204 resultados para End-Winding


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The Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) implementation of the commonly used Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) algorithm is explored. The HOG algorithm is employed to extract features for object detection. A key focus has been to explore the use of a new FPGA-based processor which has been targeted at image processing. The paper gives details of the mapping and scheduling factors that influence the performance and the stages that were undertaken to allow the algorithm to be deployed on FPGA hardware, whilst taking into account the specific IPPro architecture features. We show that multi-core IPPro performance can exceed that of against state-of-the-art FPGA designs by up to 3.2 times with reduced design and implementation effort and increased flexibility all on a low cost, Zynq programmable system.

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Objectives: To investigate the quality of end-of-life care for patients with metastatic non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Design and participants: Retrospective cohort study of patients from first hospitalisation for metastatic disease until death, using hospital, emergency department and death registration data from Victoria, Australia, between 1 July 2003 and 30 June 2010. Main outcome measures: Emergency department and hospital use; aggressiveness of care including intensive care and chemotherapy in last 30 days; palliative and supportive care provision; and place of death. Results: Metastatic NSCLC patients underwent limited aggressive treatment such as intensive care (5%) and chemotherapy (< 1%) at the end of life; however, high numbers died in acute hospitals (42%) and 61% had a length of stay of greater than 14 days in the last month of life. Although 62% were referred to palliative care services, this occurred late in the illness. In a logistic regression model adjusted for year of metastasis, age, sex, metastatic site and survival, the odds ratio (OR) of dying in an acute hospital bed compared with death at home or in a hospice unit decreased with receipt of palliative care (OR, 0.25; 95% CI, 0.21–0.30) and multimodality supportive care (OR, 0.65; 95% CI, 0.56–0.75). Conclusion: Because early palliative care for patients with metastatic NSCLC is recommended, we propose that this group be considered a benchmark of quality end-of-life care. Future work is required to determine appropriate quality-of-care targets in this and other cancer patient cohorts, with particular focus on the timeliness of palliative care engagement.

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For many decades Palaeolithic research viewed the development of early modern human behaviour as largely one of progress down a path towards the modernity of the present. The European Palaeolithic sequence the most extensively studied was for a long time the yard-stick against which records from other regions were judged. Recent work undertaken in Africa and increasingly Asia, however, now suggests that the European evidence may tell a story that is more parochial and less universal than previously thought. While tracking developments at the large scale (the grand narrative) remains important, there is growing appreciation that to achieve a comprehensive understanding of human behavioural evolution requires an archaeologically regional perspective to balance this. One of the apparent markers of human modernity that has been sought in the global Palaeolithic record, prompted by finds in the European sequence, is innovation in bonebased technologies. As one step in the process of re-evaluating and contextualizing such innovations, in this article we explore the role of prehistoric bone technologies within the Southeast Asian sequence, where they have at least comparable antiquity to Europe and other parts of Asia. We observe a shift in the technological usage of bone from a minor component to a medium of choice during the second half of the Last Termination and into the Holocene. We suggest that this is consistent with it becoming a focus of the kinds of inventive behaviour demanded of foraging communities as they adapted to the far-reaching environmental and demographic changes that were reshaping this region at that time. This record represents one small element of a much wider, much longerterm adaptive process, which we would argue is not confined to the earliest instances of a particular technology or behaviour, but which forms part of an on-going story of our behavioural evolution. © 2012 The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.

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Background: The steady increase in the number of people living and dying with dementia, coupled with the recent focus on quality of care, has highlighted the importance of dementia training for health care professionals. This exploratory study aimed to discover which skills health care students felt were important in providing quality end-of-life care to dementia patients.

Methods: Ninety-four medicine, nursing, and pharmacy students participated in a larger study using open-ended and closed questions to explore attitudes related to caring for dementia patients at the end of life. This study looks at the student responses to an open-ended question regarding the skills and knowledge they believe are needed to provide end-of-life care to dementia patients. Individual responses were reviewed by the researchers, coded into key issues, and tabulated for frequency of occurrences and group differences.

Results: Several common issues emerged: knowledge, patience, empathy, understanding, family involvement, compassion, medication knowledge, respect/patient autonomy, communication, quality of life, and patient education. Significant differences were observed among the participant groups on the following issues: Patience and understanding (pharmacy students mentioned these issues less frequently than medical and nursing students), compassion (medical students mentioned this issue more frequently than pharmacy students), and medication knowledge (pharmacy students mentioned this issue more frequently than medical and nursing students).

Conclusions: Different health care disciplines (in-training) value different skill sets for the provision of dementia care at the end-of-life. As health care education for dementia patients at the end of life is expanded, it will be important to understand which skills both patients and health care students value.

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Background
Despite the recognized importance of end-of-life (EOL) communication between patients and physicians, the extent and quality of such communication is lacking.

Objective
We sought to understand patient perspectives on physician behaviours during EOL communication.

Design
In this mixed methods study, we conducted quantitative and qualitative strands and then merged data sets during a mixed methods analysis phase. In the quantitative strand, we used the quality of communication tool (QOC) to measure physician behaviours that predict global rating of satisfaction in EOL communication skills, while in the qualitative strand we conducted semi-structured interviews. During the mixed methods analysis, we compared and contrasted qualitative and quantitative data.

Setting and Participants
Seriously ill inpatients at three tertiary care hospitals in Canada.

Results
We found convergence between qualitative and quantitative strands: patients desire candid information from their physician and a sense of familiarity. The quantitative results (n = 132) suggest a paucity of certain EOL communication behaviours in this seriously ill population with a limited prognosis. The qualitative findings (n = 16) suggest that at times, physicians did not engage in EOL communication despite patient readiness, while sometimes this may represent an appropriate deferral after assessment of a patient's lack of readiness.

Conclusions
Avoidance of certain EOL topics may not always be a failure if it is a result of an assessment of lack of patient readiness. This has implications for future tool development: a measure could be built in to assess whether physician behaviours align with patient readiness.

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The ongoing, potentially worsening problem of sexual violence and harassment on university campuses has emerged in the last few years as an area of concern. Female students have been identified as one of the most likely groups to experience sexual violence and this violence is exacerbated by contemporary student cultures around alcohol consumption and gendered and sexual norms. University campuses have also become central to prevention efforts in many countries due to their relatively accessible populations and an ability to implement social policies at an institutional level.
Many of these measures are based around promoting or educating students about sexual consent, and particularly notions of affirmative consent, expressed as ‘Yes means Yes’. However, there exists little research around sexual ethics with students exploring whether consent is in fact the best way to tackle cultural problems of sexual violence on campus. This paper makes use of existing literature on sexual ethics and focus group research undertaken with Australian university students to argue for an approach to the problem of sexual ethics on campus that is broader than simply focusing on training programs in sexual consent. It identifies a number of limitations to the consent framework and argues that prevention efforts need to more seriously engage with broader cultural norms around heterosexuality and gendered relationships.

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We report the results of a three-year-long dedicated monitoring campaign of a restless luminous blue variable (LBV) in NGC 7259. The object, named SN 2009ip, was observed photometrically and spectroscopically in the optical and near-infrared domains. We monitored a number of erupting episodes in the past few years, and increased the density of our observations during eruptive episodes. In this paper, we present the full historical data set from 2009 to 2012 with multi-wavelength dense coverage of the two high-luminosity events between 2012 August and September. We construct bolometric light curves and measure the total luminosities of these eruptive or explosive events. We label them the 2012a event (lasting ~50 days) with a peak of 3 × 1041 erg s-1, and the 2012b event (14 day rise time, still ongoing) with a peak of 8 × 1042 erg s-1. The latter event reached an absolute R-band magnitude of about -18, comparable to that of a core-collapse supernova (SN). Our historical monitoring has detected high-velocity spectral features (~13,000 km s-1) in 2011 September, one year before the current SN-like event. This implies that the detection of such high-velocity outflows cannot, conclusively, point to a core-collapse SN origin. We suggest that the initial peak in the 2012a event was unlikely to be due to a faint core-collapse SN. We propose that the high intrinsic luminosity of the latest peak, the variability history of SN 2009ip, and the detection of broad spectral lines indicative of high-velocity ejecta are consistent with a pulsational pair-instability event, and that the star may have survived the last outburst. The question of the survival of the LBV progenitor star and its future fate remain open issues, only to be answered with future monitoring of this historically unique explosion.