Preparing the foundations for video-based, practice-placement support: establishing the role from a students’ perspective

Currently, many placement-based health programme students within the UK are supported through face-to-face visits from university staff. Whilst cited in literature as being of value, the face-to-face nature of this contact is not supported. Alternatives including video-based communications methods offer the potential for cost effective, environmentally responsible support. However, in order to establish the fitness for purpose of alternative approaches, the content and purpose of current support needs to be understood. This project aimed to investigate student perceptions of the ideal content and purpose of clinical support visits, and alternatives to the current face-to-face approach. Fifty-six Physiotherapy undergraduate students responded to questionnaires with a further nine participating in a follow-up focus group. Participants emphasised the value of the visit in guiding learning, ensuring progression and resolving arising issues, and highlighted concerns over alternative approaches. Focus group participants discussed the importance of personal and professional confidence in directing requirements for support, and went on to propose a menu of options for methods of communication.Whilst limited in some applications, video technologies may be one of the options. Overall, however, this project supports the need for consideration of individualised learning journeys within curriculum planning

Looking Beyond What You See: An Empirical Analysis on Subgroup Intersectional Fairness for Multi-label Chest X-ray Classification Using Social Determinants of Racial Health Inequities

There has been significant progress in implementing deep learning models in disease diagnosis using chest X- rays. Despite these advancements, inherent biases in these models can lead to disparities in prediction accuracy across protected groups. In this study, we propose a framework to achieve accurate diagnostic outcomes and ensure fairness across intersectional groups in high-dimensional chest X- ray multi-label classification. Transcending traditional protected attributes, we consider complex interactions within social determinants, enabling a more granular benchmark and evaluation of fairness. We present a simple and robust method that involves retraining the last classification layer of pre-trained models using a balanced dataset across groups. Additionally, we account for fairness constraints and integrate class-balanced fine-tuning for multi-label settings. The evaluation of our method on the MIMIC-CXR dataset demonstrates that our framework achieves an optimal tradeoff between accuracy and fairness compared to baseline methods.Comment: ICCV CVAMD 202

Slave women and free men : gender, sexuality and culture in early Abbasid times

Dissertation. Ph.D. American University of Beirut. Department of History and Archaeology, 2015. D:63Advisor : Dr. Nadia Maria El-Cheikh, Professor, History and Archaeology ; Members of Committee: Dr. Abdul Rahim Abu-Husayn, Professor, History and Archaeology ; Dr. Hugh Kennedy, Professor, SOAS, University of London ; Dr. John Meloy, Professor, History and Archaeology ; Dr. Bilal Orfali, Associate Professor, Ohio State University .Includes bibliographical references (leaves 156-166)This thesis investigates the masculine conceptual framework defining the sexual and cultural roles of slave women in a selection of Abbasid legal, literary and historical male-authored foundational texts. It argues that the main Abbasid intellectual protagonists, namely the 'alim, the faqih, the adib and the mu'arrikh, perceived the licit and potentially uninhibited sexual access to concubines in urban and caliphal households as well as in majalis of poetry and song as an ethical, social and cultural threat which called for a delineation of the values and beliefs that governed sexual relations between free men and slave women. At stake was not only the demarcation of what constituted an ideal Muslim gendering of sexual roles but also the regulation of slave (and free) women’s cultural roles. The three genres of textual discourse, namely, legal, literary and historical, are studied in three chapters respectively. Each chapter presents an overview of a genre’s relevance for the history of slave women and asks the following questions: What are the categories and vocabulary used to designate the sexual and cultural roles of slave women? How do gender, slavery, and cultural legitimacy intervene in defining these roles? How are they related to the roles of free women? The first chapter shows that the legal regulation of sexual relations between free men and slave women was primarily aimed at preserving social hierarchy, protecting the honor and dignity of free women, honor forming a distinctive feature of freedom, while granting slave women a margin of social mobility. The second chapter contends that adab discourse perceived the sexuality of both slave and free women as a source of conflict and favored a conception of both slave and free women as mainly producers of offspring rather than objects of desire. It encouraged the adoption of a similar ethical code of conduct with both slave and free women to ensure men’s well-being and reduce tension within the household. The third chapter proposes that

“Avoiding or approaching eyes”? Introversion/extraversion affects the gaze-cueing effect

We investigated whether the extra-/introversion personality dimension can influence processing of others’ eye gaze direction and emotional facial expression during a target detection task. On the basis of previous evidence showing that self-reported trait anxiety can affect gaze-cueing with emotional faces, we also verified whether trait anxiety can modulate the influence of intro-/extraversion on behavioral performance. Fearful, happy, angry or neutral faces, with either direct or averted gaze, were presented before the target appeared in spatial locations congruent or incongruent with stimuli’s eye gaze direction. Results showed a significant influence of intra-/extraversion dimension on gaze-cueing effect for angry, happy, and neutral faces with averted gaze. Introverts did not show the gaze congruency effect when viewing angry expressions, but did so with happy and neutral faces; extraverts showed the opposite pattern. Importantly, the influence of intro-/extraversion on gaze-cueing was not mediated by trait anxiety. These findings demonstrated that personality differences can shape processing of interactions between relevant social signals

AI in Pathology: What could possibly go wrong?

The field of medicine is undergoing rapid digital transformation. Pathologists are now striving to digitize their data, workflows, and interpretations, assisted by the enabling development of whole-slide imaging. Going digital means that the analog process of human diagnosis can be augmented or even replaced by rapidly evolving AI approaches, which are just now entering into clinical practice. But with such progress comes challenges that reflect a variety of stressors, including the impact of unrepresentative training data with accompanying implicit bias, data privacy concerns, and fragility of algorithm performance. Beyond such core digital aspects, considerations arise related to difficulties presented by changing disease presentations, diagnostic approaches, and therapeutic options. While some tools such as data federation can help with broadening data diversity while preserving expertise and local control, they may not be the full answer to some of these issues. The impact of AI in pathology on the field's human practitioners is still very much unknown: installation of unconscious bias and deference to AI guidance need to be understood and addressed. If AI is widely adopted, it may remove many inefficiencies in daily practice and compensate for staff shortages. It may also cause practitioner deskilling, dethrilling, and burnout. We discuss the technological, clinical, legal, and sociological factors that will influence the adoption of AI in pathology, and its eventual impact for good or ill

Integrated platform for multiscale molecular imaging and phenotyping of the human brain.

Understanding cellular architectures and their connectivity is essential for interrogating system function and dysfunction. However, we lack technologies for mapping the multiscale details of individual cells and their connectivity in the human organ-scale system. We developed a platform that simultaneously extracts spatial, molecular, morphological, and connectivity information of individual cells from the same human brain. The platform includes three core elements: a vibrating microtome for ultraprecision slicing of large-scale tissues without losing cellular connectivity (MEGAtome), a polymer hydrogel-based tissue processing technology for multiplexed multiscale imaging of human organ-scale tissues (mELAST), and a computational pipeline for reconstructing three-dimensional connectivity across multiple brain slabs (UNSLICE). We applied this platform for analyzing human Alzheimers disease pathology at multiple scales and demonstrating scalable neural connectivity mapping in the human brain

Patient diversity and author representation in clinical studies supporting the Surviving Sepsis Campaign guidelines for management of sepsis and septic shock 2021: a systematic review of citations

Background: The generalizability of the Surviving Sepsis Campaign (SSC) guidelines to various patient populations and hospital settings has been debated. A quantitative assessment of the diversity and representation in the clinical evidence supporting the guidelines would help evaluate the generalizability of the recommendations and identify strategic research goals and priorities. In this study, we evaluated the diversity of patients in the original studies, in terms of sex, race/ethnicity, and geographical location. We also assessed diversity in sex and geographical representation among study first and last authors. Methods: All clinical studies cited in support of the 2021 SSC adult guideline recommendations were identified. Original clinical studies were included, while editorials, reviews, non-clinical studies, and meta-analyses were excluded. For eligible studies, we recorded the proportion of male patients, percentage of each represented racial/ethnic subgroup (when available), and countries in which they were conducted. We also recorded the sex and location of the first and last authors. The World Bank classification was used to categorize countries. Results: The SSC guidelines included six sections, with 85 recommendations based on 351 clinical studies. The proportion of male patients ranged from 47 to 62%. Most studies did not report the racial/ ethnic distribution of the included patients; when they did so, most were White patients (68–77%). Most studies were conducted in high-income countries (77–99%), which included Europe/Central Asia (33–66%) and North America (36–55%). Moreover, most first/last authors were males (55–93%) and from high-income countries (77–99%). Conclusions: To enhance the generalizability of the SCC guidelines, stakeholders should define strategies to enhance the diversity and representation in clinical studies. Though there was reasonable representation in sex among patients included in clinical studies, the evidence did not reflect diversity in the race/ethnicity and geographical locations. There was also lack of diversity among the first and last authors contributing to the evidence