Beginning Teachers’ Perceptions of their Pedagogical Knowledge and Skills in Teaching: A Three Year Study

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the beginning teachers’ perceptions of pedagogical knowledge and skills in teaching in Singapore. Data was collected from the beginning teachers at three time points: the exit point of the teacher education programme, the end of their first year and third year of teaching. In this three year study, the focus is to examine the beginning teachers’ perceptions of their development in the following teaching related factors: lesson planning, classroom management and instructional strategies. The results showed that beginning teachers’ pedagogical knowledge and skills increased significantly, but at different rates, in all three factors at the end of their third year of teaching. It suggested that learning to teach is an on-going process that begins from the pre-service teacher education programme and continues into the initial three years of teaching

Changes in life expectancy and disease burden in Norway, 1990–2019: an analysis of the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019

Bill & Melinda Gates FoundationpublishedVersio

GestaltMatcher Database - A global reference for facial phenotypic variability in rare human diseases

The most important factor that complicates the work of dysmorphologists is the significant phenotypic variability of the human face. Next-Generation Phenotyping (NGP) tools that assist clinicians with recognizing characteristic syndromic patterns are particularly challenged when confronted with patients from populations different from their training data. To that end, we systematically analyzed the impact of genetic ancestry on facial dysmorphism. For that purpose, we established the GestaltMatcher Database (GMDB) as a reference dataset for medical images of patients with rare genetic disorders from around the world. We collected 10,980 frontal facial images - more than a quarter previously unpublished - from 8,346 patients, representing 581 rare disorders. Although the predominant ancestry is still European (67%), data from underrepresented populations have been increased considerably via global collaborations (19% Asian and 7% African). This includes previously unpublished reports for more than 40% of the African patients. The NGP analysis on this diverse dataset revealed characteristic performance differences depending on the composition of training and test sets corresponding to genetic relatedness. For clinical use of NGP, incorporating non-European patients resulted in a profound enhancement of GestaltMatcher performance. The top-5 accuracy rate increased by +11.29%. Importantly, this improvement in delineating the correct disorder from a facial portrait was achieved without decreasing the performance on European patients. By design, GMDB complies with the FAIR principles by rendering the curated medical data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. This means GMDB can also serve as data for training and benchmarking. In summary, our study on facial dysmorphism on a global sample revealed a considerable cross ancestral phenotypic variability confounding NGP that should be counteracted by international efforts for increasing data diversity. GMDB will serve as a vital reference database for clinicians and a transparent training set for advancing NGP technology.</p

Clinical free text to HPO codes

Leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) within the rare disease diagnostic odyssey can facilitate a decrease in diagnostic times and an increase in diagnostic rates. Among the steps involved in the odyssey, this project focused on utilizing AI to automate the standardized capturing of clinical free text into Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO) codes. This research project was conducted at both the KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital (KKH), Singapore and the Rare Care Centre at Perth Children’s Hospital, Western Australia (WA), via the Curtin New Colombo Plan (NCP) Scholarship. The outcome of the project saw the development of a Streamlit web application that utilized two (2) pre-trained AI models – PhenoTagger and PhenoBERT – with a human-in-the-loop design. A case study conducted with ten (10) de-identified clinical reports demonstrated a reduction in the HPO extraction task time from ten (10) to twenty (20) minutes per report to less than five (5) minutes

A Naturally-Derived Compound Schisandrin B Enhanced Light Sensation in the pde6c Zebrafish Model of Retinal Degeneration.

Retinal degeneration is often progressive. This feature has provided a therapeutic window for intervention that may extend functional vision in patients. Even though this approach is feasible, few promising drug candidates are available. The scarcity of new drugs has motivated research to discover novel compounds through different sources. One such example is Schisandrin B (SchB), an active component isolated from the five-flavor fruit (Fructus Schisandrae) that is postulated in traditional Chinese medicines to exert prophylactic visual benefit. This SchB benefit was investigated in this study in pde6cw59, a zebrafish retinal-degeneration model. In this model, the pde6c gene (phosphodiesterase 6C, cGMP-specific, cone, alpha prime) carried a mutation which caused cone degeneration. This altered the local environment and caused the bystander rods to degenerate too. To test SchB on the pde6cw59 mutants, a treatment concentration was first determined that would not cause morphological defects, and would initiate known physiological response. Then, the mutants were treated with the optimized SchB concentration before the appearance of retinal degeneration at 3 days postfertilization (dpf). The light sensation of animals was evaluated at 6 dpf by the visual motor response (VMR), a visual startle that could be initiated by drastic light onset and offset. The results show that the VMR of pde6cw59 mutants towards light onset was enhanced by the SchB treatment, and that the initial phase of the enhancement was primarily mediated through the mutants' eyes. Further immunostaining analysis indicates that the treatment specifically reduced the size of the abnormally large rods. These observations implicate an interesting hypothesis: that the morphologically-improved rods drive the observed VMR enhancement. Together, these investigations have identified a possible visual benefit of SchB on retinal degeneration, a benefit that can potentially be further developed to extend functional vision in patients

Correction: A Naturally-Derived Compound Schisandrin B Enhanced Light Sensation in the pde6c Zebrafish Model of Retinal Degeneration.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0149663.]