E-learning initiatives in forensic interpretation: report on experiences from current projects and outlook

This paper reports on the purpose, design, methodology and target audience of E-learning courses in forensic interpretation offered by the authors since 2010, including practical experiences made throughout the implementation period of this project. This initiative was motivated by the fact that reporting results of forensic examinations in a logically correct and scientifically rigorous way is a daily challenge for any forensic practitioner. Indeed, interpretation of raw data and communication of findings in both written and oral statements are topics where knowledge and applied skills are needed. Although most forensic scientists hold educational records in traditional sciences, only few actually followed full courses that focussed on interpretation issues. Such courses should include foundational principles and methodology - including elements of forensic statistics - for the evaluation of forensic data in a way that is tailored to meet the needs of the criminal justice system. In order to help bridge this gap, the authors' initiative seeks to offer educational opportunities that allow practitioners to acquire knowledge and competence in the current approaches to the evaluation and interpretation of forensic findings. These cover, among other aspects, probabilistic reasoning (including Bayesian networks and other methods of forensic statistics, tools and software), case pre-assessment, skills in the oral and written communication of uncertainty, and the development of independence and self-confidence to solve practical inference problems. E-learning was chosen as a general format because it helps to form a trans-institutional online-community of practitioners from varying forensic disciplines and workfield experience such as reporting officers, (chief) scientists, forensic coordinators, but also lawyers who all can interact directly from their personal workplaces without consideration of distances, travel expenses or time schedules. In the authors' experience, the proposed learning initiative supports participants in developing their expertise and skills in forensic interpretation, but also offers an opportunity for the associated institutions and the forensic community to reinforce the development of a harmonized view with regard to interpretation across forensic disciplines, laboratories and judicial systems.

Intranasal administration of the synthetic polypeptide from the C-terminus of the circumsporozoite protein of Plasmodium berghei with the modified heat-labile toxin of Escherichia coli (LTK63) induces a complete protection against malaria challenge.

Needle-free procedures are very attractive ways to deliver vaccines because they diminish the risk of contamination and may reduce local reactions, pain or pain fear especially in young children with a consequence of increasing the vaccination coverage for the whole population. For this purpose, the possible development of a mucosal malaria vaccine was investigated. Intranasal immunization was performed in BALB/c mice using a well-studied Plasmodium berghei model antigen derived from the circumsporozoite protein with the modified heat-labile toxin of Escherichia coli (LTK63), which is devoid of any enzymatic activity compared to the wild type form. Here, we show that intranasal administration of the two compounds activates the T and B cell immune response locally and systemically. In addition, a total protection of mice is obtained upon a challenge with live sporozoites.

A Heterozygous Deletion Mutation in the Cardiac Sodium Channel Gene SCN5A with Loss- and Gain-of-Function Characteristics Manifests as Isolated Conduction Disease, without Signs of Brugada or Long QT Syndrome.

BACKGROUND: The SCN5A gene encodes for the α-subunit of the cardiac sodium channel NaV1.5, which is responsible for the rapid upstroke of the cardiac action potential. Mutations in this gene may lead to multiple life-threatening disorders of cardiac rhythm or are linked to structural cardiac defects. Here, we characterized a large family with a mutation in SCN5A presenting with an atrioventricular conduction disease and absence of Brugada syndrome. METHOD AND RESULTS: In a large family with a high incidence of sudden cardiac deaths, a heterozygous SCN5A mutation (p.1493delK) with an autosomal dominant inheritance has been identified. Mutation carriers were devoid of any cardiac structural changes. Typical ECG findings were an increased P-wave duration, an AV-block I° and a prolonged QRS duration with an intraventricular conduction delay and no signs for Brugada syndrome. HEK293 cells transfected with 1493delK showed strongly (5-fold) reduced Na(+) currents with altered inactivation kinetics compared to wild-type channels. Immunocytochemical staining demonstrated strongly decreased expression of SCN5A 1493delK in the sarcolemma consistent with an intracellular trafficking defect and thereby a loss-of-function. In addition, SCN5A 1493delK channels that reached cell membrane showed gain-of-function aspects (slowing of the fast inactivation, reduction in the relative fraction of channels that fast inactivate, hastening of the recovery from inactivation). CONCLUSION: In a large family, congregation of a heterozygous SCN5A gene mutation (p.1493delK) predisposes for conduction slowing without evidence for Brugada syndrome due to a predominantly trafficking defect that reduces Na(+) current and depolarization force.

Preserved capillary density of dorsal finger skin in treated hypertensive patients with or without type 2 diabetes.

OBJECTIVES: Capillary rarefaction is a hallmark of untreated hypertension. Recent data indicate that rarefaction may be reversed by antihypertensive treatment in nondiabetic hypertensive patients. Despite the frequent association of diabetes with hypertension, nothing is known on the capillary density of treated diabetic patients with hypertension. METHODS: We enrolled 21 normotensive healthy, 25 hypertensive only, and 21 diabetic (type 2) hypertensive subjects. All hypertensive patients were treated with a blocker of the renin-angiotensin system, and a majority had a home blood pressure ≤135/85 mmHg. Capillary density was assessed with videomicroscopy on dorsal finger skin and with laser Doppler imaging on forearm skin (maximal vasodilation elicited by local heating). RESULTS: There was no difference between any of the study groups in either dorsal finger skin capillary density (controls 101 ± 11 capillaries/mm(2) , nondiabetic hypertensive 99 ± 16, diabetic hypertensive 96 ± 18, p > 0.5) or maximal blood flow in forearm skin (controls 666 ± 114 perfusion units, nondiabetic hypertensive 612 ± 126, diabetic hypertensive 620 ± 103, p > 0.5). CONCLUSIONS: Irrespective of the presence or not of type 2 diabetes, capillary density is normal in hypertensive patients with reasonable control of blood pressure achieved with a blocker of the renin-angiotensin system.

Difference in the homocysteine-lowering effect of folic acid in haemodialysis patients with and without occlusive vascular disease.

BACKGROUND: Hyperhomocysteinaemia has been identified as an independent cardiovascular risk factor and is found in more than 85% of patients on maintenance haemodialysis. Previous studies have shown that folic acid can lower circulating homocysteine in dialysis patients. We evaluated prospectively the effect of increasing the folic acid dosage from 1 to 6 mg per dialysis on plasma total homocysteine levels of haemodialysis patients with and without a history of occlusive vascular artery disease (OVD). METHODS: Thirty-nine stable patients on high-flux dialysis were studied. Their mean age was 63 +/-11 years and 17 (43%) had a history of OVD, either coronary and/or cerebral and/or peripheral occlusive disease. For several years prior to the study, the patients had received an oral post-dialysis multivitamin supplement including 1 mg of folic acid per dialysis. After baseline determinations, the folic acid dose was increased from 1 to 6 mg/dialysis for 3 months. RESULTS: After 3 months, plasma homocysteine had decreased significantly by approximately 23% from 31.1 +/- 12.7 to 24.5 +/- 9 micromol/l (P = 0.0005), while folic acid concentrations had increased from 6.5 +/- 2.5 to 14.4+/-2.5 microg/l (P < 0.0001). However, the decrease of homocysteine was quite different in patients with and in those without OVD. In patients with OVD, homocysteine decreased only marginally by approximately 2.5% (from 29.0 +/- 10.3 to 28.3 +/- 8.4 micromol/l, P = 0.74), whereas in patients without OVD there was a significant reduction of approximately 34% (from 32.7+/-14.4 to 21.6+/-8.6 micromol/l, P = 0.0008). Plasma homocysteine levels were reduced by > 15% in three patients (18%) in the group with OVD compared with 19 (86%) in the group without OVD (P = 0.001), and by > 30% in none of the patients (0%) in the former group compared with 13 (59%) in the latter (P = 0.001). CONCLUSIONS: These results indicate that the homocysteine-lowering effect of folic acid administration appears to be less effective in haemodialysis patients having occlusive vascular disease than in those without evidence of such disease.

Computational problems in perfect phylogeny haplotyping: typing without calling the allele.

A haplotype is an m-long binary vector. The XOR-genotype of two haplotypes is the m-vector of their coordinate-wise XOR. We study the following problem: Given a set of XOR-genotypes, reconstruct their haplotypes so that the set of resulting haplotypes can be mapped onto a perfect phylogeny (PP) tree. The question is motivated by studying population evolution in human genetics, and is a variant of the perfect phylogeny haplotyping problem that has received intensive attention recently. Unlike the latter problem, in which the input is "full" genotypes, here we assume less informative input, and so may be more economical to obtain experimentally. Building on ideas of Gusfield, we show how to solve the problem in polynomial time, by a reduction to the graph realization problem. The actual haplotypes are not uniquely determined by that tree they map onto, and the tree itself may or may not be unique. We show that tree uniqueness implies uniquely determined haplotypes, up to inherent degrees of freedom, and give a sufficient condition for the uniqueness. To actually determine the haplotypes given the tree, additional information is necessary. We show that two or three full genotypes suffice to reconstruct all the haplotypes, and present a linear algorithm for identifying those genotypes.

Daytime sleepiness with and without cataplexy in Chinese-Taiwanese patients.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Investigation of Chinese-Taiwanese patients with excessive sleepiness, but no association with other sleep disorders, and with the presence or absence of cataplexy. PATIENTS AND METHODS: Thirty-five patients, successively referred between 2002 and 2004, underwent polysomnography (PSG), repeat multiple sleep latency test (MSLT), and human leukocyte antigen (HLA) typing. Three patients without cataplexy also had cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) hypocretin measurements. RESULTS: DQB1*0602 was associated with cataplexy in over 90% of Chinese-Taiwanese cases. Absence of cataplexy and <2 sleep-onset REM periods (SOREMPs) was seen in only two subjects, but presence of two SOREMPs did not dissociate DQB1*0602 positive and negative or cataplexy positive and negative subjects. As a group, narcoleptics with cataplexy had a higher number of SOREMPs, and the mean sleep latency was much shorter in narcoleptics with cataplexy than in the non-cataplectic patients, independent of the number of SOREMPs. CONCLUSIONS: Chinese-Taiwanese patients with cataplexy present with similar HLA findings as Black and Caucasian patients, but the presence of two or more SOREMPs in Chinese-Taiwanese patients is not a sufficient diagnostic tool to identify narcolepsy. When cataplexy is not present, description of PSG nd HLA findings may be a better approach than using a label with little scientific significance, allowing for better collection of patients' phenotype.

Dreaming without REM sleep.

To test whether mental activities collected from non-REM sleep are influenced by REM sleep, we suppressed REM sleep using clomipramine 50mg (an antidepressant) or placebo in the evening, in a double blind cross-over design, in 11 healthy young men. Subjects were awakened every hour and asked about their mental activity. The marked (81%, range 39-98%) REM-sleep suppression induced by clomipramine did not substantially affect any aspects of dream recall (report length, complexity, bizarreness, pleasantness and self-perception of dream or thought-like mentation). Since long, complex and bizarre dreams persist even after suppressing REM sleep either partially or totally, it suggests that the generation of mental activity during sleep is independent of sleep stage.

Radiological detection of dissolved cocaine

Introduction: Smuggling dissolved drugs, especially cocaine, in bottled liquids is a problem at borders nowadays. Common fluoroscopy of packages at the border cannot detect contaminated liquids. To find a dissolved drug, an immunological test using a drug-test panel has to be performed. This means that a control sample of the cargo must be opened to perform the test. As it is not possible to open all boxes, and as smugglers hide the drugcontaining boxes between regularly filled boxes, contaminated cargos can be overlooked. Investigators sometimes cannot perform the drug-test panel because they try not to arouse the smugglers' suspicion in order to follow the cargo and to find the recipient. Aims: The objective of our studies was to define non-invasive examination techniques to investigate cargos that are suspicions to contain dissolved cocaine without leaving traces on the samples. We examined vessels containing cocaine by radiological cross-section techniques such as multidetector computed tomography (MDCT) and magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS). Methods: In a previous study, we examined bottles of wine containing dissolved cocaine in different quantities using an MDCT unit. To distinguish between bottles containing red wine and those where cocaine was solved in the wine, cross sectional 2D-images have been reconstructed and the absorption of X-rays was quantified by measuring the mean density of the liquid inside the bottles. In our new study, we investigated phantoms containing cocaine dissolved in water with or without ethanol as well as cocaine dissolved in different sorts of commercially available wine by the use of a clinical magnetic resonance unit (3 tesla). To find out if dissolved cocaine could be detected, magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H MRS) was performed. Results: By using a MDCT-unit and measuring the mean attenuation of X-rays, it is possible to distinguish weather substances are dissolved in a liquid or not, if a comparative liquid without any solutions is available. The increase of the mean density indicates the presence of dissolved substances without the possibility to identify the substance. By using magnetic resonance spectroscopy, dissolved cocaine can be clearly identified because it produces distinctive resonances in the spectrum. In contrast to MDCT, this technique shows a high sensitivity (detection of 1 mM cocaine in wine). Conclusions: Cross-sectional imaging techniques such as MDCT and MRS appropriated to examine cargos that are suspicious to contain dissolved cocaine. They allow to perform non-invasive investigations without leaving any trace on the cargo. While an MDCT scan can detect dissolved substances in liquids, identification of cocaine can be obtained by MR-spectroscopy. Acknowledgment: This work was supported by the Centre d'Imagerie BioMédicale (CIBM) of the University of Lausanne (UNIL), the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), the University of Geneva (UniGe), the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois (CHUV), the Hôpitaux Universitaire de Genève (HUG) and the Leenaards and the Jeantet Foundations.

Advanced Kernel Methods For Remote Sensing Image Classification

Résumé Suite aux recentes avancées technologiques, les archives d'images digitales ont connu une croissance qualitative et quantitative sans précédent. Malgré les énormes possibilités qu'elles offrent, ces avancées posent de nouvelles questions quant au traitement des masses de données saisies. Cette question est à la base de cette Thèse: les problèmes de traitement d'information digitale à très haute résolution spatiale et/ou spectrale y sont considérés en recourant à des approches d'apprentissage statistique, les méthodes à noyau. Cette Thèse étudie des problèmes de classification d'images, c'est à dire de catégorisation de pixels en un nombre réduit de classes refletant les propriétés spectrales et contextuelles des objets qu'elles représentent. L'accent est mis sur l'efficience des algorithmes, ainsi que sur leur simplicité, de manière à augmenter leur potentiel d'implementation pour les utilisateurs. De plus, le défi de cette Thèse est de rester proche des problèmes concrets des utilisateurs d'images satellite sans pour autant perdre de vue l'intéret des méthodes proposées pour le milieu du machine learning dont elles sont issues. En ce sens, ce travail joue la carte de la transdisciplinarité en maintenant un lien fort entre les deux sciences dans tous les développements proposés. Quatre modèles sont proposés: le premier répond au problème de la haute dimensionalité et de la redondance des données par un modèle optimisant les performances en classification en s'adaptant aux particularités de l'image. Ceci est rendu possible par un système de ranking des variables (les bandes) qui est optimisé en même temps que le modèle de base: ce faisant, seules les variables importantes pour résoudre le problème sont utilisées par le classifieur. Le manque d'information étiquétée et l'incertitude quant à sa pertinence pour le problème sont à la source des deux modèles suivants, basés respectivement sur l'apprentissage actif et les méthodes semi-supervisées: le premier permet d'améliorer la qualité d'un ensemble d'entraînement par interaction directe entre l'utilisateur et la machine, alors que le deuxième utilise les pixels non étiquetés pour améliorer la description des données disponibles et la robustesse du modèle. Enfin, le dernier modèle proposé considère la question plus théorique de la structure entre les outputs: l'intègration de cette source d'information, jusqu'à présent jamais considérée en télédétection, ouvre des nouveaux défis de recherche. Advanced kernel methods for remote sensing image classification Devis Tuia Institut de Géomatique et d'Analyse du Risque September 2009 Abstract The technical developments in recent years have brought the quantity and quality of digital information to an unprecedented level, as enormous archives of satellite images are available to the users. However, even if these advances open more and more possibilities in the use of digital imagery, they also rise several problems of storage and treatment. The latter is considered in this Thesis: the processing of very high spatial and spectral resolution images is treated with approaches based on data-driven algorithms relying on kernel methods. In particular, the problem of image classification, i.e. the categorization of the image's pixels into a reduced number of classes reflecting spectral and contextual properties, is studied through the different models presented. The accent is put on algorithmic efficiency and the simplicity of the approaches proposed, to avoid too complex models that would not be used by users. The major challenge of the Thesis is to remain close to concrete remote sensing problems, without losing the methodological interest from the machine learning viewpoint: in this sense, this work aims at building a bridge between the machine learning and remote sensing communities and all the models proposed have been developed keeping in mind the need for such a synergy. Four models are proposed: first, an adaptive model learning the relevant image features has been proposed to solve the problem of high dimensionality and collinearity of the image features. This model provides automatically an accurate classifier and a ranking of the relevance of the single features. The scarcity and unreliability of labeled. information were the common root of the second and third models proposed: when confronted to such problems, the user can either construct the labeled set iteratively by direct interaction with the machine or use the unlabeled data to increase robustness and quality of the description of data. Both solutions have been explored resulting into two methodological contributions, based respectively on active learning and semisupervised learning. Finally, the more theoretical issue of structured outputs has been considered in the last model, which, by integrating outputs similarity into a model, opens new challenges and opportunities for remote sensing image processing.

Riesenzellarteriitis : Ätiologische Erkenntnisse und diagnostische Herausforderung für den Pathologen [Giant cell arteritis : Etiological knowledge and diagnostic challenge for pathologists].

Giant cell arteritis is a potentially systemic disease of medium-sized and large caliber arteries, showing a preferential manifestation in the extracranial branches of the carotid artery. The diagnosis is oriented to clinical and histomorphological criteria which will be critically reviewed. Particular emphasis is placed on the differentiation from normal aging processes and from healing stages under steroid therapy. In addition, the advances in our understanding of the disease pathomechanism during the last 10 years will be briefly presented as the basis for the hitherto empiric steroid treatment.

Lésions cutanées et infiltrats pulmonaires d'évolution défavorable sans cause infectieuse [Progressive cutaneous and pulmonary lesions without infectious etiology: two cases reports of sweet syndrome with pulmonary involvement].

Sweet syndrome is a non infectious febrile disease with a neutrophilic infiltrate of dermis. Extracutaneous involvement can occur. We report two cases of Sweet syndrome with cutaneous and pulmonary involvement and give a short review of the literature of pulmonary involvement in Sweet syndrome.