An Interactive Game with Virtual Reality Immersion to Improve Cultural Sensitivity in Healthcare

Purpose: Biased perceptions of individuals who are not part of one’s in-groups tend to be negative and habitual. Because health care professionals are no less susceptible to biases than are others, the adverse impact of biases on marginalized populations in health care warrants continued attention and amelioration. Method: Two characters, a Syrian refugee with limited English proficiency and a black pregnant woman with a history of opioid use disorder, were developed for an online training simulation that includes an interactive life course experience focused on social determinants of health, and a clinical encounter in a community health center utilizing virtual reality immersion. Pre- and post-survey data were obtained from 158 health professionals who completed the simulation. Results: Post-simulation data indicated increased feelings of compassion toward the patient and decreased expectations about how difficult future encounters with the patient would be. With respect to attribution, after the simulation participants were less inclined to view the patient as primarily responsible for their situation, suggesting less impact of the fundamental attribution error. Conclusion: This training simulation aimed to utilize components of evidence-based prejudice habit breaking interventions, such as learning more about an individual’s life experience to help minimize filling in gaps with stereotyped assumptions. Although training simulations cannot fully replicate or replace the advantages that come with real-world experience, they can heighten awareness in the increase of increasing the cultural sensitivity of clinicians in health care professions for improving health equity

Resolving catastrophic error bursts from cosmic rays in large arrays of superconducting qubits

Scalable quantum computing can become a reality with error correction, provided coherent qubits can be constructed in large arrays. The key premise is that physical errors can remain both small and sufficiently uncorrelated as devices scale, so that logical error rates can be exponentially suppressed. However, energetic impacts from cosmic rays and latent radioactivity violate both of these assumptions. An impinging particle ionizes the substrate, radiating high energy phonons that induce a burst of quasiparticles, destroying qubit coherence throughout the device. High-energy radiation has been identified as a source of error in pilot superconducting quantum devices, but lacking a measurement technique able to resolve a single event in detail, the effect on large scale algorithms and error correction in particular remains an open question. Elucidating the physics involved requires operating large numbers of qubits at the same rapid timescales as in error correction, exposing the event's evolution in time and spread in space. Here, we directly observe high-energy rays impacting a large-scale quantum processor. We introduce a rapid space and time-multiplexed measurement method and identify large bursts of quasiparticles that simultaneously and severely limit the energy coherence of all qubits, causing chip-wide failure. We track the events from their initial localised impact to high error rates across the chip. Our results provide direct insights into the scale and dynamics of these damaging error bursts in large-scale devices, and highlight the necessity of mitigation to enable quantum computing to scale

Overcoming leakage in scalable quantum error correction

Leakage of quantum information out of computational states into higher energy states represents a major challenge in the pursuit of quantum error correction (QEC). In a QEC circuit, leakage builds over time and spreads through multi-qubit interactions. This leads to correlated errors that degrade the exponential suppression of logical error with scale, challenging the feasibility of QEC as a path towards fault-tolerant quantum computation. Here, we demonstrate the execution of a distance-3 surface code and distance-21 bit-flip code on a Sycamore quantum processor where leakage is removed from all qubits in each cycle. This shortens the lifetime of leakage and curtails its ability to spread and induce correlated errors. We report a ten-fold reduction in steady-state leakage population on the data qubits encoding the logical state and an average leakage population of less than $1 \times 10^{-3}$ throughout the entire device. The leakage removal process itself efficiently returns leakage population back to the computational basis, and adding it to a code circuit prevents leakage from inducing correlated error across cycles, restoring a fundamental assumption of QEC. With this demonstration that leakage can be contained, we resolve a key challenge for practical QEC at scale.Comment: Main text: 7 pages, 5 figure

Suppressing quantum errors by scaling a surface code logical qubit

Practical quantum computing will require error rates that are well below what is achievable with physical qubits. Quantum error correction offers a path to algorithmically-relevant error rates by encoding logical qubits within many physical qubits, where increasing the number of physical qubits enhances protection against physical errors. However, introducing more qubits also increases the number of error sources, so the density of errors must be sufficiently low in order for logical performance to improve with increasing code size. Here, we report the measurement of logical qubit performance scaling across multiple code sizes, and demonstrate that our system of superconducting qubits has sufficient performance to overcome the additional errors from increasing qubit number. We find our distance-5 surface code logical qubit modestly outperforms an ensemble of distance-3 logical qubits on average, both in terms of logical error probability over 25 cycles and logical error per cycle ($2.914\%\pm 0.016\%$ compared to $3.028\%\pm 0.023\%$). To investigate damaging, low-probability error sources, we run a distance-25 repetition code and observe a $1.7\times10^{-6}$ logical error per round floor set by a single high-energy event ($1.6\times10^{-7}$ when excluding this event). We are able to accurately model our experiment, and from this model we can extract error budgets that highlight the biggest challenges for future systems. These results mark the first experimental demonstration where quantum error correction begins to improve performance with increasing qubit number, illuminating the path to reaching the logical error rates required for computation.Comment: Main text: 6 pages, 4 figures. v2: Update author list, references, Fig. S12, Table I

Non-Abelian braiding of graph vertices in a superconducting processor

Indistinguishability of particles is a fundamental principle of quantum mechanics. For all elementary and quasiparticles observed to date - including fermions, bosons, and Abelian anyons - this principle guarantees that the braiding of identical particles leaves the system unchanged. However, in two spatial dimensions, an intriguing possibility exists: braiding of non-Abelian anyons causes rotations in a space of topologically degenerate wavefunctions. Hence, it can change the observables of the system without violating the principle of indistinguishability. Despite the well developed mathematical description of non-Abelian anyons and numerous theoretical proposals, the experimental observation of their exchange statistics has remained elusive for decades. Controllable many-body quantum states generated on quantum processors offer another path for exploring these fundamental phenomena. While efforts on conventional solid-state platforms typically involve Hamiltonian dynamics of quasi-particles, superconducting quantum processors allow for directly manipulating the many-body wavefunction via unitary gates. Building on predictions that stabilizer codes can host projective non-Abelian Ising anyons, we implement a generalized stabilizer code and unitary protocol to create and braid them. This allows us to experimentally verify the fusion rules of the anyons and braid them to realize their statistics. We then study the prospect of employing the anyons for quantum computation and utilize braiding to create an entangled state of anyons encoding three logical qubits. Our work provides new insights about non-Abelian braiding and - through the future inclusion of error correction to achieve topological protection - could open a path toward fault-tolerant quantum computing

The Culture of Gun Violence: An Active Learning Exercise

Abstract Introduction: Effectively addressing and preventing gun violence requires multidisciplinary collaboration between public health and health care providers. Community-level violence prevention cannot be the exclusive responsibility of public health; health care providers have the opportunity to intervene at the point of care, when injury is most acute and the victim or family members may be most at risk of further violence or may be motivated to break the cycle of violence. This active learning exercise utilizes a case discussion about a patient who presents to the Emergency Department with a gunshot wound. Methods: This case study involving a gunshot wound is presented in a PowerPoint presentation. The session typically lasts 60 minutes, with 15-20 minutes devoted to student discussion. Open-ended questions prompt students to think about the personal, social, cultural, and environmental factors that may have contributed to this patient\u27s situation. The exercise then discusses the culture of violence that leads to so many injuries and the role physicians and other health care providers can play in the prevention of gun violence. Results: This resource has been used twice in a psychopathology course for second-year medical students. The mean student evaluation score for this module was 4.44/5.00 in the first year and 4.06/5.00 for the second year. Discussion: Students are highly engaged with this exercise, and seemed surprised to think about how physicians can be involved with efforts to prevent gun violence. After the session, several students have approached the instructors, asking how they can get involved in local initiatives to reduce gun violence. The students are also surprised to learn the patient is Caucasian, which challenges the stereotypes they have about young men who perpetrate urban gun violence. This situation allows for the course instructor to emphasize the need for caution in forming assumptions about patients

The Culture of Gun Violence: An Active Learning Exercise

Abstract Introduction: Effectively addressing and preventing gun violence requires multidisciplinary collaboration between public health and health care providers. Community-level violence prevention cannot be the exclusive responsibility of public health; health care providers have the opportunity to intervene at the point of care, when injury is most acute and the victim or family members may be most at risk of further violence or may be motivated to break the cycle of violence. This active learning exercise utilizes a case discussion about a patient who presents to the Emergency Department with a gunshot wound. Methods: This case study involving a gunshot wound is presented in a PowerPoint presentation. The session typically lasts 60 minutes, with 15-20 minutes devoted to student discussion. Open-ended questions prompt students to think about the personal, social, cultural, and environmental factors that may have contributed to this patient\u27s situation. The exercise then discusses the culture of violence that leads to so many injuries and the role physicians and other health care providers can play in the prevention of gun violence. Results: This resource has been used twice in a psychopathology course for second-year medical students. The mean student evaluation score for this module was 4.44/5.00 in the first year and 4.06/5.00 for the second year. Discussion: Students are highly engaged with this exercise, and seemed surprised to think about how physicians can be involved with efforts to prevent gun violence. After the session, several students have approached the instructors, asking how they can get involved in local initiatives to reduce gun violence. The students are also surprised to learn the patient is Caucasian, which challenges the stereotypes they have about young men who perpetrate urban gun violence. This situation allows for the course instructor to emphasize the need for caution in forming assumptions about patients

Teenage Pregnancy: Team-Based Learning Exercise

Abstract Introduction: This team-based learning (TBL) session is used in a first-year medical curriculum and contains a video case presentation of a pregnant teen, her issues and concerns, and her decisions about her pregnancy and the baby. It is well suited to the first-year medical student curriculum. It is one of seven modules featured in our Human Development: Health Across the Lifespan course: Introduction to Population Health, Normal Child Development, Child Abuse, Adolescence (the current resource), Adulthood, Middle Age, and Aging. Methods: Learning involves preclass reading and completion of a tutorial by students, in-class viewing of the video case, analysis and discussion of a clinical scenario, and brainstorming for a community-level teen pregnancy intervention. Assessment of student learning includes an in-class quiz and class discussion. Materials include the preclass readings and tutorial, a description of the video case, a Readiness Assurance Test (RAT), and an application exercise. This session works well with up to about 100 students organized in groups of six. Results: This TBL was developed in 2010 and has been implemented three times. In a preclass assessment in 2011, only 7% of students indicated they felt confident or very confident in their “ability to explain the characteristics of successful community-level interventions for adolescent risk behaviors.” In the postclass assessment of the same students, that number increased to 79%. Course evaluation data for the TBL sessions for the last 3 years averaged 4.05 (with 5 being the highest) for the graded part (individual and group RATs) and 4.18 for the ungraded application exercise. This Adolescence module was rated a 4.52 by the students, meaning they felt confident in their ability to master the objectives for the topic of adolescence. Discussion: This TBL generated considerable discussion among the students regarding how to handle the difficult social and cultural factors that contribute to patients\u27 health status. Students often shared information about the culture and norms of their own hometowns and how these factors contribute to adolescent risk behaviors such as sexual activity, drinking, and drug use. Students said they enjoyed working together to brainstorm community-level interventions