Infant and Childhood Mortality Research in the Philippines: Review and Agenda

This article advocates for more focused research designs and the use of more complex causal models. Investigations of morbidity and mortality differentials indicate a higher death rate in urban than in rural areas. Further inquiry can be made to the dearth of studies conducted regarding mortality on infant and children.mortality rate, morbidity rate

Infant and Childhood Mortality Research in the Philippines: Review and Agenda

This article advocates for more focused research designs and the use of more complex causal models. Investigations of morbidity and mortality differentials indicate a higher death rate in urban than in rural areas. Further inquiry can be made to the dearth of studies conducted regarding mortality on infant and children.mortality rate, morbidity rate

Objective dysphonia quantification in vocal fold paralysis: comparing nonlinear with classical measures

Clinical acoustic voice recording analysis is usually performed using classical perturbation measures including jitter, shimmer and noise-to-harmonic ratios. However, restrictive mathematical limitations of these measures prevent analysis for severely dysphonic voices. Previous studies of alternative nonlinear random measures addressed wide varieties of vocal pathologies. Here, we analyze a single vocal pathology cohort, testing the performance of these alternative measures alongside classical measures.

We present voice analysis pre- and post-operatively in unilateral vocal fold paralysis (UVFP) patients and healthy controls, patients undergoing standard medialisation thyroplasty surgery, using jitter, shimmer and noise-to-harmonic ratio (NHR), and nonlinear recurrence period density entropy (RPDE), detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) and correlation dimension. Systematizing the preparative editing of the recordings, we found that the novel measures were more stable and hence reliable, than the classical measures, on healthy controls.

RPDE and jitter are sensitive to improvements pre- to post-operation. Shimmer, NHR and DFA showed no significant change (p > 0.05). All measures detect statistically significant and clinically important differences between controls and patients, both treated and untreated (p < 0.001, AUC > 0.7). Pre- to post-operation, GRBAS ratings show statistically significant and clinically important improvement in overall dysphonia grade (G) (AUC = 0.946, p < 0.001).

Re-calculating AUCs from other study data, we compare these results in terms of clinical importance. We conclude that, when preparative editing is systematized, nonlinear random measures may be useful UVFP treatment effectiveness monitoring tools, and there may be applications for other forms of dysphonia.
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Optimization of thermal systems with sensitive optics, electronics, and structures

A strategy was investigated by which thermal designers for spacecraft could devise an optimal thermal control system to maintain the required temperatures, temperature differences, changes in temperature, and changes in temperature differences for specified equipment and elements of the spacecraft's structure. Thermal control is to be maintained by the coating pattern chosen for the external surfaces and heaters chosen to supplement the coatings. The approach is to minimize the thermal control power, thereby minimizing the weight of the thermal control system. Because there are so many complex computations involved in determining the optimal coating design a computerized approach was contemplated. An optimization strategy including all the elements considered by the thermal designer for use in the early stages of design, where impact on the mission is greatest, and a plan for implementing the strategy were successfully developed. How the optimization process may be used to optimize the design of the Space Telescope as a test case is demonstrated

Identifying safety strategies for on-farm grain bins using risk analysis

The potential for grain bin accidents exists each year on Arkansas farms and farms across the nation. The trend toward increasing utilization of on-farm grain drying and storage could lead to an increase in grain bin accidents. The sharp contrast between a safe, efficient operation and one that leads to injury or death can be represented as sets of farmer-decisions and subsequent chance events. A model was constructed to define the risk associated with grain bin entry and inbin activity so that safety interventions could be identified and implemented to reduce the probability of injury and death. A survey was distributed to Arkansas grain farmers to gather data on the level of safety education, storage techniques, operations management, and other parameters. The data collected from the survey provided quantitative input of many of the model’s probability-distribution functions. Using a fault tree (with parallel modes of failure) in conjunction with a Monte Carlo simulation technique, we evaluated six safety intervention strategies and identified the one with the greatest potential for reducing the risk of serous injury or death. As part of senior design in biological engineering, plans are underway to design and test a probe that can locate and break bridged grain (a common risk factor in grain bin management) while working outside the bin on the ground

Social disparities in heart disease risk and survivor bias among autoworkers: an examination based on survival models and g-estimation.

ObjectivesTo examine gender and racial disparities in ischaemic heart disease (IHD) mortality related to metalworking fluid exposures and in the healthy worker survivor effect.MethodsA cohort of white and black men and women autoworkers in the USA was followed from 1941 to 1995 with quantitative exposure to respirable particulate matter from water-based metalworking fluids. Separate analyses used proportional hazards models and g-estimation.ResultsThe HR for IHD among black men was 3.29 (95% CI 1.49 to 7.31) in the highest category of cumulative synthetic fluid exposure. The HR for IHD among white women exposed to soluble fluid reached 2.44 (95% CI 0.96 to 6.22). However, no increased risk was observed among white men until we corrected for the healthy worker survivor effect. Results from g-estimation indicate that if white male cases exposed to soluble or synthetic fluid had been unexposed to that fluid type, then 1.59 and 1.20 years of life would have been saved on average, respectively.ConclusionsWe leveraged the strengths of two different analytic approaches to examine the IHD risks of metalworking fluids. All workers may have the same aetiological risk; however, black and female workers may experience more IHD from water-based metalworking fluid exposure because of a steeper exposure-response or weaker healthy worker survivor effect

Electron shielding studies - Experimental program Technical summary report, 1 Aug. 1968 - 31 Dec. 1969

Electron shielding and bremsstrahlung energy spectra for tin, gold, and silve

Cardiac hemangioma of the right atrium in a neonate : fetal management and expedited surgical resection

Cardiac hemangioma is a rare tumor with a reported incidence of 1-2%. We describe the case of a neonate with a right atrial mass that was diagnosed prenatally. The fetus developed a supraventricular tachycardia and was delivered by cesarean section in the 35th week of gestation. The infant underwent surgery after 24 hours to remove the mass which was diagnosed as a cardiac capillary-cavernous hemangioma.peer-reviewe

Exploiting Nonlinear Recurrence and Fractal Scaling Properties for Voice Disorder Detection

Background: Voice disorders affect patients profoundly, and acoustic tools can potentially measure voice function objectively. Disordered sustained vowels exhibit wide-ranging phenomena, from nearly periodic to highly complex, aperiodic vibrations, and increased "breathiness". Modelling and surrogate data studies have shown significant nonlinear and non-Gaussian random properties in these sounds. Nonetheless, existing tools are limited to analysing voices displaying near periodicity, and do not account for this inherent biophysical nonlinearity and non-Gaussian randomness, often using linear signal processing methods insensitive to these properties. They do not directly measure the two main biophysical symptoms of disorder: complex nonlinear aperiodicity, and turbulent, aeroacoustic, non-Gaussian randomness. Often these tools cannot be applied to more severe disordered voices, limiting their clinical usefulness.

Methods: This paper introduces two new tools to speech analysis: recurrence and fractal scaling, which overcome the range limitations of existing tools by addressing directly these two symptoms of disorder, together reproducing a "hoarseness" diagram. A simple bootstrapped classifier then uses these two features to distinguish normal from disordered voices.

Results: On a large database of subjects with a wide variety of voice disorders, these new techniques can distinguish normal from disordered cases, using quadratic discriminant analysis, to overall correct classification performance of 91.8% plus or minus 2.0%. The true positive classification performance is 95.4% plus or minus 3.2%, and the true negative performance is 91.5% plus or minus 2.3% (95% confidence). This is shown to outperform all combinations of the most popular classical tools.

Conclusions: Given the very large number of arbitrary parameters and computational complexity of existing techniques, these new techniques are far simpler and yet achieve clinically useful classification performance using only a basic classification technique. They do so by exploiting the inherent nonlinearity and turbulent randomness in disordered voice signals. They are widely applicable to the whole range of disordered voice phenomena by design. These new measures could therefore be used for a variety of practical clinical purposes.
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