Accessory Flexor Digitorum Longus Presenting as Tarsal Tunnel Syndrome: A Case Series.

Tarsal tunnel syndrome (TTS) typically occurs from extrinsic or intrinsic sources of compression on the tibial nerve. We present 3 cases of patients, all of whom have a prolonged time to diagnosis after evaluation with multiple specialties, with foot pain ultimately secondary to an accessory flexor digitorum longus muscle causing TTS. The literature describing the association between TTS and accessory musculature has been limited to single case reports and frequently demonstrate abnormal electrodiagnostic testing.

Can Carpal Tunnel Syndrome be Appropriately Diagnosed in a Cold Hand?

Introduction: The diagnosis of carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS) with nerve conduction studies traditionally involves warming the hand to avoid misleading prolongation of distal latency (DL). Comparing the median nerve DL to the ulnar and radial nerves using the combined sensory index (CSI) has been reported to improve the accuracy of CTS diagnosis. During this study, the authors examined the effect of hand temperature on the CSI and diagnosis of CTS.

An Additional Electrodiagnostic Tool for Ulnar Neuropathy: Mixed across the Elbow.

 Diagnosing ulnar neuropathy at the elbow (UNE) remains challenging despite guidelines from national organizations. Motor testing of hand intrinsic muscles remains a common diagnostic method fraught with challenges.  The aim of the study is to demonstrate utility of an uncommon nerve conduction study (NCS), mixed across the elbow, when diagnosing UNE.

Emotional Reactivity as a Vulnerability for Psychogenic Nonepileptic Seizures? Responses While Reliving Specific Emotions.

Objective: Dysfunction in emotional processes is a hypothesized contributor to functional neurological disorders (FNDs), yet few studies have evoked real-time emotion during multimethod assessment incorporating subjective, behavioral, and psychophysiological indicators. This approach may reveal clinical and neurobiological vulnerability to FND and clarify how dysfunctional emotional processes serve as perpetuating factors.

Methods: Eleven participants with video-EEG-confirmed diagnoses of psychogenic nonepileptic seizures (PNES) were compared with 49 seizure-free trauma control subjects (TCs) with or without clinically elevated posttraumatic stress symptoms (25 clinically elevated [TC-clin], 24 not clinically elevated [TC-nonclin]).

Assessing the Lead Solubility Potential of Untreated Groundwater of the United States.

In the U.S., about 44 million people rely on self-supplied groundwater for drinking water.

VS2DRTI: Simulating Heat and Reactive Solute Transport in Variably Saturated Porous Media.

Variably saturated groundwater flow, heat transport, and solute transport are important processes in environmental phenomena, such as the natural evolution of water chemistry of aquifers and streams, the storage of radioactive waste in a geologic repository, the contamination of water resources from acid-rock drainage, and the geologic sequestration of carbon dioxide. Up to now, our ability to simulate these processes simultaneously with fully coupled reactive transport models has been limited to complex and often difficult-to-use models. To address the need for a simple and easy-to-use model, the VS2DRTI software package has been developed for simulating water flow, heat transport, and reactive solute transport through variably saturated porous media.

The Effects of Condom Availability on College Women's Sexual Discounting.

College students commonly engage in risky sexual behaviors, such as casual sexual encounters and inconsistent condom use. Discounting paradigms that examine how individuals devalue rewards due to their delay or uncertainty have been used to improve our understanding of behavioral problems, including sexual risk. The current study assessed relations between college women's sexual partners discounting and risky sexual behavior.

Chemical Considerations for an Updated National Assessment of Brackish Groundwater Resources.

Brackish groundwater (BGW) is increasingly used for water supplies where fresh water is scarce, but the distribution and availability of such resources have not been characterized at the national scale in the United States since the 1960s. Apart from its distribution and accessibility, BGW usability is a function of the chemical requirements of the intended use, chemical characteristics of the resource, and treatment options to make the resource compatible with the use. Here, we discuss relations between these three chemical factors using national-scale examples and local case studies.

Phast4Windows: a 3D graphical user interface for the reactive-transport simulator PHAST.

Phast4Windows is a Windows® program for developing and running groundwater-flow and reactive-transport models with the PHAST simulator. This graphical user interface allows definition of grid-independent spatial distributions of model properties-the porous media properties, the initial head and chemistry conditions, boundary conditions, and locations of wells, rivers, drains, and accounting zones-and other parameters necessary for a simulation. Spatial data can be defined without reference to a grid by drawing, by point-by-point definitions, or by importing files, including ArcInfo® shape and raster files.

The evaluation of physician assistant students' history-taking abilities using actors as standardized patients.

Purpose: The value of professional actors as standardized patients (SPs) was evaluated in an exercise that normally uses students for SPs.

Methods: A history-taking instructional curriculum was developed for a clinical skills exam for second-year students. Students anonymously rated their impressions of actors versus physician assistant (PA) students as patient simulators and assessed this exercise in the terms of the history-taking task areas described in the National Commission on Certification of Physician Assistants (NCCPA) Blueprint.

Everyone knows what is interesting: salient locations which should be fixated.

Most natural scenes are too complex to be perceived instantaneously in their entirety. Observers therefore have to select parts of them and process these parts sequentially. We study how this selection and prioritization process is performed by humans at two different levels.

A simple nutrition screening tool for hemodialysis nurses.

Objective: To assess the reliability of a nurse-performed nutrition screening tool (NST) for hemodialysis (HD) patients to identify nutritionally at-risk patients.

Design: Tool reliability assessment.

Setting And Participants: The setting was nine non-hospital private (n = 3) and public (n = 6) HD units in Australia (two rural and seven metropolitan).

A haemodialysis nutritional screening tool for nurses--a pilot study.

The purpose of the study was to pilot a nurse-performed nutritional screening tool (NST) for dialysis patients in order to identify nutritionally at-risk patients. Haemodialysis (HD) patients are at risk of nutritional-related problems. Nutritional screening by nurses may assist in the early recognition of and response to these problems.

Perilous work: nurses' experiences in psychiatric units with high risks of assault.

Psychiatric facilities struggle to maintain therapeutic environments made increasingly difficult by severe nursing shortages. Related safety concerns prompted a phenomenological inquiry about nurses' experiences working in environments with high risks of assault. Ten registered nurses participated in open-ended interviews.

Increased delivery of haemodialysis assists successful pregnancy outcome in end-stage renal failure.

Pregnancy in patients on maintenance dialysis is rare, with few cases of successful live births reported in Australian women on dialysis at the time of conception. Increasing dialysis delivery may improve outcomes for both mother and foetus in this high-risk situation. We report a case of successful pregnancy outcome with the application of an intensive dialysis regimen.

Texture contrast attracts overt visual attention in natural scenes.

In natural vision, the central nervous system actively selects information for detailed processing through mechanisms of visual attention. It is widely held that simple stimulus features such as color, orientation and intensity contribute to the determination of visual salience and thus can act to guide the selection process in a bottom-up fashion. Contrary to this view, Einhäuser, W.

Scene content selected by active vision.

The primate visual system actively selects visual information from the environment for detailed processing through mechanisms of visual attention and saccadic eye movements. This study examines the statistical properties of the scene content selected by active vision. Eye movements were recorded while participants free-viewed digitized images of natural and artificial scenes.

Variable-resolution displays: a theoretical, practical, and behavioral evaluation.

Variable-resolution display techniques present visual information in a display using more than one resolution. For example, gaze-contingent variable-resolution displays allocate computational resources for image generation preferentially to the area around the center of gaze, where visual sensitivity to detail is the greatest. Using such displays reduces the amount of computational resources required as compared with traditional uniform-resolution displays.

Modeling the role of salience in the allocation of overt visual attention.

A biologically motivated computational model of bottom-up visual selective attention was used to examine the degree to which stimulus salience guides the allocation of attention. Human eye movements were recorded while participants viewed a series of digitized images of complex natural and artificial scenes. Stimulus dependence of attention, as measured by the correlation between computed stimulus salience and fixation locations, was found to be significantly greater than that expected by chance alone and furthermore was greatest for eye movements that immediately follow stimulus onset.