Publications by authors named "Michael J Beck"

Purpose: Although full-wave simulations could be used to aid in RF coil design, the algorithms may be too slow for an iterative optimization algorithm. If quasistatic simulations are accurate within the design tolerance, then their use could reduce simulation time by orders of magnitude compared to full-wave simulations. This paper examines the accuracy of quasistatic and full-wave simulations at 3 Tesla.

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Background And Objectives: Burnout is prevalent among clinicians and entails negative personal, professional, and organizational consequences. Assessments of burnout are typically anonymous to facilitate psychological safety. This limits the capacity of leadership to help struggling providers and reduces the level of demographic detail.

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Phased array (PA) receive coils are built such that coil elements approximate independent antenna behavior. One method of achieving this goal is to use an available decoupling method to decouple adjacent coil elements. The purpose of this work was to compare the relative performance of two decoupling methods as a function of variation in sample load.

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Approximately 20% of the nationally reported tetanus infections in children aged 0 to 14 years that occurred in the United States between 2005 and 2015 were treated at Penn State Children's Hospital. With an electronic medical record search, we identified 5 cases of pediatric tetanus; 100% of these cases occurred in unimmunized children. Their median length of stay was 10 days, and the costs were significant.

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Purpose: To demonstrate the interchangeable neck shape-specific (NSS) coil concept that supplements standard commercial spine and head/neck coils to provide simultaneous high-resolution (hi-res) head/neck imaging with high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).

Methods: Two NSS coils were constructed on formers designed to fit two different neck shapes. A 7-channel (7ch) ladder array was constructed on a medium neck former, and a 9-channel (9ch) ladder array was constructed on large neck former.

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Objective: To determine if a lean intervention improved emergency department (ED) throughput and reduced ED boarding by improving patient discharge efficiency from a tertiary care children's hospital.

Methods: The study was conducted at a tertiary care children's hospital to study the impact lean that changes made to an inpatient pediatric service line had on ED efficiency. Discharge times from the general pediatrics' service were compared to patients discharged from all other pediatric subspecialty services.

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Purpose: To develop a method for rapid prediction of the geometric focus location in MR coordinates of a focused ultrasound (US) transducer with arbitrary position and orientation without sonicating.

Methods: Three small tracker coil circuits were designed, constructed, attached to the transducer housing of a breast-specific MR-guided focused US (MRgFUS) system with 5 degrees of freedom, and connected to receiver channel inputs of an MRI scanner. A one-dimensional sequence applied in three orthogonal directions determined the position of each tracker, which was then corrected for gradient nonlinearity.

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Background: Data suggest that delays in discharges from inpatient units affect hospital throughput and contribute to emergency department crowding. Lean/Six Sigma (LSS) has been shown to improve inefficiencies in other industries. There are no published data on what impact LSS can have on advancing and sustaining earlier patient discharges.

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We present the only reported case of an immunocompetent pediatric patient in the literature to have fulminate gas gangrene of the lower extremity and concomitant gastrointestinal tract infection due to Clostridium septicum coinfected with Clostridium difficile colitis respectively. The patient survived with aggressive medical and surgical treatment.

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Background: Computer-based tools to assess venous thromboembolism (VTE) risk have been shown to increase VTE pharmacoprophylaxis rates and decrease VTE incidence in high-risk hospitalized patients. However, VTE risk may be underestimated using computer-based tools alone. We tested the effect of a provider-enhanced clinical decision support (CDS) tool on VTE pharmacoprophylaxis and VTE incidence in patients who would have been deemed "low risk" using a computer-based risk-assessment tool alone.

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Background: Venous thromboembolism (VTE) prophylaxis is underutilized in hospitalized medical patients. Underutilization might occur as a result of resident practice variation incurred by using a complex risk assessment tool.

Objective: To examine what impact repetitive exposure to an electronic point-based VTE risk assessment tool has on resident inter-rater reliability and protocol adherence.

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Background: Venous thromboembolic events (VTE) are a significant cause of mortality in hospitalized medical and surgical patients. Despite recommendations and guidelines, current evidence demonstrates that VTE prophylaxis remains underutilized in at-risk patients. The process of providing VTE prophylaxis begins with assessing each patient's VTE risk.

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This study is concerned with the determination of the shoot and root inducing effects of kinetin (K) and naphthaleneacetic acid (NAA) on shoots ofthe fishtail fern (Nephrolepisfalcata formafurcans) in sterile tissue culture. The data shows that K is the major factor involved in maximal shoot production. The NAA is not essential.

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