The Effects of Small Group Exercise on Rate of Perceived Exertion and Mood State in College Students

Please download the pdf version of the abstract

Examination of psychological risk factors for chronic pain following cardiac surgery: protocol for a prospective observational study

© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2019. Re-use permitted under CC BY-NC. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ. INTRODUCTION: Approximately 400 000 Americans and 36 000 Canadians undergo cardiac surgery annually, and up to 56% will develop chronic postsurgical pain (CPSP). The primary aim of this study is to explore the association of pain-related beliefs and gender-based pain expectations on the development of CPSP. Secondary goals are to: (A) explore risk factors for poor functional status and patient-level cost of illness from a societal perspective up to 12 months following cardiac surgery; and (B) determine the impact of CPSP on quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) borne by cardiac surgery, in addition to the incremental cost for one additional QALY gained, among those who develop CPSP compared with those who do not. METHODS AND ANALYSES: In this prospective cohort study, 1250 adults undergoing cardiac surgery, including coronary artery bypass grafting and open-heart procedures, will be recruited over a 3-year period. Putative risk factors for CPSP will be captured prior to surgery, at postoperative day 3 (in hospital) and day 30 (at home). Outcome data will be collected via telephone interview at 6-month and 12-month follow-up. We will employ generalised estimating equations to model the primary (CPSP) and secondary outcomes (function and cost) while adjusting for prespecified model covariates. QALYs will be estimated by converting data from the Short Form-12 (version 2) to a utility score. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: This protocol has been approved by the responsible bodies at each of the hospital sites, and study enrolment began May 2015. We will disseminate our results through CardiacPain.Net, a web-based knowledge dissemination platform, presentation at international conferences and publications in scientific journals. TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER: NCT01842568

the prevention of chronic diseases through ehealth a practical overview

Disease prevention is an umbrella term embracing individual-based or population-based interventions aimed at preventing the manifestation of diseases (primary prevention), reducing the impact of a disease that has arisen (secondary prevention), or mitigating the impact of an ongoing illness (tertiary prevention). Digital health has the potential to improve prevention of chronic diseases. Its application ranges from effective mHealth weight-loss intervention to prevent or delay the onset of diabetes in overweight adults to the cost-effective intervention on the provision of mental-health care via mobile-based or Internet-based programs to reduce the incidence or the severity of anxiety. The present contribution focuses on the effectiveness of eHealth preventive interventions and on the role of digital health in improving health promotion and disease prevention. We also give a practical overview on how eHealth interventions have been effectively implemented, developed, and delivered for the primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention of chronic diseases

Statistical CLEAN technique for ISAR imaging

Inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) images are frequently used in target classification and recognition applications. Some classifiers often require features that can be more easily obtained by extracting scattering centers from ISAR data rather than by reconstructing ISAR images. An available method for scattering center extraction, namely, the CLEAN technique, was proposed in a recent paper by Yang et aL In this paper, an improvement of this CLEAN technique is proposed that introduces a new method for detecting scattering centers. The proposed technique is based on a Gaussianity test, and its effectiveness is first theoretically proven and then tested on real data. Moreover, a comparison with the technique proposed by Yang et aL is shown

Evaluation of soil water content in tilled and cover-cropped olive orchards by the geoelectrical technique

Electrical Resistivity Imaging (ERI) was performed in southern Italy, under semi-arid climate, on a Haplic Calcisol soil of two rainfed oliveorchards managed according to different soil management (Tillage – T, and Cover Cropping – CC), applied for 8 years. The main aim was to test the usefulness of such geoelectrical method for the assessment of spatial and temporal variability of soilwatercontent for water balance studies. For that purpose, the quality of univariate relationships between soil electrical resistivity (ρ) and volumetric soilwatercontent (θv) was tested. Three geoelectrical measurement campaigns were performed in the autumn–spring period of 2006–2007. For each campaign, 3 two-dimensional (2-D) geoelectrical tomographies were carried out in the pole–dipole array using a fixed electrode spacing of 0.25 m. 2-D apparent resistivity pseudosection data sets have been inverted using the software TomoLab®. Each covered soil section was 3 m in depth and 11.5 m long. On 14 November 2006 and 18 April 2007 campaigns the ERI were followed by soil samplings carried out with auger directly below the respective geoelectrical profiles. Direct measurements of soil electrical conductivity and soilwatercontent were conducted on the soil samples in situ and in the laboratory. Volumetric soilwatercontent, θv (mm mm−1), was significantly related to soil electrical resistivity data, ρ (Ω m), by the exponential model θv = 1.641 ρ− 0.599 (R = 0.866, n = 84). This relation allowed to assess the change of soilwatercontent in the two orchards during the autumn–spring period and to reveal that the CC plot was more efficient to intercept and store rainwater. ERI technique allowed to highlight differences between the systems in the dynamics of water distribution along the soil profile as an effect of the adopted soil management. In particular, such technique consented to easily evaluate the extent of watercontent of the deepest soil layers (> 1.0 m) evidencing a significant water reserve in the CC plot, convenient for the root system of rainfed olive trees in the driest months. Finally, the soilwatercontent evaluated by means of the ERI technique was used for the short-term application of soilwater balance which showed interesting data on the progress of water consumption during the autumn–spring period, particularly useful as operative indications for cover crops management

Responses to Caffeine Supplementation in Trained and Untrained Individuals During the Wingate Protocol

Please click the pdf icon to download the abstracts

Results on Super-Resolution and Target Identification Techniques from the SPERI Project

We give an overview of the EDA CAT B R&D project Signal Processing for Enhanced Radar Imaging (SPERI). In this project, the benefits of applying two super-resolution methods Super Spatially Variant Apodization (SSVA) and Compressed Sensing (CS) to two-dimensional Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (ISAR) images of airborne radar targets were investigated with respect to the improvements in automatic target identification rates. The algorithms have been tested over a database of more than 1200 real radar images