Anaphylaxis: Signs, symptoms, and pathophysiology

Anaphylaxis is an emergent, life-threatening condition and quick provider response is imperative. When a patient has this acute and severe Immunoglobulin E hypersensitivity immune response, the health care provider must be ready to immediately act using an expert level of awareness. This project serves as an overview of this important topic and should cultivate a spirit of inquiry into institutional policies for management, as well as to inspire further research

Satellite-Derived Bathymetry Using Multiple Images: The Alaska North Slope Case Study

Currently, charting data in much of the U.S. Arctic North Slope is inadequate or nonexistent and most of its areas have not been updated since the early-1950s. Although the charting infrastructure is out of date, ship transportation (such as, fishing and transit between the towns) has increased. NOAA conducted a preliminary multibeam survey in 2013 that reached Point Barrow, AK. However, all the Arctic North Slope remained untouched. Previous studies have shown that satellite-derived bathymetry (SDB) is a useful reconnaissance tool in tropical and sub-tropical waters in clear water conditions, especially over sandy seafloor. However, it is very difficult to extract good information over the Arctic using a single satellite image, especially over the U.S. North Slope. The glacial powder from land reduces the water clarity that limits the light penetration depth. Also, this turbidity is not uniform along the coast line and may affect the calculations. In this paper, a new SDB approach was developed that compiles multiple satellite images to extract only areas that were identified clear by comparison (i.e., minimum water clarity change between two satellite images). Preliminary results using Landsat 7 imagery from 1999-2002 and Landsat 8 imagery from 2013 are presented

Orchard Management Practices and Handbook

The purpose of this project was to develop an SAE start-up handbook for the Hollister FFA program\u27s orchard. The orchard was being underutilized by the chapter and the hopes are that the chapter will supply students with this handbook allowing for a more diverse group of SAE projects within the chapter. Implementing the steps outlined in this handbook would also create a more competitive chapter in the areas of proficiencies and degrees

Load and resistance factor design of cold formed steel comparative study of design methods for cold formed steel

Allowable Stress Design is the current method used to design cold-formed steel structural members and connections. In this design approach, factors of safety are used to compute the allowable design stresses which are compared to the actual maximum stresses that will occur in the member during the life of the structure. In recent years, the Load and Resistance Factor Design (LRFD) method has been developed for the design of hot-rolled steel shapes and the design of cold-formed steel structural members. This method is based on probabilistic and statistical techniques to account for the many uncertainties involved with the actual design. The LRFD criteria use load factors which are applied to the external load and resistance factors that are applied to the internal resistance capacities of the structure. The allowable unfactored loads based on each design method for different types of structural members are compared and shown in graphical forms. For structural members with one type of loading, the dead-to-live load ratio contributes to the difference between the two allowable loads. For members with a combination of loads, crosssectional geometry, loading conditions, material strength, member length, along with dead-to-live load ratio will affect the difference between the allowable loads computed from allowable stress design and LRFD

Role of The Cortex in Visuomotor Control of Arm Stability

Whereas numerous motor control theories describe the control of arm trajectory during reach, the control of stabilization in a constant arm position (i.e., visuomotor control of arm posture) is less clear. Three potential mechanisms have been proposed for visuomotor control of arm posture: 1) increased impedance of the arm through co-contraction of antagonistic muscles, 2) corrective muscle activity via spinal/supraspinal reflex circuits, and/or 3) intermittent voluntary corrections to errors in position. We examined the cortical mechanisms of visuomotor control of arm posture and tested the hypothesis that cortical error networks contribute to arm stabilization. We collected electroencephalography (EEG) data from 10 young healthy participants across four experimental planar movement tasks. We examined brain activity associated with intermittent voluntary corrections of position error and antagonist co-contraction during stabilization. EEG beta-band (13–26 Hz) power fluctuations were used as indicators of brain activity, and coherence between EEG electrodes was used as a measure of functional connectivity between brain regions. Cortical activity in the sensory, motor, and visual areas during arm stabilization was similar to activity during volitional arm movements and was larger than activity during co-contraction of the arm. However, cortical connectivity between the sensorimotor and visual regions was higher during arm stabilization compared with volitional arm movements and co-contraction of the arm. The difference in cortical activity and connectivity between tasks might be attributed to an underlying visuomotor error network used to update motor commands for visuomotor control of arm posture

Algorithm Development for Intrafraction Radiotherapy Beam Edge Verification from Cherenkov Imaging.

Imaging of Cherenkov light emission from patient tissue during fractionated radiotherapy has been shown to be a possible way to visualize beam delivery in real time. If this tool is advanced as a delivery verification methodology, then a sequence of image processing steps must be established to maximize accurate recovery of beam edges. This was analyzed and developed here, focusing on the noise characteristics and representative images from both phantoms and patients undergoing whole breast radiotherapy. The processing included temporally integrating video data into a single, composite summary image at each control point. Each image stack was also median filtered for denoising and ultimately thresholded into a binary image, and morphologic small hole removal was used. These processed images were used for day-to-day comparison computation, and either the Dice coefficient or the mean distance to conformity values can be used to analyze them. Systematic position shifts of the phantom up to 5 mm approached the observed variation values of the patient data. This processing algorithm can be used to analyze the variations seen in patients being treated concurrently with daily Cherenkov imaging to quantify the day-to-day disparities in delivery as a quality audit system for position/beam verification