Creating a Standardized Operating Room Management Curriculum for Anesthesia Trainees.

As the healthcare environment evolves, physicians are taking on new roles and responsibilities. In addition to clinical care, physicians must now be knowledgeable about administrative concepts and understand healthcare finances. However, these nonclinical subjects usually are not taught during residency training. Introducing these topics into all residencies in the form of standardized lectures, reading materials, and management rotations is a way to bridge the knowledge gap and better prepare future physicians as they enter the workforce. Currently, very few programs have a curriculum that addresses the required elements. Implementing a specific operating room management curriculum will, ideally, allow residents to gain practica and theoretical experience in this area and develop a better understanding of the scope of administrative medicine.

Rational design of all organic polymer dielectrics.

To date, trial and error strategies guided by intuition have dominated the identification of materials suitable for a specific application. We are entering a data-rich, modelling-driven era where such Edisonian approaches are gradually being replaced by rational strategies, which couple predictions from advanced computational screening with targeted experimental synthesis and validation. Here, consistent with this emerging paradigm, we propose a strategy of hierarchical modelling with successive downselection stages to accelerate the identification of polymer dielectrics that have the potential to surpass 'standard' materials for a given application. Successful synthesis and testing of some of the most promising identified polymers and the measured attractive dielectric properties (which are in quantitative agreement with predictions) strongly supports the proposed approach to material selection.

Effect of pore size on the calculated pressure at biological cells pore wall.

A transient nonlinear finite-element program has been used to calculate the electric field distribution as a function of time for a spherical cell with a pore in a conducting medium during application of a subnanosecond rise time "step" wave, including the effects of dipolar saturation in the water-based cytoplasm and cell medium. The time-dependent pressure on the pore wall has been computed as a function of time as the system polarizes from the change of the energy in the electric field to the left (inside the pore) and to the right (inside the membrane) of the pore wall. The computations suggest that dipolar saturation, while significant, has little effect on the time-dependent electric field distribution but a substantial effect on the field-induced pore wall pressure. Also, the effect of pore size on both the computed electric field and field-induced pressure was studied. As the pore size increases, a collapse in both the electric field and field-induced pressure has been noticed. This suggests that as the pore size increases, the driving force for further opening the pore is not electrical.