Deaf Studies Through the Eyes of Anthropology

For years, the Deaf community has struggled to achieve their language to be seen as a true language and to have empowerment. Research in anthropology has aided the community in this effort by answering questions like: Is Sign Language a real language, what is deaf culture, and how do deaf view their identity? The concepts discussed include: deaf community, culture, identity, membership, ethnicity, and deafness vs. Deafhood. This Literature analysis will identify the efforts previous studies have done and identify what questions still need to be addressed. This paper suggests that more ethnographic research should be conducted with the deaf culture

Equity and Excellence: Creating a Socially Responsible Shared Vision of Academic Quality

The concepts of academic quality and social responsibility in post-secondary organizations are spacious yet becoming more intertwined. With stated organizational values grounded in excellence and diversity, this Organizational Improvement Plan (OIP) seeks to intersect a quality management framework with the equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) efforts at a multi-campus college in Atlantic Canada. Specifically, the problem of practice I aim to resolve is how a shared vision of academic quality may be created through an added lens of social responsibility among the academic leadership team. In order to achieve a shared vision of academic quality, there are two main goals central to this OIP: examine the newly developed APAE framework piloted through an international partner through a lens of local community and examine our quality standards through an EDI lens. Organizational learning theory provides insights into understanding how knowledge is created and used within the organization to accomplish these goals. Central to this initiative is a trianalogous leadership framework grounded in servant, transformational, and collective leadership ideologies used to guide the leadership team in a series of Academic Quality Leadership Lessons through a community of practice model. This process is supported by an appreciative inquiry modality which draws upon the strengths of current quality management initiatives and aims to bring about positive change by enhancing the leadership team’s knowledge of socially responsible quality management practices

Deaf Studies Through the Eyes of Anthropology

For years, the Deaf community has struggled to achieve their language to be seen as a true language and to have empowerment. Research in anthropology has aided the community in this effort by answering questions like: Is Sign Language a real language, what is deaf culture, and how do deaf view their identity? The concepts discussed include: deaf community, culture, identity, membership, ethnicity, and deafness vs. Deafhood. This Literature analysis will identify the efforts previous studies have done and identify what questions still need to be addressed. This paper suggests that more ethnographic research should be conducted with the deaf culture

On Realistic Errors in Quantum Computers

In this thesis, we are concerned with the problem of characterizing noise associated with implementations of quantum circuits. We first explore the notion of error rates of quantum circuits and argue that the semantic distinction between process fidelity as “average error rate” and diamond distance as “worst-case error rate” is wrong. To this end, we analyze their worst-case and average analogies, and show they are proportional to their original measures. We show that the non-unital contributions to the diamond distance are negligible and the discrepancy between the process fidelity and diamond distance is primarily due to unitary errors. We then turn to a new analysis of cycle benchmarking, a randomized benchmarking-like protocol to estimate the process fidelity of a cycle as engineered by randomized compiling. Using this approach, we prove that gate-dependent noise on the randomized gates is de- scribed by a single perturbation term that decays rapidly as long as the implementation is close to a representation. We also comment on how the protocol can be extended to qudits, what the cycle benchmarking decay actually measures, and how our analysis is amenable to the Fourier analysis of randomized benchmarking. We end with a discussion of how the gate-dependent cycle benchmarking process fidelity relates to gate-dependent randomized compiling

Effect of Left Atrial Wall Thickness on Radiofrequency Ablation Success.

INTRODUCTION: Radiofrequency (RF) ablation in thicker regions of the left atrium (LA) may require increased ablation energy in order to achieve effective transmural lesions. Consequently, many cases of recurrent atrial fibrillation (AF) postablation may be due to thicker-than-normal atrial tissue. The aim of this study was to test the hypotheses that patients with recurrent AF have thicker tissue overall and that electrical reconnection is more likely in regions of thicker tissue. METHODS AND RESULTS: Retrospective analysis was performed on 86 CT images acquired preoperatively from a cohort of 119 patients who had undergone RF ablation for AF. Of these, 33 patients experienced recurrence of AF within 1 year of initial treatment and 29 returned for a repeat ablation. For each patient, LA wall thickness (LAWT) was measured from the images in 12 anatomical regions using custom software. Patients with recurrent AF had larger LAWT compared to successfully treated patients (1.6 ± 0.6 mm vs. 1.5 ± 0.5 mm, P \u3c 0.001) and reconnection was found to be at regions of thicker tissue (1.6 ± 0.6 mm, P = 0.038) compared to nonreconnected regions (1.5 ± 0.5 mm). The superior right posterior wall of the LA was significantly related to both recurrence (P = 0.048) and reconnection (P = 0.014). CONCLUSION: Increased LAWT has a small but significant effect on postablation recurrence and reconnection. Measures of LAWT may facilitate appropriate dosing of RF energy, but other factors will be critical in transmural lesion formation and ablation success

Design and Evaluation of a Catheter Contact-Force Controller for Cardiac Ablation Therapy.

GOAL: Maintaining a constant contact force (CF) of an ablation catheter during cardiac catheter ablation therapy is clinically challenging due to inherent myocardial motion, often resulting in poor ablation of arrhythmogenic substrates. To enable a prescribed contact force to be applied during ablation, a catheter contact force controller (CCFC) was developed. METHODS: The system includes a hand-held device attached to a commercial catheter and steerable sheath. A compact linear motor assembly attaches to an ablation catheter and autonomously controls its relative position within the shaft of the steerable sheath. A closed-loop control system is implemented within embedded electronics to enable real-time catheter-tissue contact force control. To evaluate the performance of the CCFC, a linear motion phantom was used to impose a series of physiological CF profiles; lesion CF was controlled at prescribed levels ranging from 15 to 40 g. RESULTS: For a prescribed CF of 25 g, the CCFC was able to regulate the CF with a root mean squared error of 3.7 ± 0.7 g. The ability of the CCFC to retract the catheter upon sudden changes in tissue motion, which may have caused tissue damage, was also demonstrated. Finally, the device was able to regulate the CF for a predetermined amount of time according to a force-time integral model. CONCLUSION: The developed CCFC is capable of regulating catheter-tissue CF in a laboratory setting that mimics clinical ablation therapy. SIGNIFICANCE: Catheter-tissue CF control promises to improve the precision and success of ablation lesion delivery

Time series novelty detection with application to production sensor systems

Modern fiber manufacturing plants rely heavily on the use of automation. Automated facilities use sensors to measure fiber state and react to data patterns, which correspond to physical events. Many patterns can be predefined either by careful analysis or by domain experts. Instances of these patterns can then be discovered through techniques such as pattern recognition. However, pattern recognition will fail to detect events that have not been predefined, potentially causing expensive production errors. A solution to this dilemma, novelty detection, allows for the identification of interesting data patterns embedded in otherwise normal data. In this thesis we investigate some of the aspects of implementing novelty detection in a fiber manufacturing system. Specifically, we empirically evaluate the effectiveness of currently available feature extraction and novelty detection techniques on data from a real fiber manufacturing system. -- Our results show that piecewise linear approximation (PLA) methods produce the highest quality features for fiber property datasets. Motivated by this fact, we introduced a new PLA algorithm called improved bottom up segmentation (IBUS). This new algorithm produced the highest quality features and considerably more data reduction than all currently available feature extraction techniques for our application. -- Further empirical results from several leading time series novelty detection techniques revealed two conclusions. A simple Euclidean distance based technique is the best overall when no feature extraction is used. However, when feature extraction is used the Tarzan technique performs best

Eliminating the effects of motion during radiofrequency lesion delivery using a novel contact-force controller.

INTRODUCTION: Catheter-tissue contact force is a determinant of radiofrequency (RF) ablation lesion effectiveness. However, ablation on a beating heart is subject to force variability, making it difficult to optimally deliver consistently durable and transmural lesions. This work evaluates improvements in contact force stability and lesion reproducibility by using a catheter contact-force controller (CFC) during lesion delivery in vitro and in vivo. METHODS AND RESULTS: Using a sheath and force-sensing catheter, an experienced operator attempted to maintain a constant force of 20 g at targets within the atria and left ventricle of a pig manually and using the CFC; the average force and contact-force variation (CFV) achieved using each approach were compared. Ablation lesions (20 W, 30 seconds, 17 mL/min irrigation) were created in bovine tissue samples mounted on a platform programmed to reproduce clinically relevant motion. CFC-assisted lesions were delivered to stationary and moving tissue with forces of 5 to 35  g. Mimicking manual intervention, lesions were also delivered to moving tissue while the CFC was disabled. Resultant lesion volumes were compared using two-way analysis of variance. When using the CFC, the average force was within 1 g of the set level, with a CFV less than 5 g, during both in vitro and in vivo experiments. Reproducible and statistically identical (P = .82) lesion volumes proportional to the set force were achieved in both stationary and moving tissue when the CFC was used. CONCLUSIONS: CFC assistance maintains constant force in vivo and removes effect of motion on lesion volume during RF lesion delivery

How to diagnose the cause of sudden cardiac arrest

Sudden cardiac death or sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) is defined as natural death that occurs within an hour of the onset of acute symptoms or during sleep due to a primary cardiac cause. Most cases of SCA are attributable to coronary artery disease, with occult cardiomyopathy or inheritable arrhythmic syndromes accounting for a minority of SCA. Diagnosing the cause of SCA has potential implications for the patient and the family, and demands a comprehensive approach. This review summarizes the potential causes of SCA and outlines a systematic diagnostic approach to the SCA survivor. (Cardiol J 2011; 18, 2: 210-216