Ethical Considerations for Care of the Child Undergoing Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation.

Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) is a complex, highly technical surgical procedure that can offer hope for children born with congenital heart defects. The procedure may only briefly prolong a life, has limited potential for decreasing mortality, and may lead to serious complications, however. Perioperative nurses play an important role in caring for the child who requires ECMO. They are involved in assessing the child, implementing the plan of care, and facilitating communication between the child's family members and the health care team. Thus, perioperative nurses have a responsibility to consider the broad range of ethical issues associated with the procedure. By examining the ethical concepts of beneficence, nonmaleficence, autonomy, justice, and moral distress, the perioperative nurse can better understand the dilemmas that can affect the care and outcome of the critically ill child who requires ECMO.

Evaluating the Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension of artificial neural networks using the Poincaré polynomial.

The Vapnik-Chervonenkis (V-C) dimension of a set of functions representing a feed-forward, multi-layered, single output artificial neural network (ANN) with hard-limited activation functions can be evaluated using the Poincaré polynomial of the implied hyperplane arrangement. This ANN is geometrically a hyperplane arrangement, which is configured to dichotomize a signed set (i.e., a two-class set). As it is known that the cut-intersections of the hyperplane arrangement forms a semi-lattice, the Poincaré polynomial can be used to evaluate certain geometric invariants of this semi-lattice, in particular, the cardinality of the resultant chamber set of the arrangements, which is shown to be the V-C dimension. From this theory, we arrive at a stable formula to compute the V-C dimension values.