact. Irrespective of the level of competition, no differences were found in previous concussion history and the number of concussions, reflecting similar attitudes. The data from this study suggests that concussion awareness programs should be delivered across all sports and to all levels

THE EFFECT OF INSPIRED OXYGEN CONCENTRATION ON INTRAPULMONARY RIGHT-TO-LEFT SHUNT DURING POSTOPERATIVE MECHANICAL VENTILATION

A consecutive series of patients undergoing cardiac surgery for valve replacement was divided into two groups. The first underwent postoperative artificial ventilation using the oxygen-driven Bird ventilator. The inspiratory oxygen concentration was 83%. In the second group a Bird ventilator was also used but with an oxygen concentration of 40%. In the first group the intrapulmonary right-to-left shunt rose to an average of 17% during the first two postoperative daysand in the second group to an average of 9%. The study supports the view that the inspiratory oxygen concentration should only be kept high enough to achieve a normal oxygen saturation of arterial bloo

A Realism Metric for Generated LiDAR Point Clouds

A considerable amount of research is concerned with the generation of realistic sensor data. LiDAR point clouds are generated by complex simulations or learned generative models. The generated data is usually exploited to enable or improve downstream perception algorithms. Two major questions arise from these procedures: First, how to evaluate the realism of the generated data? Second, does more realistic data also lead to better perception performance? This paper addresses both questions and presents a novel metric to quantify the realism of LiDAR point clouds. Relevant features are learned from real-world and synthetic point clouds by training on a proxy classification task. In a series of experiments, we demonstrate the application of our metric to determine the realism of generated LiDAR data and compare the realism estimation of our metric to the performance of a segmentation model. We confirm that our metric provides an indication for the downstream segmentation performance