Medical students as health coaches: Implementation of a student-initiated Lifestyle Medicine curriculum

Background: By 2020, the World Health Organization predicts that two-thirds of all diseases worldwide will be the result of lifestyle choices. Physicians often do not counsel patients about healthy behaviors, and lack of training has been identified as one of the barriers. Between 2010 and 2014, Hebrew University developed and implemented a 58-h Lifestyle Medicine curriculum spanning five of the 6 years of medical school. Content includes nutrition, exercise, smoking cessation, and behavior change, as well as health coaching practice with friends/relatives (preclinical years) and patients (clinical years). This report describes this development and diffusion process, and it also presents findings related to the level of acceptance of this student-initiated Lifestyle Medicine (LM) curriculum. Methods: Students completed an online semi-structured questionnaire after the first coaching session (coaching questionnaire) and the last coaching session (follow-up questionnaire). Results: Nine hundred and twenty-three students completed the coaching questionnaire (296 practices were with patients, 627 with friends /relatives); and 784 students completed the follow-up questionnaire (208 practices were with patients, 576 with friends /relatives). They reported overall that health coaching domains included smoking cessation (263 students), nutrition (79), and exercise (117); 464 students reported on combined topics. Students consistently described a high acceptance of the curriculum and their active role in coaching. Further, most students reported that they were eager to address their own health behaviors. Conclusions: We described the development and acceptance of a student-initiated comprehensive LM curriculum. Students perceived LM as an important component of physicians’ professional role and were ready to explore it both as coaches and in their personal lives. Thus, medical school deans might consider developing similar initiatives in order to position medical schools as key players within a preventive strategy in healthcare policy. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13584-017-0167-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users

Fast and Robust Retrieval of Minkowski Sums of Rotating Convex Polyhedra in 3-Space

We present a novel method for fast retrieval of exact Minkowski sums of pairs of convex polytopes in R³, where one of the polytopes keeps rotating. The algorithm is based on pre-computing a so-called criticality map, which records the changes in the underlying graph-structure of the Minkowski sum, while one of the polytopes rotates. We give tight combinatorial bounds on the complexity of the criticality map when the rotating polytope rotates about one, two, or three axes. The criticality map can be rather large already for rotations about one axis, even for summand polytopes with a moderate number of vertices each. We therefore focus on the restricted case of rotations about a single, though arbitrary, axis. Our work targets applications that require exact collisiondetection such as motion planning with narrow corridors and assembly maintenance where high accuracy is required. Our implementation handles all degeneracies and produces exact results. It efficiently handles the algebra of exact rotations about an arbitrary axis in R³, and it well balances between preprocessing time and space on the one hand, and query time on the other. We use Cgal arrangements and in particular the support for spherical Gaussian-maps to efficiently compute the exact Minkowski sum of two polytopes. We conducted several experiments to verify the correctness of the algorithm and its implementation, and to compare its efficiency with an alternative (static) exact method. The results are reported

Melatonin receptors in Atlantic salmon stimulate cAMP levels in heterologous cell lines and show season‐dependent daily variations in pituitary expression levels

publishedVersio

Automatically Identifying Join Candidates in the Cairo Genizah

A join is a set of manuscript-fragments that are known to originate from the same original work. The Cairo Genizah is a collection containing approximately 250,000 fragments of mainly Jewish texts discovered in the late 19th century. The fragments are today spread out in libraries and private collections worldwide, and there is an onging effort to document and catalogue all extant fragments. The task of finding joins is currently conducted manually by experts, and presumably only a small fraction of the existing joins have been discovered. In this work, we study the problem of automatically finding candidate joins, so as to streamline the task. The proposed method is based on a combination of local descriptors and learning techniques. To evaluate the performance of various join-finding methods, without relying on the availability of human experts, we construct a benchmark dataset that is modeled on the Labeled Faces in the Wild benchmark for face recognition. Using this benchmark, we evaluate several alternative image representations and learning techniques. Finally, a set of newly-discovered join-candidates have been identified using our method and validated by a human expert

Defining diurnal fluctuations in mouse choroid plexus and CSF at high molecular, spatial, and temporal resolution

Abstract Transmission and secretion of signals via the choroid plexus (ChP) brain barrier can modulate brain states via regulation of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) composition. Here, we developed a platform to analyze diurnal variations in male mouse ChP and CSF. Ribosome profiling of ChP epithelial cells revealed diurnal translatome differences in metabolic machinery, secreted proteins, and barrier components. Using ChP and CSF metabolomics and blood-CSF barrier analyses, we observed diurnal changes in metabolites and cellular junctions. We then focused on transthyretin (TTR), a diurnally regulated thyroid hormone chaperone secreted by the ChP. Diurnal variation in ChP TTR depended on Bmal1 clock gene expression. We achieved real-time tracking of CSF-TTR in awake Ttr mNeonGreen mice via multi-day intracerebroventricular fiber photometry. Diurnal changes in ChP and CSF TTR levels correlated with CSF thyroid hormone levels. These datasets highlight an integrated platform for investigating diurnal control of brain states by the ChP and CSF