Interactive Compression for Multi-Party Protocol

The field of compression studies the question of how many bits of communication are necessary to convey a given piece of data. For one-way communication between a sender and a receiver, the seminal work of Shannon and Huffman showed that the communication required is characterized by the entropy of the data; in recent years, there has been a great amount of interest in extending this line of research to interactive communication, where instead of a sender and a receiver we have two parties communication back-and-forth. In this paper we initiate the study of interactive compression for distributed multi-player protocols. We consider the classical shared blackboard model, where players take turns speaking, and each player\u27s message is immediately seen by all the other players. We show that in the shared blackboard model with k players, one can compress protocols down to ~O(Ik), where I is the information content of the protocol and k is the number of players. We complement this result with an almost matching lower bound of ~Omega(Ik), which shows that a nearly-linear dependence on the number of players cannot be avoided

Transition to Multidisciplinary Pediatric Telerehabilitation during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Strategy Development and Implementation

Telerehabilitation offers a unique solution for continuity of care in pediatric rehabilitation under physical distancing. The major aims of this study were to: (1) describe the development of telerehabilitation usage guidelines in a large hospital in Israel, and to (2) evaluate the implementation of telerehabilitation from the perspectives of healthcare practitioners and families. An expert focus group developed guidelines which were disseminated to multidisciplinary clinicians. Following sessions, clinicians filled The Clinician Evaluation of Telerehabilitation Service (CETS), a custom-built feedback questionnaire on telerehabilitation, and parents completed the client version of the Therapist Presence Inventory (TPI-C) and were asked to rate the effectiveness of sessions on an ordinal scale. Four goals of telerehabilitation sessions were defined: (1) maintenance of therapeutic alliance, (2) provision of parental coping strategies, (3) assistance in maintaining routine, and (4) preventing functional deterioration. Principal Components Analysis was used for the CETS questionnaire and the relationships of CETS and TPI-C with child’s age and the type of session were evaluated using Spearman’s correlations and the Kruskal–Wallis H test. In total, sixty-seven telerehabilitation sessions, with clients aged 11.31 ± 4.8 years, were documented by clinicians. Three components (child, session, parent) explained 71.3% of the variance in CETS. According to therapists, their ability to maintain the therapeutic alliance was generally higher than their ability to achieve other predefined goals (p < 0.01). With younger children, the ability to provide feedback to the child, grade treatment difficulty and provide coping strategies to the parents were diminished. Families perceived the therapist as being highly present in therapy regardless of treatment type. These results demonstrate a potential framework for the dissemination of telerehabilitation services in pediatric rehabilitation

Preventing post-stroke dementia. The MARCH Trial. Protocol and statistical analysis plan of a randomized clinical trial testing the safety and efficacy of Maraviroc in post-stroke cognitive impairment

BackgroundCurrent evidence suggest that 25%-33% of stroke-survivors develop post-stroke cognitive impairment (PSCI). The licensed drug Maraviroc, a CCR5-antagonist, is postulated to act via a neuroprotective mechanism that may offer the potential of preventing progression to vascular dementia. Our hypothesis: Maraviroc may have the potential to augment learning skills and cognitive performance by affecting synaptic plasticity, along with neuro-inflammatory modulation in patients with cerebral small vessel disease (SVD) and PSCI.DesignMARCH is a multi-center, double-blind randomized-control Phase-II trial of Maraviroc 150 or 600 mg/day versus placebo for 12-months in five stroke centers in Israel. Included are patients diagnosed with recent (1-24 months) subcortical stroke who experience mild PSCI and have evidence of white matter lesions and SVD on neuroimaging.OutcomesPrimary outcomes: 1. Change in cognitive scores. 2. Drug related adverse events. Secondary outcomes: change in functional and affective scores, MRI-derived measures, inflammatory markers, carotid atherosclerosis, cerebrospinal-fluid biomarkers in a sub-study. A sample size of 60 in each treatment group and 30 in the placebo group (total - 150 participants) provides 80% power between the treatment and the placebo groups.ConclusionsThe results of this work could lead to a novel, readily available, therapeutic avenue to reduce PSCI, and possibly other pathologies. This study will test safety and effectiveness of Maraviroc in limiting cognitive deterioration and/or post stroke cognitive impairment in patients with cerebral small vessel disease.ScheduleFirst-patient first-visit was May 2021. Recruitment to complete in 2023, follow-up to complete in 2024