Thinking Allowed

medical / technology / education / art / flub

showing posts for 'sure'

Clinically contextualised ECG interpretation: the impact of prior clinical exposure and case vignettes on ECG diagnostic

Does teaching ECGs with a clinical vignette improve training? Not greatly ... but having seen a condition previously (and presumably the ECG that went with it) is probably best. The researchers concluded that "ECG training should therefore not rely on experiential learning alone, but instead be supplemented...
Source: biomedcentral.com

Tracking SARS-CoV-2 variants

 All viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, change over time. Most changes have little to no impact on the virus’ properties. However, some changes may affect the virus’s properties, such as how easily it spreads, the associated disease severity, or the performance...
Source: who.int

Why Did It Take So Long to Accept the Facts About Covid?

"The importance of airborne transmission in the pandemic was clear long before the World Health Organization finally began to acknowledge it." "If the importance of aerosol transmission had been accepted early, we would have been told from the beginning that it was much safer outdoors, where these small...
Source: nytimes.com

Covid-19: Project offers support to overwhelmed Indian doctors

Prof Parag Singhal from Somerset is among those offering online advice to help relieve pressure.
Source: bbc.com

Innovators in Japan are Developing New Technologies to Counter Coronavirus

As the global coronavirus pandemic continues, the world is searching for new measures that will minimize the risk of infection while allowing essential institutions such as hospitals, government, and schools to continue to function.
Source: reuters.com

Effectiveness of a serious game addressing guideline adherence: cohort study with 1.5-year follow-up Tobias Raupach. Insa

Background Patients presenting with acute shortness of breath and chest pain should be managed according to guideline recommendations. Serious games can be used to train clinical reasoning. However, only few studies have used outcomes beyond student satisfaction, and most of the published evidence is...
Source: biomedcentral.com

Detection of a particle shower at the Glashow resonance with IceCube Nature.

The Glashow resonance describes the resonant formation of a W− boson during the interaction of a high-energy electron antineutrino with an electron1, peaking at an antineutrino energy of 6.3 petaelectronvolts (PeV) in the rest frame of the electron. Whereas this energy scale is out of reach for currently...
Source: nature.com

Medical educators’ beliefs about teaching, learning, and knowledge: development of a new framework

Interesting paper about beliefs among medical educators. This has been developed with a qualitative study of undergraduate educators but the framework makes for good reading for those of us involved in urging colleagues and expert speakers to become more learner-centred. "The sharp divide between...
Source: biomedcentral.com

Contactless Sleep Sensing in Nest Hub

“People often turn to technology to manage their health and wellbeing, whether it is to record their daily exercise, measure their heart rate, or increasingly, to understand their sleep patterns. Sleep is foundational to a person’s everyday wellbeing and can be impacted by (and in turn, have an impact...
Source: googleblog.com

Singapore 'bubble' business hotel welcomes first guests

Singapore has launched a travel "bubble" business hotel that allows executives to do face-to-face meetings without a risk of exposure to the coronavirus, in one of the world's first such facilities.
Source: reuters.com

New Technique Reveals Centuries of Secrets in Locked Letters

M.I.T. researchers have devised a virtual-reality technique that lets them read old letters that were mailed not in envelopes but in the writing paper itself after being folded into elaborate enclosures.
Source: nytimes.com

Betting on death of petrol cars, Volvo to go all electric by 2030

"Volvo's entire car lineup will be fully electric by 2030, the Chinese-owned company said on Tuesday, joining a growing number of carmakers planning to phase out fossil-fuel engines by the end of this decade." Maybe the transition to all electric cars is going to go faster than it appeared only a few...
Source: reuters.com

The Technology Behind Cinematic Photos

There has been some work by teams at Google looking at analysing images to extract their 3D features. They launched a new feature called 'cinematic photos' and this blog posted by Per Karlsson and Lucy Yu, Software Engineers, of Google Research tries to explain how it works. "Looking at photos from...
Source: googleblog.com

Fires Raged in the Amazon Again in 2020

"After intense fires in the Amazon captured global attention in 2019, fires again raged throughout the region in 2020. According to an analysis of satellite data from NASA’s Amazon dashboard, the 2020 fire season was actually more severe by some key measures." “Our system identified about 23,000...
Source: nasa.gov

Ancient Northland swamp kauri solves 42,000 year old mystery

NZ Herald: Ancient Northland swamp kauri shows breakdown of Earth's magnetic field 42,000 years ago. "For the first time ever, we have been able to precisely date the timing and environmental impacts of the last magnetic pole switch," Chris Turney, a professor at UNSW Science and co-lead author of the...
Source: nzherald.co.nz

Preventing critical failure

Can routinely collected data be repurposed to predict avoidable patient harm? A quantitative descriptive study Objectives To determine whether sharing of routinely collected health service performance data could have predicted a critical safety failure at an Australian maternity service. Design Observational...
Source: bmj.com

England's current lockdown could be the last

England's current lockdown could be the last, says Neil Ferguson: Expert says growing immunity means England could be in tier 1 or 2 measures by May.
Source: theguardian.com

Effect of school closures on mortality from coronavirus disease 2019: old and new predictions

"It was predicted in March 2020 that in response to covid-19 a broad lockdown, as opposed to a focus on shielding the most vulnerable members of society, would reduce immediate demand for ICU beds at the cost of more deaths long term. The optimal strategy for saving lives in a covid-19 epidemic is different...
Source: bmj.com

Psoriasis severity: commonly used clinical thresholds may not adequately convey patient impact - PubMed: Patients with PASI

Psoriasis severity: commonly used clinical thresholds may not adequately convey patient impact - PubMed: Patients with PASI or BSA scores less than 10 can have major quality of life impairment. In general, the objective measures of BSA and PASI alone, when excluding DLQI, may not fully capture the impact...
Source: nih.gov

Current themes and challenges facing HPE accreditation in the 21st century

A supplement in BMC Medical Education on Health Professional Education accreditation from the community of practice The International Health Professions Accreditation Outcomes Consortium (IFPAOC) - which was founded in 2012. This supplement focuses on graduate and residency programmes but it also addresses...
Source: biomedcentral.com