Motor deficit and lack of overt dystonia in Dlx conditional Dyt1 knockout mice.

DYT1 or DYT-TOR1A dystonia is early-onset generalized dystonia caused by a trinucleotide deletion of GAG in the TOR1A or DYT1 gene leads to the loss of a glutamic acid residue in the resulting torsinA protein. A mouse model with overt dystonia is of unique importance to better understand the DYT1 pathophysiology and evaluate preclinical drug efficacy. DYT1 dystonia is likely a network disorder involving multiple brain regions, particularly the basal ganglia.

Integration of Clinical Skills into Preclinical Medical Curriculum Via a Low-Cost Femoral Triangle Ultrasound Model.

We created a low-cost femoral triangle model that allows first year medical students to practice ultrasound-guided procedures while reinforcing their knowledge of femoral triangle anatomy. Use of this model also increased opportunities for informal near-peer teaching and student involvement in the creation of instructional materials.

Evaluation of freely available data profiling tools for health data research application: a functional evaluation review.

Objectives: To objectively evaluate freely available data profiling software tools using healthcare data.

Design: Data profiling tools were evaluated for their capabilities using publicly available information and data sheets. From initial assessment, several underwent further detailed evaluation for application on healthcare data using a synthetic dataset of 1000 patients and associated data using a common health data model, and tools scored based on their functionality with this dataset.

Development of a data utility framework to support effective health data curation.

Objectives: The value of healthcare data is being increasingly recognised, including the need to improve health dataset utility. There is no established mechanism for evaluating healthcare dataset utility making it difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of activities improving the data. To describe the method for generating and involving the user community in developing a proposed framework for evaluation and communication of healthcare dataset utility for given research areas.