Expressing the Complexities of the Student-Cadaver Relationship Through Visual Artwork.

ABSTRACT: Many physician assistant (PA) students first encounter death in the earliest days of their training when working with cadavers in the gross anatomy laboratory. Developing a deep knowledge of human anatomy is fundamental to health profession training programs and modern medical practice. Despite decreased laboratory hours and integration of technology and diagnostic imaging into modern anatomy courses, there remains value in the cadaver dissection experience. Medical learners experience diverse and complex feelings toward cadavers; learning to regulate one's personal responses within the anatomy laboratory is a skill that can be extrapolated to clinical practice. Art is one way for students to process their experiences with cadavers, and creating art for cadaver memorial ceremonies is an opportunity for student emotional processing while honoring the lives of their cadaveric teachers. A PA program in New England incorporated student art into a cadaver memorial ceremony, with 4 pieces of artwork and corresponding artist statements from that ceremony included in this piece. The works of art are visually diverse, but there is a shared sentiment in the artist statements of reflection, awe, appreciation, and humanity. Encouraging students to process complex experiences artistically may provide an enduring practice throughout a career in medicine.

Multipass Target Search in Natural Environments.

Consider a disaster scenario where search and rescue workers must search difficult to access buildings during an earthquake or flood. Often, finding survivors a few hours sooner results in a dramatic increase in saved lives, suggesting the use of drones for expedient rescue operations. Entropy can be used to quantify the generation and resolution of uncertainty. When searching for targets, maximizing mutual information of future sensor observations will minimize expected target location uncertainty by minimizing the entropy of the future estimate. Motion planning for multi-target autonomous search requires planning over an area with an imperfect sensor and may require multiple passes, which is hindered by the submodularity property of mutual information. Further, mission duration constraints must be handled accordingly, requiring consideration of the vehicle's dynamics to generate feasible trajectories and must plan trajectories spanning the entire mission duration, something which most information gathering algorithms are incapable of doing. If unanticipated changes occur in an uncertain environment, new plans must be generated quickly. In addition, planning multipass trajectories requires evaluating path dependent rewards, requiring planning in the space of all previously selected actions, compounding the problem. We present an anytime algorithm for autonomous multipass target search in natural environments. The algorithm is capable of generating long duration dynamically feasible multipass coverage plans that maximize mutual information using a variety of techniques such as ϵ -admissible heuristics to speed up the search. To the authors' knowledge this is the first attempt at efficiently solving multipass target search problems of such long duration. The proposed algorithm is based on best first branch and bound and is benchmarked against state of the art algorithms adapted to the problem in natural Simplex environments, gathering the most information in the given search time.

Isolation of genomic DNA from buccal swabs for forensic analysis, using fully automated silica-membrane purification technology.

We developed a reliable and efficient, fully automated method for high-throughput isolation of genomic DNA from buccal swabs, based on silica-membrane technology. It was demonstrated that DNA purified using this method performed successfully in downstream applications relevant to forensic science and molecular diagnostics.

Enlarged spinoglenoid notch veins causing suprascapular nerve compression.

OBJECTIVE: To report the magnetic resonance (MR) imaging findings of enlarged veins in the spinoglenoid notch as a cause of suprascapular nerve compression. DESIGN AND PATIENTS: Six patients presented to MR imaging for evaluation of chronic shoulder pain. Clinical information and MR imaging studies were reviewed. The spinoglenoid notch vascular structures were compared with measurements made in 10 age-matched controls. RESULTS: Spinoglenoid notch vascular structures measured in 10 asymptomatic age-matched control patients ranged from 1 to 4 mm in diameter with an average of 2.2 mm. The six study patients had vascular structures that ranged from 6 to 10 mm in diameter with an average of 8.4 mm. Atrophy and fatty infiltration of the infraspinatus muscle was noted as an associated finding at MR imaging in all six patients. Surgery was performed in three of the six patients, at which time a venous varix was identified in the spinoglenoid notch in all three patients. CONCLUSION: We describe distended veins in the spinoglenoid notch. These may be readily apparent at MR imaging and should be distinguished from paralabral ganglion cysts compressing the suprascapular nerve in the absence of labral tears, especially if percutaneous aspiration of a ganglion cyst is entertained.