Performance assessment using sensor technology.

Over the past 30 years, there have been numerous, noteworthy successes in the development, validation, and implementation of clinical skills assessments. Despite this progress, the medical profession has barely scratched the surface towards developing assessments that capture the true complexity of hands-on skills in procedural medicine. This paper highlights the development implementation and new discoveries in performance metrics when using sensor technology to assess cognitive and technical aspects of hands-on skills.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion in presidential leadership of academic medical and surgical societies.

BACKGROUND: Our aim was to identify gender and racial disparities in presidential leadership for national medical and surgical organizations. METHODS: We located publicly sourced information on national medical organizations. Years between or since the first diverse presidents were analyzed using descriptive statistics and Mann Whitney U tests. RESULTS: Sixty-seven national medical and surgical organizations were surveyed. 70.8% (n = 34) diversified via gender first (White-female), whereas 26.1% (n = 14) had racial diversity first. Organizations with gender diversity first followed with an African American male president sooner than organizations who first diversified by race (14.7 ± 11.8 v. 27.6 ± 11.3 years, p = 0.018). No significant difference was observed for the third tier of diversification. CONCLUSIONS: Significant gender and racial leadership disparities in national medical organizations are still present. It is notable that organizations with female leaders had a shorter timeline to racial diversity. These findings help to inform strategies to promote and increase diversity, equity, and inclusion in national leadership.

Long-term Live Imaging Device for Improved Experimental Manipulation of Zebrafish Larvae.

The zebrafish larva is an important model organism for both developmental biology and wound healing. Further, the zebrafish larva is a valuable system for live high-resolution microscopic imaging of dynamic biological phenomena in space and time with cellular resolution. However, the traditional method of agarose encapsulation for live imaging can impede larval development and tissue regrowth. Therefore, this manuscript describes the zWEDGI (zebrafish Wounding and Entrapment Device for Growth and Imaging), which was designed and fabricated as a functionally compartmentalized device to orient larvae for high-resolution microscopy while permitting caudal fin transection within the device and subsequent unrestrained tail development and re-growth. This device allows for wounding and long-term imaging while maintaining viability. Given that the zWEDGI mold is 3D printed, the customizability of its geometries make it easily modified for diverse zebrafish imaging applications. Furthermore, the zWEDGI offers numerous benefits, such as access to the larva during experimentation for wounding or for the application of reagents, paralleled orientation of multiple larvae for streamlined imaging, and reusability of the device.

zWEDGI: Wounding and Entrapment Device for Imaging Live Zebrafish Larvae.

Zebrafish, an established model organism in developmental biology, is also a valuable tool for imaging wound healing in space and time with cellular resolution. However, long-term imaging of wound healing poses technical challenges as wound healing occurs over multiple temporal scales. The traditional strategy of larval encapsulation in agarose successfully limits sample movement but impedes larval development and tissue regrowth and is therefore not amenable to long-term imaging of wound healing. To overcome this challenge, we engineered a functionally compartmentalized device, the zebrafish Wounding and Entrapment Device for Growth and Imaging (zWEDGI), to orient larvae for high-resolution microscopy, including confocal and second harmonic generation (SHG), while allowing unrestrained tail development and regrowth. In this device, larval viability was maintained and tail regrowth was improved over embedding in agarose. The quality of tail fiber SHG images collected from larvae in the device was similar to fixed samples but provided the benefit of time lapse data collection. Furthermore, we show that this device was amenable to long-term (>24 h) confocal microscopy of the caudal fin. Finally, the zWEDGI was designed and fabricated using readily available techniques so that it can be easily modified for diverse experimental imaging protocols.