Objective structured clinical examination to teach competency in planetary health care and management - a prospective observational study.

Background: Health professionals are increasingly called upon and willing to engage in planetary health care and management. However, so far, this topic is rarely covered in medical curricula. As the need for professional communication is particularly high in this subject area, this study aimed to evaluate whether the objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) could be used as an accompanying teaching tool.

Wireless transmission of neural signals using entropy and mutual information compression.

Two of the most critical tasks when designing a portable wireless neural recording system are to limit power consumption and to efficiently use the limited bandwidth. It is known that for most wireless devices the majority of power is consumed by the wireless transmitter and it often represents the bottleneck of the overall design. This paper compares two compression techniques that take advantage of the sparseness of the neural spikes in neural recordings using an information theoretic formalism to enhance the well-established vector quantization (VQ) algorithm.

Wireless transmission of neuronal recordings using a portable real-time discrimination/compression algorithm.

A design challenge of portable wireless neural recording systems is the tradeoff between bandwidth and power consumption. This paper investigates the compression of neuronal recordings in real-time using a novel discriminating Linde-Buzo-Gray algorithm (DLBG) that preserves spike shapes while filtering background noise. The technique is implemented in a low power digital signal processor (DSP) which is capable of wirelessly transmitting raw neuronal recordings.

A reconfigurable neural signal processor (NSP) for brain machine interfaces.

In this paper, we present a design for a wearable computational DSP system that alleviates the issues of a previous design and provides a much smaller and lower power solution for the overall BMI goals. The system first acquires the neural data through a high speed data bus in order to train and evaluate prediction models. Then it wirelessly transmits the predicted results to a simulated robot arm.

Neural signal sampling via the low power wireless pico system.

This paper presents a powerful new low power wireless system for sampling multiple channels of neural activity based on Texas Instruments MSP430 microprocessors and Nordic Semiconductor's ultra low power high bandwidth RF transmitters and receivers. The system's development process, component selection, features and test methodology are presented.

Molecular and morphological supertrees for eutherian (placental) mammals.

A large body of diverse comparative data now exists for a major phylogenetic synthesis of the higher-level relationships among eutherian (placental) mammals. We present such a phylogenetic synthesis using the composite trees or supertrees from the combined and separate analyses of their published molecular and morphological source phylogenies. Our combined and separate supertrees largely support the same suprafamilial taxa and orders, but different interordinal clades.

Reduction of the infectivity of scrapie agent as a model for BSE in the manufacturing process of Trasylol.

The Trasylol manufacturing process was investigated with respect to its capacity for the inactivation/removal of infectivity causing bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). Four process steps were selected for this investigation and scaled down to laboratory scale. Authentic samples of bovine lungs used in the Trasylol manufacturing plant were taken and spiked in laboratory scale experiments with high infectious titres of the rodent adapted scrapie strain ME 7 which served as model for BSE.