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At least 307 records · Page 17Linked to original sources
PubMed1990

Prospects for speech pattern element aids.

A brief discussion is given of new hearing aids which are based on the use of speech pattern elements. Their operation essentially involves the reduction of the complex acoustic structure of the original speech signal into simpler sets of perceptually clear components which are then encoded for maximally relevant presentation to the listener. This approach has four primary features which may contribute crucially to future advances. First, by providing for external analysis, reduced or even non-existent ability in the impaired ear can be palliated. Second, by the selection of appropriate elements of the original speech signal, the stimulation can be tailored so that it matches the residual auditory ability--psychophysical and cognitive--of the deaf person. Third, the speech, language, and also environmental needs of the individual adult or developing child can be met in structured ways. Fourth, the use of selective pattern sensitive analysis methods makes it possible in practice to provide a degree of in-built immunity to domestic and working acoustic environments.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

Mental models and meaningful learning.

If you understand something, you can use the information you have acquired to solve problems to which that knowledge is relevant. Meaningful learning is learning with understanding. Achieving meaningful learning begins with the building of correct, appropriate mental models, or representations, of the knowledge being acquired. The next step is learning to use the available mental models to solve problems. In many of the biomedical sciences, this means being able to either calculate something, predict the responses of the system, or explain the responses of the system. Since only the learner can do the learning, the only possible role for the teacher is to help the learner to learn. This means creating an active learning environment in which the learner can acquire the needed information, continually test the mental models being built, and correct or refine those models as needed. In an active learning environment, students are given ample opportunities to learn to solve problems. If the goal of the course is the achievement of meaningful learning, it is essential that the students then be assessed to determined whether they have reached that goal.

Animals↗
PubMed2006

ArchPRED: a template based loop structure prediction server.

ArchPRED server (http://www.fiserlab.org/servers/archpred) implements a novel fragment-search based method for predicting loop conformations. The inputs to the server are the atomic coordinates of the query protein and the position of the loop. The algorithm selects candidate loop fragments from a regularly updated loop library (Search Space) by matching the length, the types of bracing secondary structures of the query and by satisfying the geometrical restraints imposed by the stem residues. Subsequently, candidate loops are inserted in the query protein framework where their side chains are rebuilt and their fit is assessed by the root mean square deviation (r.m.s.d.) of stem regions and by the number of rigid body clashes with the environment. In the final step remaining candidate loops are ranked by a Z-score that combines information on sequence similarity and fit of predicted and observed [/psi] main chain dihedral angle propensities. The final loop conformation is built in the protein structure and annealed in the environment using conjugate gradient minimization. The prediction method was benchmarked on artificially prepared search datasets where all trivial sequence similarities on the SCOP superfamily level were removed. Under these conditions it was possible to predict loops of length 4, 8 and 12 with coverage of 98, 78 and 28% with at least of 0.22, 1.38 and 2.47 A of r.m.s.d. accuracy, respectively. In a head to head comparison on loops extracted from freshly deposited new protein folds the current method outperformed in a approximately 5:1 ratio an earlier developed database search method.

Algorithms↗
PubMedDate not supplied

The moral context of oncology nursing.

Current work environments in health care are hierarchical social systems built around disease-oriented medical goals and procedures. Expansion of biomedical technologies and cost-containment policies have increased the ethical concerns and problems of nurses and other providers. Yet, nurses often are not included as major contributors in deliberations about solutions to these ethical problems. A patriarchal pattern of decision making reflects the paternalistic organization of patient care settings and discounts the reality that multiple providers from many disciplines and specialties provide patient care. To foster ethical practice as a shared activity, ways are needed to build work environments that foster interdependent practice and facilitate moral discourse among all participants. Actions to promote the development of work environments as moral contexts require systematic attention to conceptual, structural, process, and leadership issues that foster collaboration, open communication, and person-centered care.

Cost Control↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Business management and the environment of care standards.

In summary, the entire JCAHO manual is built around the concept of "know thyself." This expectation creates the need to engage in a substantial rework of existing practices to remove communication barriers and to eliminate turf warfare. The focus of the standards is on the patient. All aspects of the patient-care delivery cycle are examined during survey, as are key elements of the business-management activities. The EC standards are a case study of business management. They expect leadership and planning, development of human resources, management of information, and improvement of performance. They expect that all four of these management tools will be exercised by all managers and staff members who have an impact on or are impacted by the seven elements of the EC function. The primary focus is on teamwork among providers and maximizing benefits to patients.

Health Facility Environment↗
PubMed1992

Positioning device for magnetically sensitive environments.

Presented in this short communication are design principles for the construction of a positioning apparatus for biological specimens in magnetically sensitive environments. An apparatus with 3 degrees of freedom was built and found to provide position accuracy to within +/- 0.25 mm throughout a cubic volume measuring 9 cm on each side.

Animals↗
PubMed1994

GREEN: a program package for docking studies in rational drug design.

A program package, GREEN, has been developed that enables docking studies between ligand molecules and a protein molecule. Based on the structure of the protein molecule, the physical and chemical environment of the ligand-binding site is expressed as three-dimensional grid-point data. The grid-point data are used for the real-time evaluation of the protein-ligand interaction energy, as well as for the graphical representation of the binding-site environment. The interactive docking operation is facilitated by various built-in functions, such as energy minimization, energy contribution analysis and logging of the manipulation trajectory. Interactive modeling functions are incorporated for designing new ligand molecules while considering the binding-site environment and the protein-ligand interaction. As an example of the application of GREEN, a docking study is presented on the complex between trypsin and a synthetic trypsin inhibitor. The program package will be useful for rational drug design, based on the 3D structure of the target protein.

Algorithms↗
PubMed2006

Proposal of Health Information System (HIS) as tool for the epidemiological surveillance of leishmaniasis in urban areas.

In recent years leishmaniasis has become a serious Public Health problem in Italy. The coexistence of infected dogs, vectors and humans, makes urban areas suitable environment for the spread of this zoonotic disease. With the purpose to improve the current system for the control of leishmaniasis in urban areas, the authors report their experiences carrying out a Health Information System (HIS) for the surveillance of the disease in the city of Messina. The HIS project is built on a dataset containing geographical data on urban environment, census tracts at parish level and data of human and canine leishmaniasis cases reported in the last years. The HIS allows the spatial representation of the disease occurrence and can be used as a novel epidemiological tool to perform area-based surveillance.

Animals↗
PubMed2005

Survey of environmental biocontamination on board the International Space Station.

The International Space Station (ISS) is an orbital living and working environment extending from the original Zarya control module built in 1998. The expected life span of the completed station is around 10 years and during this period it will be constantly manned. It is inevitable that the ISS will also be home to an unknown number of microorganisms. This survey reports on microbiological contamination in potable water, air, and on surfaces inside the ISS. The viable counts in potable water did not exceed 1.0 x 10(2) CFU/ml. Sphingomonas sp. and Methylobacterium sp. were identified as the dominant genera. Molecular analysis demonstrated the presence of nucleic acids belonging to various pathogens, but no viable pathogens were recovered. More than 500 samples were collected at different locations over a period of 6 years to characterize air and surface contamination in the ISS. Concentrations of airborne bacteria and fungi were lower than 7.1 x 10(2) and 4.4 x 10(1) CFU/m3, respectively. Staphylococcus sp. was by far the most dominant airborne bacterial genus, whereas Aspergillus sp. and Penicillium sp. dominated the fungal population. The bacterial concentrations in surface samples fluctuated from 2.5 x 10(1) to 4.3 x 10(4) CFU/100 cm2. Staphylococcus sp. dominated in all of these samples. The number of fungi varied between 2.5 x 10(1) and 3.0 x 10(5) CFU/100 cm2, with Aspergillus sp. and Cladosporium sp. as the most dominant genera. Furthermore, the investigations identified the presence of several (opportunistic) pathogens and strains involved in the biodegradation of structural materials.

Air Microbiology↗
PubMed1998

Spine update lumbar interbody cages.

Interbody cage devices, used to assist interbody fusion, are rapidly gaining popularity in the surgical management of chronic low back pain. This update provides a structural classification of commonly used devices and assesses them against a set of clearly defined surgical goals, including ability to correct the existing mechanical deformation, ability to provide mechanical stability, ability to provide a suitable environment for arthrodesis, and ability to limit "built-in" morbidity. In addition, the materials used in the devices are examined regarding their biomechanical, biologic, and radiographic characteristics.

Biomechanical Phenomena↗
PubMed2003

Implementation of a WAP-based telemedicine system for patient monitoring.

Many parties have already demonstrated telemedicine applications that use cellular phones and the Internet. A current trend in telecommunication is the convergence of wireless communication and computer network technologies, and the emergence of wireless application protocol (WAP) devices is an example. Since WAP will also be a common feature found in future mobile communication devices, it is worthwhile to investigate its use in telemedicine. This paper describes the implementation and experiences with a WAP-based telemedicine system for patient-monitoring that has been developed in our laboratory. It utilizes WAP devices as mobile access terminals for general inquiry and patient-monitoring services. Authorized users can browse the patients' general data, monitored blood pressure (BP), and electrocardiogram (ECG) on WAP devices in store-and-forward mode. The applications, written in wireless markup language (WML), WMLScript, and Perl, resided in a content server. A MySQL relational database system was set up to store the BP readings, ECG data, patient records, clinic and hospital information, and doctors' appointments with patients. A wireless ECG subsystem was built for recording ambulatory ECG in an indoor environment and for storing ECG data into the database. For testing, a WAP phone compliant with WAP 1.1 was used at GSM 1800 MHz by circuit-switched data (CSD) to connect to the content server through a WAP gateway, which was provided by a mobile phone service provider in Hong Kong. Data were successfully retrieved from the database and displayed on the WAP phone. The system shows how WAP can be feasible in remote patient-monitoring and patient data retrieval.

Blood Pressure↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Techniques for the visualization of topological defect behavior in nematic liquid crystals.

We present visualization tools for analyzing molecular simulations of liquid crystal (LC) behavior. The simulation data consists of terabytes of data describing the position and orientation of every molecule in the simulated system over time. Condensed matter physicists study the evolution of topological defects in these data, and our visualization tools focus on that goal. We first convert the discrete simulation data to a sampled version of a continuous second-order tensor field and then use combinations of visualization methods to simultaneously display combinations of contractions of the tensor data, providing an interactive environment for exploring these complicated data. The system, built using AVS, employs colored cutting planes, colored isosurfaces, and colored integral curves to display fields of tensor contractions including Westin's scalar cl, cp, and cs metrics and the principal eigenvector. Our approach has been in active use in the physics lab for over a year. It correctly displays structures already known; it displays the data in a spatially and temporally smoother way than earlier approaches, avoiding confusing grid effects and facilitating the study of multiple time steps; it extends the use of tools developed for visualizing diffusion tensor data, re-interpreting them in the context of molecular simulations; and it has answered long-standing questions regarding the orientation of molecules around defects and the conformational changes of the defects.

Journal Article↗
PubMed1983

Biodegradation and photolysis of pentachlorophenol in artificial freshwater streams.

The biodegradation, photolysis, and adsorption of pentachlorophenol (PCP) in outdoor, aquatic environments were examined with man-made channels built by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency at a field station on the Mississippi River near Monticello, Minn. Four channels were used, each channel being approximately 520 m long and receiving river water that flowed through the channels for about 10 h before reentering the river. The channels were dosed continuously during the summer of 1982 with various concentrations of PCP (approximately 0, 48, 144, and 432 micrograms/liter). We monitored the biotic and abiotic degradation of PCP in these channels for approximately 16 weeks. Photolysis of PCP was rapid at the water surface, but greatly attenuated with depth. Depending on sunlight conditions, photolysis accounted for a 5 to 28% decline in initial PCP concentration. Adsorption of PCP by sediment and uptake by biota accounted for less than 15% and probably less than 5% in unacclimated water. Microbial degradation of PCP became significant about 3 weeks after the initiation of dosing and eventually became the primary mechanism of PCP removal, accounting for a 26 to 46% (dose-dependent) decline in initial PCP. Most of the PCP-mineralizing microorganisms that developed in the channels were either attached to surfaces (e.g., rocks and macrophytes) or associated with surface sediments. Total bacterial numbers (direct microscopic counts) in the various channels were not affected significantly by PCP concentrations of micrograms per liter. Numerous strains of bacteria able to grow at the expense of PCP were isolated from the adapted channels. The experiments reported here will help predict the responses of flowing aquatic ecosystems to contamination by biocides such as pentachlorophenol.

Adsorption↗
PubMed2003

A knowledge-acquisition wizard to encode guidelines.

An important step in building guideline-based clinical care systems is encoding guidelines. Protégé-2000, developed in our laboratory, is a general-purpose knowledge-acquisition tool that facilitates domain experts and developers to record, browse and maintain domain knowledge in knowledge bases. In this poster we illustrate a knowledge-acquisition wizard that we built around Protégé-2000. The wizard provides an environment that is more intuitive to domain specialists to enter knowledge, and domain specialists and practitioners to review the knowledge entered.

Artificial Intelligence↗
PubMedDate not supplied

[Notes on some self-induced diseases in prison communities].

The self-induced and simulated diseases in prison communities are numerous and not always easy to detect. This is, at any rate, a peculiar phenomenon that also involves other closed communities external to the prison environment, such as those of the large built-up areas, of the factories, of the schools, of the barracks, etc... As a rule, recourse is had, in the latter, to self-induction and simulation to achieve economic or absenteeistic purposes. In prison communities, self-induction and simulation are instead implemented in order to escape the rigours of the law and detention itself. It is an unquestionable fact, however, that nowadays this phenomenon is regressing, chiefly thanks to the coming into force of law No. 354 of July 26, 1975 on the penitentiary System, that is certainly determining radical improvements within the prisons.

Conjunctivitis↗
PubMed2000

An artificial landscape-scale fishery in the Bolivian Amazon.

Historical ecologists working in the Neotropics argue that the present natural environment is an historical product of human intentionality and ingenuity, a creation that is imposed, built, managed and maintained by the collective multigenerational knowledge and experience of Native Americans. In the past 12,000 years, indigenous peoples transformed the environment, creating what we now recognize as the rich ecological mosaic of the Neotropics. The prehispanic savanna peoples of the Bolivian Amazon built an anthropogenic landscape through the construction of raised fields, large settlement mounds, and earthen causeways. I have studied a complex artificial network of hydraulic earthworks covering 525 km2 in the Baures region of Bolivia. Here I identify a particular form of earthwork, the zigzag structure, as a fish weir, on the basis of form, orientation, location, association with other hydraulic works and ethnographic analogy. The native peoples used this technology to harvest sufficient animal protein to sustain large and dense populations in a savanna environment.

Animals↗
PubMed1996

Carbon dioxide exchange of lettuce plants under hypobaric conditions.

Growth of plants in a Controlled Ecological Life Support System (CELSS) may involve the use of hypobaric pressures enabling lower mass requirements for atmospheres and possible enhancement of crop productivity. A controlled environment plant growth chamber with hypobaric capability designed and built at Ames Research Center was used to determine if reduced pressures influence the rates of photosynthesis (Ps) and dark respiration (DR) of hydroponically grown lettuce plants. The chamber, referred to as a plant volatiles chamber (PVC), has a growing area of about 0.2 m2, a total gas volume of about 0.7 m3, and a leak rate at 50 kPa of <0.1%/day. When the pressure in the chamber was reduced from ambient to 51 kPa, the rate of net Ps increased by 25% and the rate of DR decreased by 40%. The rate of Ps increased linearly with decreasing pressure. There was a greater effect of reduced pressure at 41 Pa CO2 than at 81 Pa CO2. This is consistent with reports showing greater inhibition of photorespiration (Pr) in reduced O2 at low CO2 concentrations. When the partial pressure of O2 was held constant but the total pressure was varied between 51 and 101 kPa, the rate of CO2 uptake was nearly constant, suggesting that low pressure enhancement of Ps may be mainly attributable to lowered partial pressure of O2 and the accompanying reduction in Pr. The effects of lowered partial pressure of O2 on Ps and DR could result in substantial increases in the rates of biomass production, enabling rapid throughput of crops or allowing flexibility in the use of mass and energy resources for a CELSS.

Atmosphere Exposure Chambers↗