Effects of socio-emotional stressors on ventilation rate and subjective workload during simulated CPR by lay rescuers

Several studies have documented the occurrence of high ventilation rates during cardiopulmonary resuscitation, but to date, there have been no scientific investigation of the causes of hyperventilation. The objective of the current study was to test the effects of socio-emotional stressors on lay rescuers' ventilation rate in a simulated resuscitation setting using a manikin model. A within-subjects experiment with randomized order of conditions tested lay rescuers' ventilation rate on an intubated manikin during exposure to socio-emotional stressors and during a control condition where no external stressors were present. Ventilation rates and subjective workload were significantly higher during exposure to socio-emotional stressors than during the control condition. All but one of the nine participants ventilated at a higher ventilation rate in the experimental condition. All nine participants rated the subjective workload to be higher during exposure to socio-emotional stressors. Hence, exposure to socio-emotional stressors is associated with increased ventilation rates performed by lay rescuers during simulated cardiac arrest using a manikin model. These findings might have implications for the understanding of the type of situations which hyperventilation may occur. Awareness of these situations may have implications for training of lay rescues.     

Interaction between radiation and drug damage in mammalian cells. II. The effect of actinomycin-D on the repair of the sublethal radiation damage in plateau phase cells

The effect of actinomycin-D (AMD) on radiation damage repair was studied in plateau phase V79 Chinese hamster cells. Sublethal radiation damage repair, as demonstrated by survival fluctuations following two x-ray exposures separted by time, was observed in our plateau phase cells. Plateau phase cells exposed to 0.01-0.04 mug/ml AMD (a nontoxic regimen to 8 hours) between x-ray exposures were less able to repair sublethal damage. If plateau phase cells were plated at low dilutions into fresh medium (conditions for resuming exponential growth) immediately after the first x-ray dose, and exposed to 0.01--0.04 mug/ml AMD until the second dose, inhibition of sublethal damage repair and additional cell killing were observed particularly at 0.04 mug/ml AMD. It is suggested that radiation-drug damage interactions should be studied in plateau phase cells and in cells resuming exponential growth after plateau phase (possibly analogous to "recruitment"), as well as in exponential phase cultures.     

Effects of hypothalamic temperature changes on the sweat rate in Macaca mulatta

The concept of cardiac reconditioning centers for the prevention and rehabilitation of coronary patients has been tremendously successful in Germany over the past 20 years. At least 40 such centers are located throughout the country. Physicians, nurses, and physical therapists work closely together in the various facets of the rehabilitation process. The financial backing for these facilities is primarily through governmental and regional insurance companies, whose officials are apparently convinced that in the long run supporting preventive measures is financially sound. Objective data supporting their convictions come from studies such as that of Brusis, who showed that such as that of 1,500 employees was diminished by nearly 70 percent during a two-year period after cardiac reconditioning, as compared to a similar time period before the rehabilitation experience. Subjective benefits, which are extremely difficult to quantitate in meaningful terms, were nonetheless expressed by nearly all the patients with whom I conversed. Perhaps they have experienced the same feelings that Mark Twain did when he observed that "all frets and worries and chafings sank to sleep in the presence of the benignant serenity of the Alps; the Great Spirit of the Mountains breathed his own peace upon their hurt minds and sore hearts and healed them."     

The emotional aftermath of adoption

Adopted children are emotionally vulnerable. Adoptive parents must cope with more complex problems than biologic parents. The family physician can provide valuable counseling. Preadoption counseling focuses on motivation and ambivalence. After adoption, however, serious, sometimes predictable, issues arise, such as: how and when to tell the child he is adopted; the child's search for knowledge; the problem of subsequent divorce; the birth of a natural sibling, and the involvement of other family members. New concepts include "open adoption" and "single parent adoption."     

EnvironalPlanning: Analytic Network Process Model for Environmentally Conscious Construction Planning

Although the construction pollution index has been put forward and proved to be an efficient approach to reducing or mitigating pollution level during the construction planning stage, the problem of how to select the best construction plan based on distinguishing the degree of its potential adverse environmental impacts is still a research task. This paper first reviews environmental issues and their characteristics in construction, which are critical factors in evaluating potential adverse impacts of a construction plan. These environmental characteristics are then used to structure two decision models for environmental-conscious construction planning by using an analytic network process (ANP), including a complicated model and a simplified model. The two ANP models are combined and called the EnvironalPlanning system, which is applied to evaluate potential adverse environmental impacts of alternative construction plans.     

An integrated model for supplier selection process

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Structurally noise resistant classifier for multi-modal person verification

In this letter we propose a piece-wise linear (PL) classifier for use as the decision stage in a two-modal verification system, comprised of a face and a speech expert. The classifier utilizes a fixed decision boundary that has been specifically designed to account for the effects of noisy audio conditions. Experimental results on the VidTIMIT database show that in clean conditions, the proposed classifier is outperformed by a traditional weighted summation decision stage (using both fixed and adaptive weights). Using white Gaussian noise to corrupt the audio data resulted in the PL classifier obtaining better performance than the fixed approach and similar performance to the adaptive approach. Using a more realistic noise type, namely “operations room” noise from the NOISEX-92 corpus, resulted in the PL classifier obtaining better performance than both the fixed and adaptive approaches. The better results in this case stem from the PL classifier not making a direct assumption about the type of noise that causes the mismatch between training and testing conditions (unlike the adaptive approach). Moreover, the PL classifier has the advantage of having a fixed (non-adaptive, thus simpler) structure.     

Preserving Topology by a Digitization Process

The main task of digital image processing is to recognize properties of real objects based on their digital images. These images are obtained by some sampling device, like a CCD camera, and represented as finite sets of points that are assigned some value in a gray-level or color scale. Based on technical properties of sampling devices, these points are usually assumed to form a square grid and are modeled as finite subsets of Z². Therefore, a fundamental question in digital image processing is which features in the digital image correspond, under certain conditions, to properties of the underlying objects. In practical applications this question is mostly answered by visually judging the obtained digital images. In this paper we present a comprehensive answer to this question with respect to topological properties. In particular, we derive conditions relating properties of real objects to the grid size of the sampling device which guarantee that a real object and its digital image are topologically equivalent. These conditions also imply that two digital images of a given object are topologically equivalent. This means, for example, that shifting or rotating an object or the camera cannot lead to topologically different images, i.e., topological properties of obtained digital images are invariant under shifting and rotation.