Performance of Fluid Infusion Systems in the Changing Atmospheric Pressures Encountered in Aviation.

Introduction: With the increasing use of aeromedical transport for critically ill patients, it is essential to understand the impact of pressure changes on drug infusion delivery systems. As airplanes ascend and descend, gases/bubbles are released from solutions when ambient pressure decreases and dissolves when pressure increases. This may affect mechanical fluid delivery systems and cause clinically significant changes, especially within a critical care setting.

An exploration of governance in teaching hospitals in the Netherlands focused on educational objectives.

Background: Many countries are improving medical education in teaching hospitals through more focus on internal quality assurance, for example by creating new stakeholders like hospital-wide education committees. Adequate oversight is thought essential to ensure the quality of medical education. How teaching hospitals distribute roles and responsibilities for quality control across educational stakeholders to organize this oversight is rarely investigated.

System-failing creativity in health care.

Introduction: Health care professionals often generate novel solutions to solve problems during day-to-day patient care. However, less is known about generating novel and useful (i.e.

Cochlear Implant Electrode Placement and Music Perception.

Importance: Cochlear implants enable improvements in speech perception, but music perception outcomes remain variable. Image-guided cochlear implant programming has emerged as a potential programming strategy for increasing the quality of spectral information delivered through the cochlear implant to improve outcomes.

Objectives: To perform 2 experiments, the first of which modeled the variance in music perception scores as a function of electrode positioning factors, and the second of which evaluated image-guided cochlear implant programming as a strategy to improve music perception with a cochlear implant.

The relationship between channel interaction, electrode placement, and speech perception in adult cochlear implant users.

This study (1) characterized the effects of channel interaction using spectral blurring, (2) evaluated an image-guided electrode selection (IGES) method aiming to reduce channel interaction, and (3) investigated the impact of electrode placement factors on the change in performance by condition. Twelve adult MED-EL (Innsbruck, Austria) cochlear implant recipients participated. Performance was compared across six conditions: baseline (no blurring), all blurred, apical blurred, middle blurred, basal blurred, and IGES.

Consonant articulation accuracy in paediatric cochlear implant recipients.

Hearing loss is a significant risk factor for delays in the spoken language development of children. The purpose of this study was to examine the distribution of articulation errors for English consonants among children with cochlear implants (CIs) who utilise auditory-oral communication. Speech samples from 45 prelingually deafened paediatric CI users were obtained using a single-word picture elicitation task.

Frequency-to-Place Mismatch and Cochlear Implant Outcomes by Electrode Type.

Importance: Speech recognition outcomes with a cochlear implant (CI) are highly variable. One factor suggested to correlate with CI-aided speech recognition is frequency-to-place mismatch, or the discrepancy between the natural tonotopic organization of the cochlea and the electric frequency allocation of the CI electrodes within the patient's cochlea.

Objective: To evaluate the association between frequency-to-place mismatch and speech recognition outcomes in a large cohort of postlingually deafened adult CI users, while controlling for various clinical factors known to be associated with those outcomes.

The relationships between cochlear nerve health and AzBio sentence scores in quiet and noise in postlingually deafened adult cochlear implant users.

Objectives: This study investigated the relationships between the cochlear nerve (CN) health and sentence-level speech perception outcomes measured in quiet and noise in postlingually deafened adult cochlear implant (CI) users.

Design: Study participants included 24 postlingually deafened adult CI users with a Cochlear Nucleus device. For each participant, only one ear was tested.

Hybrid Cochlear Implant Outcomes and Improving Outcomes With Electric-Acoustic Stimulation.

Introduction: Electric-acoustic stimulation (EAS) provides cochlear implant (CI) recipients with preserved low-frequency acoustic hearing in the implanted ear affording auditory cues not reliably transmitted by the CI including fundamental frequency, temporal fine structure, and interaural time differences (ITDs). A prospective US multicenter clinical trial was conducted examining the safety and effectiveness of a hybrid CI for delivering EAS.

Materials And Methods: Fifty-two adults (mean age 59.

Barriers to Cochlear Implant Uptake in Adults: A Scoping Review.

Introduction: Cochlear implants (CIs) provide access to sound and help mitigate the negative effects of hearing loss. As a field, we are successfully implanting more adults with greater amounts of residual hearing than ever before. Despite this, utilization remains low, which is thought to arise from barriers that are both intrinsic and extrinsic.

No evidence that mutations in SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern derive from homologous fragments in gut microbiota.

Understanding the origin and evolution of mutations in SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern (VOCs) is a critical area of research. B. Cao, X.

Speech motor impairment in ALS is associated with multiregional cortical thinning beyond primary motor cortex.

Introduction: Cortical thinning is well-documented in individuals with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), yet its association with speech deterioration remains understudied. This study characterizes anatomical changes in the brain within the context of speech impairment patterns in individuals with ALS, providing insight into the disease's multiregional spread and biology.

Methods: To evaluate patterns of cortical thickness in speakers with ALS with and without functional speech changes compared to healthy controls (HCs) using whole-brain and region of interest (ROI) analyses.

Cochlear implant users experience the sound-to-music effect.

Introduction: The speech-to-song illusion is a robust effect where repeated speech induces the perception of singing; this effect has been extended to repeated excerpts of environmental sounds (sound-to-music effect). Here we asked whether repetition could elicit musical percepts in cochlear implant (CI) users, who experience challenges with perceiving music due to both physiological and device limitations.

Methods: Thirty adult CI users and thirty age-matched controls with normal hearing (NH) completed two repetition experiments for speech and nonspeech sounds (water droplets).

Changes in body composition and average daily energy expenditure of men and women during arduous extended polar travel.

Weight and skin-fold measurements were made at five-day intervals during a 47-day expedition by six men and three women from the edge of the sea ice to the South Pole. From these, together with detailed manual records of the nutrition for individual participants, the average daily energy expenditure was determined before and after a resupply at approximately mid-point of the expedition. For all participants body weight fell during the expedition with the overall loss being much smaller for the three female participants (-4.

A new lineage nomenclature to aid genomic surveillance of dengue virus.

Dengue virus (DENV) is currently causing epidemics of unprecedented scope in endemic settings and expanding to new geographical areas. It is therefore critical to track this virus using genomic surveillance. However, the complex patterns of viral genomic diversity make it challenging to use the existing genotype classification system.

Clinical Applications for Spread of Excitation Functions Obtained Via Electrically Evoked Compound Action Potentials (eCAP).

Objectives: To assess the clinical utility of spread of excitation (SOE) functions obtained via electrically evoked compound action potentials (eCAP) to 1) identify electrode array tip fold-over, 2) predict electrode placement factors confirmed via postoperative computed tomography (CT) imaging, and 3) predict postoperative speech recognition through the first year post-activation in a large clinical sample.

Study Design: Retrospective case review.

Setting: Cochlear implant (CI) program at a tertiary medical center.

The impact of spectral and temporal processing on speech recognition in children with cochlear implants.

While the relationships between spectral resolution, temporal resolution, and speech recognition are well defined in adults with cochlear implants (CIs), they are not well defined for prelingually deafened children with CIs, for whom language development is ongoing. This cross-sectional study aimed to better characterize these relationships in a large cohort of prelingually deafened children with CIs (N = 47; mean age = 8.33 years) by comprehensively measuring spectral resolution thresholds (measured via spectral modulation detection), temporal resolution thresholds (measured via sinusoidal amplitude modulation detection), and speech recognition (measured via monosyllabic word recognition, vowel recognition, and sentence recognition in noise via both fixed signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and adaptively varied SNR).

A new lineage nomenclature to aid genomic surveillance of dengue virus.

Dengue virus (DENV) is currently causing epidemics of unprecedented scope in endemic settings and expanding to new geographical areas. It is therefore critical to track this virus using genomic surveillance. However, the complex patterns of viral genomic diversity make it challenging to use the existing genotype classification system.

Objective measure of binaural processing: Acoustic change complex in response to interaural phase differences.

Combining cochlear implants with binaural acoustic hearing via preserved hearing in the implanted ear(s) is commonly referred to as combined electric and acoustic stimulation (EAS). EAS fittings can provide patients with significant benefit for speech recognition in complex noise, perceived listening difficulty, and horizontal-plane localization as compared to traditional bimodal hearing conditions with contralateral and monaural acoustic hearing. However, EAS benefit varies across patients and the degree of benefit is not reliably related to the underlying audiogram.

A novel approach to exploring the dark genome and its application to mapping of the vertebrate virus fossil record.

Background: Genomic regions that remain poorly understood, often referred to as the dark genome, contain a variety of functionally relevant and biologically informative features. These include endogenous viral elements (EVEs)-virus-derived sequences that can dramatically impact host biology and serve as a virus fossil record. In this study, we introduce a database-integrated genome screening (DIGS) approach to investigate the dark genome in silico, focusing on EVEs found within vertebrate genomes.