The ACTTION-APS-AAPM Pain Taxonomy (AAAPT) Multidimensional Approach to Classifying Acute Pain Conditions.

Objective: With the increasing societal awareness of the prevalence and impact of acute pain, there is a need to develop an acute pain classification system that both reflects contemporary mechanistic insights and helps guide future research and treatment. Existing classifications of acute pain conditions are limiting, with a predominant focus on the sensory experience (e.g., pain intensity) and pharmacologic consumption. Consequently, there is a need to more broadly characterize and classify the multidimensional experience of acute pain. Setting: Consensus report following expert panel involving the Analgesic, Anesthetic, and Addiction Clinical Trial Translations, Innovations, Opportunities, and Networks (ACTTION), American Pain Society (APS), and American Academy of Pain Medicine (AAPM). Methods: As a complement to a taxonomy recently developed for chronic pain, the ACTTION public-private partnership with the US Food and Drug Administration, the APS, and the AAPM convened a consensus meeting of experts to develop an acute pain taxonomy using prevailing evidence. Key issues pertaining to the distinct nature of acute pain are presented followed by the agreed-upon taxonomy. The ACTTION-APS-AAPM Acute Pain Taxonomy will include the following dimensions: 1) core criteria, 2) common features, 3) modulating factors, 4) impact/functional consequences, and 5) putative pathophysiologic pain mechanisms. Future efforts will consist of working groups utilizing this taxonomy to develop diagnostic criteria for a comprehensive set of acute pain conditions. Perspective: The ACTTION-APS-AAPM Acute Pain Taxonomy (AAAPT) is a multidimensional acute pain classification system designed to classify acute pain along the following dimensions: 1) core criteria, 2) common features, 3) modulating factors, 4) impact/functional consequences, and 5) putative pathophysiologic pain mechanisms. Conclusions: Significant numbers of patients still suffer from significant acute pain, despite the advent of modern multimodal analgesic strategies. Mismanaged acute pain has a broad societal impact as significant numbers of patients may progress to suffer from chronic pain. An acute pain taxonomy provides a much-needed standardization of clinical diagnostic criteria, which benefits clinical care, research, education, and public policy. For the purposes of the present taxonomy, acute pain is considered to last up to seven days, with prolongation to 30 days being common. The current understanding of acute pain mechanisms poorly differentiates between acute and chronic pain and is often insufficient to distinguish among many types of acute pain conditions. Given the usefulness of the AAPT multidimensional framework, the AAAPT undertook a similar approach to organizing various acute pain conditions

Custom Integrated Circuits

Contains table of contents for Part III, table of contents for Section 1 and reports on eleven research projects.IBM CorporationMIT School of EngineeringNational Science Foundation Grant MIP 94-23221Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency/U.S. Army Intelligence Center Contract DABT63-94-C-0053Mitsubishi CorporationNational Science Foundation Young Investigator Award Fellowship MIP 92-58376Joint Industry Program on Offshore Structure AnalysisAnalog DevicesDefense Advanced Research Projects AgencyCadence Design SystemsMAFET ConsortiumConsortium for Superconducting ElectronicsNational Defense Science and Engineering Graduate FellowshipDigital Equipment CorporationMIT Lincoln LaboratorySemiconductor Research CorporationMultiuniversity Research IntiativeNational Science Foundatio

An interactive learning environment for VLSI design

The interactive learning environment (ILE) is designed to combine the traditional resources of a textbook with the “hands-on” design experiences that are vital to a real understanding of basic engineering principles. The ILE builds on the technology developed for the World Wide Web to provide a learning environment that can be easily accessed from any browser. In addition to browseable text, JAVA-based computer-aided design (CAD) tools can be accessed through interactive figures embedded in the text, where students can investigate circuit behavior under the guidance of focused tutorials. Keywords—Computer-aided instruction, design automation, educational technology, electrical engineering education, integrated circuit design, interactive computing, unsupervised learning, very large scale integration (VLSI). I. TODAY’S LEARNING ENVIRONMENT Very large scale integration (VLSI) design classes have been very popular at universities for at least two decades and continue to be in high demand as students seek to exploit the rapidly expanding technological base. Today, these design techniques are taught by a combination of lectures, recitations, teaching assistant tutorial sessions, textbook reading assignments, problem sets, and laboratory exercises, culminating in a term project that is often submitted for fabrication, the resulting chip being returned later for testing. Students appreciate the increasingly central role of VLSI in our technical culture and seek to understand and appreciate the MOS VLSI design process, even if they do not intend to become professional VLSI designers. They sense the excitement of creating a design from scratch (i.e., synthesis) and of actually building something useful. Synthesis implies choice among design alternatives and, hence, exploration of the consequences of design decisions. However, today’s learning en

A Dynamic Platform for Runtime Adaptation

We present a middleware platform for assembling pervasive applications that demand fault-tolerance and adaptivity in distributed, dynamic environments. Unlike typical adaptive middleware approaches, in which sophisticated component model semantics are embedded into an existing, underlying platform (e.g., CORBA, COM, EJB), we propose a platform that imposes minimal constraints for greater flexibility. Such a tradeoff is advantageous when the platform is targeted by automatic code generators that inherently enforce correctness by construction. Applications are written as simple, single-threaded programs that assemble and monitor a set of distributed components. The approach decomposes applications into two distinct layers: (1) a distributed network of interconnected modules performing computations, and (2) constructor logic that assembles that network via a simple block-diagram construction API. The constructor logic subsequently monitors the configured system via a stream of high-level events, such as notifications of resource availability or failures, and consequently provides a convenient, centralized location for reconfiguration and debugging. The component network is optimized for performance, while the construction API is optimized for ease of assembly