Staff nurses' antimicrobial stewardship practices and performance confidence relative to patient safety culture

Current antimicrobial stewardship guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggest staff nurses play a key role in the stewardship process. The American Nurses Association (ANA) supports the CDC guideline and has charged nursing leaders with allotting organizational resources and aligning their workplace culture to support nurses' role. Despite national attention on nurses' involvement in antimicrobial stewardship, there is neither research describing practices used by nurses that impact antimicrobial stewardship processes; nor, is there understanding about how organizations' patient safety culture influences nurses' role in stewardship. Therefore, the purpose of this dissertation study is to determine pediatric and adult staff nurses' understanding of current practices that support antimicrobial stewardship, nurses' confidence to perform stewardship practices, and the influence of organizational patient safety culture on practices.Includes bibliographical reference

Estimation of skeletal kinematics in freely moving rodents

Forming a complete picture of the relationship between neural activity and skeletal kinematics requires quantification of skeletal joint biomechanics during free behavior; however, without detailed knowledge of the underlying skeletal motion, inferring limb kinematics using surface-tracking approaches is difficult, especially for animals where the relationship between the surface and underlying skeleton changes during motion. Here we developed a videography-based method enabling detailed three-dimensional kinematic quantification of an anatomically defined skeleton in untethered freely behaving rats and mice. This skeleton-based model was constrained using anatomical principles and joint motion limits and provided skeletal pose estimates for a range of body sizes, even when limbs were occluded. Model-inferred limb positions and joint kinematics during gait and gap-crossing behaviors were verified by direct measurement of either limb placement or limb kinematics using inertial measurement units. Together we show that complex decision-making behaviors can be accurately reconstructed at the level of skeletal kinematics using our anatomically constrained model

Anatomically-based skeleton kinetics and pose estimation in freely-moving rodents

Forming a complete picture of the relationship between neural activity and body kinetics requires quantification of skeletal joint biomechanics during behavior. However, without detailed knowledge of the underlying skeletal motion, inferring joint kinetics from surface tracking approaches is difficult, especially for animals where the relationship between surface anatomy and skeleton changes during motion. Here we developed a videography-based method enabling detailed three-dimensional kinetic quantification of an anatomically defined skeleton in untethered freely-behaving animals. This skeleton-based model has been constrained by anatomical principles and joint motion limits and provided skeletal pose estimates for a range of rodent sizes, even when limbs were occluded. Model-inferred joint kinetics for both gait and gap-crossing behaviors were verified by direct measurement of limb placement, showing that complex decision-making behaviors can be accurately reconstructed at the level of skeletal kinetics using our anatomically constrained model

Role of Red Palm Oil in Male Obesity and Infertility Prevention

The African continent has wide, varied, and rich plant diversity due to its climate. Some of these plants and their products have received tremendous attention due to their benefits in treating and managing ailments that plagues humanity. Red palm oil (RPO) is one of such natural products that have immense nutritional value with ability to ameliorate cardiac- and reproductive-related disorders. In this review article, the current knowledge on the potential of RPO as a phytomedicine to lessen or even prevent the negative impact of obesity on general health status and male fertility was evaluated. This study was done using electronic databases such as PubMed, Scopus, Science Direct, Google Scholar and Web of Science. The study revealed some controversies and inconsistent reports on the effect of RPO on obesity and male fertility which needs further research using appropriate experimental models of obesity. Obesity is known to disrupt male fertility by causing changes to the hypothalamic- pituitary-gonadal axis, thus impairing steroidogenesis and spermatogenesis. As spermatozoa are extremely sensitive towards oxidative stress, a carefully balanced daily supplementation of normal diet with antioxidant-rich RPO might be useful to protect spermatozoa and preserving male fertility. RPO was shown to be useful to protect against or ameliorate toxin- or medical condition-induced male infertility. Also, RPO is packed with powerful antioxidants like carotenoids and vitamin E which helps to prevent cell damage. However, its role in obesity prevention remains a debate

Rapid Display of Radiographic Images

The requirements for the rapid display of radiographic images exceed the capabilities of widely available display, computer and communication technologies. Computed radiography captures data with a resolution of about four megapixels. Large format displays are available that can present over four megapixels. One megapixel displays are practical for use in combination with large format displays and in areas where the viewing task does not require primary diagnosis. This paper describes an electronic radiology system that approximates the highest quality systems, but through the use of several interesting techniques allows the possibility of its widespread installation throughout hospitals. The techniques uses can be grouped under three major systems concepts: a local, high-speed Image Server, one of more physician\u27s workstations each with one or more high-performance Auxiliary Displays specialized to the radiology viewing task, and dedicated, high-speed communication links between the server and the displays. This approach is enhanced by the use of a progressive transmission scheme to decrease the latency for viewing four megapixel images. The system includes an Image Server with storage for over 600 4 megapixel images and high-speed link. A subsampled megapixel image is fetched from disk and transmitted to the display in about one second followed by the full resolution 4 megapixel in about 2.5 seconds. Other system components include a megapixel display with a 6 megapixel display memory space and frame-rate update of image roam, zoom and contrast. Plans for clinical use are presented

Urban agriculture as a keystone contribution towards securing sustainable and healthy development for cities in the future

esearch and practice during the last 20 years has shown that urban agriculture can contribute to minimising the effects of climate change by, at the same time, improving quality of life in urban areas. In order to do so most effectively, land use and spatial planning are crucial so as to obtain and maintain a supportive green infrastructure and to secure citizens' healthy living conditions. As people today trend more towards living in green and sustainable city centres that can offer fresh and locally produced food, cities become again places for growing food. The scope of urban agriculture thereby is to establish food production sites within the city's sphere; for example, through building-integrated agriculture including concepts such as aquaponics, indoor agriculture, vertical farming, rooftop production, edible walls, as well as through urban farms, edible landscapes, school gardens and community gardens. Embedded in changing urban food systems, the contribution of urban agriculture to creating sustainable and climate-friendly cities is pivotal as it has the capacity to integrate other resource streams such as water, waste and energy. This article describes some of the current aspects of the circular city debate where urban agriculture is pushing forward the development of material and resource cycling in cities.European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST): CA17133; EU Horizon 2020 Programmeinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Decision theory applied to image quality control in radiology

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licens