2,359 research outputs found
Relational use of an electronic quality of life and practice support system in hospital palliative consult care: a pilot study
Objectives:
This study is part of an overarching research initiative on the development and integration of an electronic Quality of Life and Practice Support System (QPSS) that uses patient-reported outcome and experience measures in clinical practice. The current study focused on palliative nurse consultants trialing the QPSS with older hospitalized adults receiving acute care. The primary aim of the study was to better understand consultants’ and patients’ experiences and perspectives of use.
Method:
The project involved two nurse specialists within a larger palliative outreach consult team (POCT) and consenting older adult patients (age 55+) in a large tertiary acute care hospital in western Canada. User-centered design of the QPSS was informed by three focus groups with the entire POCT team, and implementation was evaluated by direct observation as well as interviews with the POCT nurses and three patients. Thematic analysis of interviews and field notes was informed by theoretical perspectives from social sciences.
Result:
Over 9 weeks, the POCT nurses used the QPSS at least once with 20 patients, for a total of 47 administrations. The nurses most often assisted patients in using the QPSS. Participants referenced three primary benefits of relational use: enhanced communication, strengthened therapeutic relations, and cocreation of new insights about quality of life and care experiences. The nurses also reported increased visibility of quality of life concerns and positive development as relational care providers.
Significance of results:
Participants expressed that QPSS use positively influenced relations of care and enhanced practices consistent with person-centered care. Results also indicate that electronic assessment systems may, in some instances, function as actor-objects enabling new knowledge and relations of care rather than merely as a neutral technological platform. This is the first study to examine hospital palliative consult clinicians’ use of a tablet-based system for routine collection of patient-reported outcome and experience measures
Theory of Phonon-Assisted Multimagnon Optical Absorption and Bimagnon States in Quantum Antiferromagnets
We calculate the effective charge for multimagnon infrared (IR) absorption
assisted by phonons in a perovskite like antiferromagnet and we compute the
spectra for two magnon absorption using interacting spin-wave theory. The full
set of equations for the interacting two magnon problem is presented in the
random phase approximation for arbitrary total momentum of the magnon pair. The
spin wave theory results fit very well the primary peak of recent measured
bands in the parent insulating compounds of cuprate superconductors. The line
shape is explained as being due to the absorption of one phonon plus a new
quasiparticle excitation of the Heisenberg Hamiltonian that consists off a long
lived virtual bound state of two magnons (bimagnon). The bimagnon states have
well defined energy and momentum in a substantial portion of the Brillouin
zone. The higher energy bands are explained as one phonon plus higher
multimagnon absorption processes. Other possible experiments for observing
bimagnons are proposed. In addition we predict the line shape for the spin one
system LaNiO.Comment: Modified version of the paper to be published in PR
First order algorithms in variational image processing
Variational methods in imaging are nowadays developing towards a quite
universal and flexible tool, allowing for highly successful approaches on tasks
like denoising, deblurring, inpainting, segmentation, super-resolution,
disparity, and optical flow estimation. The overall structure of such
approaches is of the form ; where the functional is a data fidelity term also
depending on some input data and measuring the deviation of from such
and is a regularization functional. Moreover is a (often linear)
forward operator modeling the dependence of data on an underlying image, and
is a positive regularization parameter. While is often
smooth and (strictly) convex, the current practice almost exclusively uses
nonsmooth regularization functionals. The majority of successful techniques is
using nonsmooth and convex functionals like the total variation and
generalizations thereof or -norms of coefficients arising from scalar
products with some frame system. The efficient solution of such variational
problems in imaging demands for appropriate algorithms. Taking into account the
specific structure as a sum of two very different terms to be minimized,
splitting algorithms are a quite canonical choice. Consequently this field has
revived the interest in techniques like operator splittings or augmented
Lagrangians. Here we shall provide an overview of methods currently developed
and recent results as well as some computational studies providing a comparison
of different methods and also illustrating their success in applications.Comment: 60 pages, 33 figure
Harvesting Information from Captions for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation
Since acquiring pixel-wise annotations for training convolutional neural
networks for semantic image segmentation is time-consuming, weakly supervised
approaches that only require class tags have been proposed. In this work, we
propose another form of supervision, namely image captions as they can be found
on the Internet. These captions have two advantages. They do not require
additional curation as it is the case for the clean class tags used by current
weakly supervised approaches and they provide textual context for the classes
present in an image. To leverage such textual context, we deploy a multi-modal
network that learns a joint embedding of the visual representation of the image
and the textual representation of the caption. The network estimates text
activation maps (TAMs) for class names as well as compound concepts, i.e.
combinations of nouns and their attributes. The TAMs of compound concepts
describing classes of interest substantially improve the quality of the
estimated class activation maps which are then used to train a network for
semantic segmentation. We evaluate our method on the COCO dataset where it
achieves state of the art results for weakly supervised image segmentation
Magnon-mediated interactions between fermions depend strongly on the lattice structure
We propose two new methods to calculate exactly the spectrum of two
spin- charge carriers moving in a ferromagnetic background, at zero
temperature. We find that if the spins are located on a different sublattice
than that on which the fermions move, magnon-mediated effective interactions
are very strong and can bind the fermions into low-energy bipolarons with
triplet character. This never happens in models where spins and charge carriers
share the same lattice, whether they are in the same band or in different
bands. This proves that effective one-lattice models do not describe correctly
the low-energy part of the two-carrier spectrum of a two-sublattice model, even
though they may describe the low-energy single-carrier spectrum appropriately
High-spin polaron in lightly doped CuO planes
We device and investigate numerically a minimal yet detailed spin polaron
model that describes lightly doped CuO layers. The low-energy physics of a
hole is studied by total-spin-resolved exact diagonalization on clusters of up
to 32 CuO unit cells, revealing features missed by previous studies. In
particular, spin-polaron states with total spin 3/2 are the lowest eigenstates
in several regions of the Brillouin zone. In these regions, and also at other
points the quasiparticle weight is identically zero, indicating orthogonal
states to those represented in the one electron Green's function. This
highlights the importance of proper treatment of spin fluctuations in the
many-body background.Comment: To appear in Phys. Rev. Lett. Final version and Supplementary
Materials will be available at the journal's websit
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