Development of an assistive patient mobile system for hospital environments

This paper presents an assistive patient mobile system for hospital environments, which focuses on transferring the patient without nursing help. The system is a combination of an advanced hospital bed and an autonomous navigating robot. This intelligent bed can track the robot and routinely navigates and communicates with the bed. The work centralizes in building a structure, hardware design and robot detection and tracking algorithms by using laser range finder. The assistive patient mobile system has been tested and the real experiments are shown with a high performance of reliability and practicality. The accuracy of the method proposed in this paper is 91% for the targeted testing object with the error rate of classification by 6%. Additionally, a comparison between our method and a related one is also described including the comparison of results. © 2013 IEEE

Autopsy as an outcome and performance measure: three years of hospital autopsy as an instrument of clinical audit

An extensive literature documents a high prevalence of errors in clinical diagnosis discovered at autopsy. Multiple studies have suggested no significant decrease in these errors over time. Despite these findings, autopsies have dramatically decreased in frequency in the United States and many other countries. In 1994, the last year for which national U.S. data exist, the autopsy rate for all non-forensic deaths fell below 6%. The marked decline in autopsy rates from previous rates of 40\u201350% undoubtedly reflects various factors, including reimbursement issues, the attitudes of clinicians regarding the utility of autopsies in the setting of other diagnostic advances, and general unfamiliarity with the autopsy and techniques for requesting it, especially among physicians-in-training. The autopsy is valuable for its role in undergraduate and graduate medical education, the identification and characterization of new diseases, and contributions to the understanding of disease pathogenesis. Although extensive, these benefits are difficult to quantify. This review of the last three years of hospital autopsy in Lucca studied the more easily quantifiable benefits of the autopsy as a tool in performance measurement and improvement. Such benefits largely relate to the role of the autopsy in detecting errors in clinical diagnosis and unsuspected complications of treatment. It is hoped that characterizing the extent to which the autopsy provides data relevant to clinical performance measurement and improvement will help inform strategies for preserving the benefits of routinely obtained autopsies and for considering its wider use as an instrument for quality improvement

A feminist new materialist experiment: exploring what else gets produced through encounters with children’s news media

In this paper we are concerned to grapple with the ways in which real world issues directly impact children’s lives, and ask what else gets produced through encounters with children’s global news media specifically within the contexts of the UK and Norway. Our aim is to experiment with worldling practices as a means to open up generative possibilities to encounter and reconfigure difficult knowledges. We take two contemporary events: the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire tragedy in London, and the 2018 Marjory Stoneman high school shooting massacre in Florida, as a means to attend to ways in which affects are materialised across multiple times and spaces. News reports of these harrowing events, alongside what they produced, in terms of child activism, racism and toxic masculinity, provided a catalyst for a feminist new materialist experiment in generating other knowledges through material-affective-embodied encounters. Newspapers, glue, sticky tape, string, torches, bags and a cartridge for a firearm undertook important work within a speculative workshop, where a small number of early childhood researchers came together to be open to multiple and experimental ways of (k)not-knowing in order to formulate collectively shared problems. Following Manning (2016) we recognise that to avoid getting stuck in familiar ways of thinking and doing we need to undertake research differently. We wondered how might the re-materialisation of these events (through objects, artefacts, sounds and images) shift our thinking about childhood in other directions. We dwell upon the affective work that these high-profile news events perform, and how they might become rearticulated through affective encounters with materiality. Attending to how these events worked on us involves staying with the trouble (Haraway, 2016) as it becomes reignited, mutated and amplified across time and in different contexts. Our goal is to generate other possibilities that seek to reconfigure the ‘image of the child’. By resisting comforts of recognition, reflection and identification we reach beyond what we think we know about how children are in the world, and instead argue for their entanglement with difficult knowledges through, ours and their, world-making practices

A complex network approach to structural inequality of educational deprivation in a Latin American country

To guarantee the human right to education established by the fourth UNESCO’s Sustainable Development Goal, a deep understanding of a big set of non-linear relationships at different scales is need it, as well as to know how they impact on learning outcomes. In doing so, current methods do not provide enough evidence about interactions and, for this reason, some researchers have proposed to model education as a complex system for considering all interactions at individual level, as well as using computer simulation and network analysis to provide a comprehensive look at the educational processes, as well as to predict the outcomes of different public policies. The highlight of this paper is modeling the structure of the inequality of a national educational system as a complex network from learning outcomes and socio-economic, ethnicity, rurality and type of school funding, for providing a better understanding and measuring of the educational gaps. This new approach might help to integrate insights improving the theoretical framework, as well as to provide valuable information about non-trivial relationships between educational and non-educational variables in order to help policymakers to implement effective solutions for the educational challenge of ensuring inclusive and equitable education.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Epidemiology of Subpatent Plasmodium Falciparum Infection: Implications for Detection of Hotspots with Imperfect Diagnostics.

At the local level, malaria transmission clusters in hotspots, which may be a group of households that experience higher than average exposure to infectious mosquitoes. Active case detection often relying on rapid diagnostic tests for mass screen and treat campaigns has been proposed as a method to detect and treat individuals in hotspots. Data from a cross-sectional survey conducted in north-western Tanzania were used to examine the spatial distribution of Plasmodium falciparum and the relationship between household exposure and parasite density. Dried blood spots were collected from consenting individuals from four villages during a survey conducted in 2010. These were analysed by PCR for the presence of P. falciparum, with the parasite density of positive samples being estimated by quantitative PCR. Household exposure was estimated using the distance-weighted PCR prevalence of infection. Parasite density simulations were used to estimate the proportion of infections that would be treated using a screen and treat approach with rapid diagnostic tests (RDT) compared to targeted mass drug administration (tMDA) and Mass Drug Administration (MDA). Polymerase chain reaction PCR analysis revealed that of the 3,057 blood samples analysed, 1,078 were positive. Mean distance-weighted PCR prevalence per household was 34.5%. Parasite density was negatively associated with transmission intensity with the odds of an infection being subpatent increasing with household exposure (OR 1.09 per 1% increase in exposure). Parasite density was also related to age, being highest in children five to ten years old and lowest in those > 40 years. Simulations of different tMDA strategies showed that treating all individuals in households where RDT prevalence was above 20% increased the number of infections that would have been treated from 43 to 55%. However, even with this strategy, 45% of infections remained untreated. The negative relationship between household exposure and parasite density suggests that DNA-based detection of parasites is needed to provide adequate sensitivity in hotspots. Targeting MDA only to households with RDT-positive individuals may allow a larger fraction of infections to be treated. These results suggest that community-wide MDA, instead of screen and treat strategies, may be needed to successfully treat the asymptomatic, subpatent parasite reservoir and reduce transmission in similar settings

The Schwinger Variational Method

Variational methods have proven invaluable in theoretical physics and chemistry, both for bound state problems and for the study of collision phenomena. For collisional problems they can be grouped into two types: those based on the Schroedinger equation and those based on the Lippmann-Schwinger equation. The application of the Schwinger variational (SV) method to e-molecule collisions and photoionization has been reviewed previously. The present chapter discusses the implementation of the SV method as applied to e-molecule collisions

Novel Use of Matched Filtering for Synaptic Event Detection and Extraction

Efficient and dependable methods for detection and measurement of synaptic events are important for studies of synaptic physiology and neuronal circuit connectivity. As the published methods with detection algorithms based upon amplitude thresholding and fixed or scaled template comparisons are of limited utility for detection of signals with variable amplitudes and superimposed events that have complex waveforms, previous techniques are not applicable for detection of evoked synaptic events in photostimulation and other similar experimental situations. Here we report on a novel technique that combines the design of a bank of approximate matched filters with the detection and estimation theory to automatically detect and extract photostimluation-evoked excitatory postsynaptic currents (EPSCs) from individually recorded neurons in cortical circuit mapping experiments. The sensitivity and specificity of the method were evaluated on both simulated and experimental data, with its performance comparable to that of visual event detection performed by human operators. This new technique was applied to quantify and compare the EPSCs obtained from excitatory pyramidal cells and fast-spiking interneurons. In addition, our technique has been further applied to the detection and analysis of inhibitory postsynaptic current (IPSC) responses. Given the general purpose of our matched filtering and signal recognition algorithms, we expect that our technique can be appropriately modified and applied to detect and extract other types of electrophysiological and optical imaging signals

The Seroprevalence and Seroincidence of Enterovirus71 Infection in Infants and Children in Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam

Enterovirus 71 (EV71)-associated hand, foot and mouth disease has emerged as a serious public health problem in South East Asia over the last decade. To better understand the prevalence of EV71 infection, we determined EV71 seroprevalence and seroincidence amongst healthy infants and children in Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam. In a cohort of 200 newborns, 55% of cord blood samples contained EV71 neutralizing antibodies and these decayed to undetectable levels by 6 months of age in 98% of infants. The EV71 neutralizing antibody seroconversion rate was 5.6% in the first year and 14% in the second year of life. In children 5–15 yrs of age, seroprevalence of EV71 neutralizing antibodies was 84% and in cord blood it was 55%. Taken together, these data suggest EV71 force of infection is high and highlights the need for more research into its epidemiology and pathogenesis in high disease burden countries

Treating cofactors can reverse the expansion of a primary disease epidemic

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Cofactors, "nuisance" conditions or pathogens that affect the spread of a primary disease, are likely to be the norm rather than the exception in disease dynamics. Here we present a "simplest possible" demographic model that incorporates two distinct effects of cofactors: that on the transmission of the primary disease from an infected host bearing the cofactor, and that on the acquisition of the primary disease by an individual that is not infected with the primary disease but carries the cofactor.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We constructed and analyzed a four-patch compartment model that accommodates a cofactor. We applied the model to HIV spread in the presence of the causal agent of genital schistosomiasis, <it>Schistosoma hematobium</it>, a pathogen commonly co-occurring with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We found that cofactors can have a range of effects on primary disease dynamics, including shifting the primary disease from non-endemic to endemic, increasing the prevalence of the primary disease, and reversing demographic growth when the host population bears only the primary disease to demographic decline. We show that under parameter values based on the biology of the HIV/<it>S. haematobium </it>system, reduction of the schistosome-bearing subpopulations (e.g. through periodic use of antihelminths) can slow and even reverse the spread of HIV through the host population.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Typical single-disease models provide estimates of future conditions and guidance for direct intervention efforts relating only to the modeled primary disease. Our results suggest that, in circumstances under which a cofactor affects the disease dynamics, the most effective intervention effort might not be one focused on direct treatment of the primary disease alone. The cofactor model presented here can be used to estimate the impact of the cofactor in a particular disease/cofactor system without requiring the development of a more complicated model which incorporates many other specific aspects of the chosen disease/cofactor pair. Simulation results for the HIV/<it>S. haematobium </it>system have profound implications for disease management in developing areas, in that they provide evidence that in some cases treating cofactors may be the most successful and cost-effective way to slow the spread of primary diseases.</p