Doctoral Work Research Articles

Dialogues for equity: precarious parent-scholars in times of crisis

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic amplified inequities around parent-scholars in the neoliberal gig academy. This paper documents the stories and intersectional struggles of four precarious parent-scholars as they navigated doctoral work, dissertation defenses, research, remote teaching, and family life during the pandemic. We illustrate how we navigated our neoliberal subjectivities and the extending multifold crises around the division of labor between academic work and parenting, gender roles, and internalized pressures exacerbated by a public postsecondary education system that exploits increasingly precarious workforces. Through critical collaborative autoethnography, we reflect on our parenting and teaching from March 2020 to August 2021. Drawing from our collective findings we summarize three mutually interdependent areas of communicative intervention that can make our workplace more equitable, entailing self-reflection, negotiation of labor, and collaborative dialogue.

Chất lượng dịch vụ khám chữa bệnh ngoại trú tại bệnh viện Hoàn Mỹ Bình Dương năm 2021 và một số yếu tố ảnh hưởng

The study was carried out on 252 cases by a descriptive cross-sectional method combining qualitative and quantitative at Hoan My Binh Duong Hospital. The research method using the SERVPERF toolkit was tested through Cronbach's Alpha reliability coefficient, surveyed 252 patients who came for outpatient medical examination and treatment, and conducted in-depth interviews with a number of research participants including representatives of the leaders of the study. hospital director: 01 people; Leading representative of medical examination department 01 people; Doctor working at the medical examination department 01 people; Nurses working in the outpatient medical care area: 02 people; Customer care staff: 01 people. The research results show that the service quality in the outpatient clinic, through the assessment of the patients, results in an overall average service quality score of 4.33 (±0.55) on a scale of 4.33 (±0.55). 5. Service quality is assessed as good. From the research results, the author suggests that hospitals continue to promote their advantages and promote IT applications towards smart hospitals. Keywords: Service quality, SERVPERF, Outpatient examination, Tangible factors, Trust.

A summary of common grading systems used in neurosurgical practice.

Grading and scoring systems are routinely used across various specialties in medicine and surgery. They help us assess the severity of disease and often guide management as well. In addition, grading systems allow us to prognosticate and gauge outcomes. Neurosurgeons also utilize an array of scores and grading systems. This article aims to collate some of the common grading systems used in neurosurgical practice to be utilized as an easy reference especially for junior doctors and other health-care providers working in this field. An initial literature search was carried out to look at the grading systems in use. These were then distilled down to the ones that are frequently used in clinical neurosurgical practice based on my own experience as a doctor working in a tertiary neurosurgical unit. Neuro-oncology scoring systems were excluded from the study. Grading systems are grouped based on the area of neurosurgical practice they fall into such as cranial, vascular, spinal, and miscellaneous. A brief description of each grading system is provided and the conditions when they can be used in a tabular format. Discussion on the advantages and disadvantages of each grading system is not included in the study. The list of grading systems in this article is not exhaustive. To the best of my knowledge, there seems to be no recent article, which summarizes them concisely. I hope that this summary will benefit the neurosurgical community and wider audience.

Using Memory Work To Recall Childhood Experiences of Learning: Collaborative Reflections on Four Self-Study Projects

We are South African self-study researchers who started building our collaborative relationship as critical friends completing our doctoral studies. We have a keen interest in self-study research, and we all received our doctorates through self-study using arts-based research. Our collective self-study explores our doctoral work as critical friends teaching and learning using arts-based research in education. This article presents how we used memory work in a self-study project to elicit childhood memories for teacher-learner engagement and mentor-mentee knowledge sharing. We understand that a sociocultural theoretical perspective highlights the fundamental requirement of working together in educational contexts to make sense of collective and personal experiences. In addition, employing self-study research and revisiting our learning has assisted or even encouraged us to engage deeply with past life experiences to improve our teaching practice. We understand that our past experiences have the power to shape our teaching practices now and in the future. Although these experiences occur both inside and outside the classroom, the principles that we endorse remain the same: collaborative and interactive teaching and learning, and acknowledging the children's and our own earlier learning and backgrounds.

An activate appearance model‐based algorithm for ear characteristic points positioning

SummaryIn the field of ear acupoint therapy in traditional Chinese medicine, many diseases can be treated through ear acupoint acupuncture, buried needle, bleeding, ear acupoint compression, massage, electric stimulation, and other programs. To achieve this goal, the positioning of the earhole feature point region is required. Based on the active appearance model, this article proposes an automatic identification feature point scheme through 168 datasets of data (including data collected based on standard equipment and ordinary mobile phones) collected from Hangzhou Normal University, China. The experimental results show that the average distance error of 91 feature points is less than 6 pixels, which can replace the identification work of TCM ear acupoint doctors.

Using Memory Work To Recall Childhood Experiences of Learning: Collaborative Reflections on Four Self-Study Projects

We are South African self-study researchers who started building our collaborative relationship as critical friends completing our doctoral studies. We have a keen interest in self-study research, and we all received our doctorates through self-study using arts-based research. Our collective self-study explores our doctoral work as critical friends teaching and learning using arts-based research in education. This article presents how we used memory work in a self-study project to elicit childhood memories for teacher-learner engagement and mentor-mentee knowledge sharing. We understand that a sociocultural theoretical perspective highlights the fundamental requirement of working together in educational contexts to make sense of collective and personal experiences. In addition, employing self-study research and revisiting our learning has assisted or even encouraged us to engage deeply with past life experiences to improve our teaching practice. We understand that our past experiences have the power to shape our teaching practices now and in the future. Although these experiences occur both inside and outside the classroom, the principles that we endorse remain the same: collaborative and interactive teaching and learning, and acknowledging the children's and our own earlier learning and backgrounds.

Cambodian American Listening as Memory Work

Cambodian American Listening as Memory Work

About the Authors

About the Authors

Self-care of the elderly with cancer in the community

Self-care is an activity learned by individuals, oriented towards a goal. Cancer is one of the non-communicable chronic diseases that most affects the general population. Colon Cancer is identified as a problem of great magnitude for health systems. It is the third most common cancer in men and the second in women. Multiple predisposing factors are invoked as possible for its development. Aging is usually accompanied by an increase in the burden of chronic diseases, including Colon Cancer. The instruction to this population group aimed at adequate self-care through specific ways, with a coherent and systemic nature, which will form part of the doctor's work system in the community, is considered pertinent. A reconceptualization of self-care is necessary, specifically on the Self-care of the elderly with Colorectal Cancer in the community, so that the community doctor can incorporate into his work system the need to educate the elderly with Colorectal Cancer

Perinatology – the link between Obstetrics and Neonatology

Starting from the end of the XIXth century, a decrease in infant mortality was observed worldwide. Care of preterm infants became the domain of dedicated units inside hospitals and technology became more complex. Neonatal Intensive Care Units were created throughout the world, increasing infant survival chances regardless of age and pathology. Alongside Neonatology, better means of investigating the pregnancies were discovered. Ultrasound use during pregnancy improved the chances of identifying complex genetic syndromes, some incompatible with survival after birth. It is considered that Stéphane Tarnier (1828–1897) is the architect of Perinatology, many of his inventions had a major role in the evolution of Obstetrics and Neonatology (the Tarnier forceps, the basiotribe, intrauterine balloon for inducing the labor, gavage feeding of the preemies). But only in 1967 the term “perinatology” was mentioned for the first time in a German paper. Professor Emeritus Erich Saling is the father or perinatology. He introduced the evaluation of gas exchange for the fetus during labor and the examination of amniotic fluid during the last weeks of pregnancy. Today, Perinatology is a widely used concept, but the road to creating this concept was long and needed the work of many prominent doctors.

INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION IN THE TERRITORY OF CHUVASHIA OF THE XX CENTURY IN THE ACTIVITIES OF THE SCIENTIFIC SCHOOL HEADED BY PROFESSOR I.I. BOYKO (for the Scientist’s Anniversary)

The XXI century is a century of rapidly changing information and technological space, new breakthrough technologies created by the scientific creativity of scientists. Fundamental and applied research carried out in Russia, in a difficult international situation, is becoming in demand and is implemented in the real sector of the economy. It is no coincidence that the President of the Russian Federation V.V. Putin signed a Decree declaring 2022–2031 the Decade of Science and Technology in the country. However, the top performance of a research scientist is not only creation of unique knowledge, but forming a team of followers as well. By far not everyone is in power to build his own scientific school and train highly qualified specialists. The article reflects the main stages showing the creative work of Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor Ivan Ivanovich Boyko, as well as the activities of the researcher’s scientific school, which largely supplemented the history of Chuvashia of the XX century. It is noted that the main directions investigated by the scientific school of I.I. Boyko were 3 problem blocks: industrial development and agriculture of Chuvashia in the XX century; formation and activity of state and municipal administration of the republic in the Soviet period; historical experience of implementing Soviet youth policy. Each of these areas was directly related to scientific interests of the researcher. The problems in the development of industry, the system of public administration, transition of the Middle Volga region republics to the statute of industrial-agrarian ones in the second half of the XX century have repeatedly become the historian’s object of attention.

Legal protection for doctors’ work safety in handling Covid-19 cases reviewed aased on Saddu al-Dzari’ah

Legal protection for doctor's work safety during the Covid 19 pandemic has not received optimal preventive action from the government with the data showing that the death of health workers in Indonesia accounts for the highest in Asia. This study aims to discuss the concept of legal protection for doctors' work safety in handling Covid-19 cases on the basis of Saddu al-Dzari'ah. The main data source for this study's juridical-normative methodology consisted of secondary data from written legal materials quantitatively examined to provide analytical descriptive data. Results show that legal protection for the safety of doctors in dealing with Covid-19 cases cannot be as required and correctly implemented in the legislation; in reality, the rights of doctors are still neglected and not fulfilled. The government's failure to take preventive measures to offer legal protection for doctors means that mafsadat (injury) in managing Covid-19 cases persists, which is also evidenced by the number of doctors who died from Covid-19. Our findings suggest the importance of having the concept of legal protection for doctors in handling Covid-19 cases based on Saddu al-Dzari'ah so that doctors get comprehensive protection.

ANALISIS EXPERT SYSTEM DIAGNOSIS PENYAKIT OBESITAS PADA ORANG DEWASA MENGGUNAKAN BACKWARD CHAINING METHOD

The purpose of this study is to build an expert system for diagnosing obesity in adults using the PHP programming language and MySQL database, the backward chaining method is suitable to be applied to the diagnosis of an expert system for diagnosing obesity in adults using PHP and MySQL so that it can be accessed online by users and implementation the backward chaining method on an expert system can help diagnose obesity in adults and provide solutions quickly and accurately. The research method used is qualitative using the backward chaining method. It is hoped that the result of this study is that an expert system for diagnosing obesity in adults with the Backward Chaining method can provide information about the symptoms and solutions of the disease and can be used at any time and does not require a long time to diagnose. This system can help doctors work and make it easier for the public to diagnose obesity in adults and their prevention efforts.

Analysis of the Causes of Solitary Pulmonary Nodule Misdiagnosed as Lung Cancer by Using Artificial Intelligence: A Retrospective Study at a Single Center.

Artificial intelligence (AI) adopting deep learning technology has been widely used in the med-ical imaging domain in recent years. It realized the automatic judgment of benign and malig-nant solitary pulmonary nodules (SPNs) and even replaced the work of doctors to some extent. However, misdiagnoses can occur in certain cases. Only by determining the causes can AI play a larger role. A total of 21 Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) patients were diagnosed with SPN by CT imaging. Their Clinical data, including general condition, imaging features, AI re-ports, and outcomes were included in this retrospective study. Although they were confirmed COVID-19 by testing reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), their CT imaging data were misjudged by AI to be high-risk nodules for lung cancer. Imaging characteristics included burr sign (76.2%), lobulated sign (61.9%), pleural indentation (42.9%), smooth edges (23.8%), and cavity (14.3%). The accuracy of AI was different from that of radiologists in judging the nature of be-nign SPNs (p < 0.001, κ = 0.036 < 0.4, means the two diagnosis methods poor fit). COVID-19 patients with SPN might have been misdiagnosed using the AI system, suggesting that the AI system needs to be further optimized, especially in the event of a new disease outbreak.

Dietary Factors and Changes in Blood Pressure in Adult Kazakhs: A 3-year Follow-Up Study

BACKGROUND: As in the world and Kazakhstan’s clinical protocols for the treatment of AH, it is proposed to limit the intake of salt to &lt;5 g/day and alcohol as a dietary therapy, as well as an increase in the consumption of vegetables, fresh fruits, fish, nuts, and sources of unsaturated fatty acids, to reduce the consumption of meat as a source of saturated fatty acids (SFA); consumption of low-fat dairy products. However, it remains unclear how the traditional diet of Kazakhs, which is dominated by sources of carbohydrates and fats with its subspecies, affects the development of AD in the Kazakh population. Local epidemiological and clinical data are required for the successful work of doctors with the population in the prevention of diseases of the blood circulatory system and the creation of clinical recommendations. AIM: The aim of this investigation was to evaluate an influence of fats, its subspecies, and carbohydrates on BP change after 3-year observation of adult Kazakhs. MATERIALS AND METHODS: There is described data of 96 individuals of the Kazakh population recruited by the cluster method, living in Aktobe, the Republic of Kazakhstan. Clusters were 14 polyclinics in Aktobe, of which three outpatient municipal polyclinics were randomly selected, each of which had one attached site. From the list of attached adults, also randomly selected 96 people without a history of cardiovascular events. RESULTS: Average age of participants of the study was 61.9 ± 10.8. None of the participants had a special diets or food restrictions for health reasons or personal beliefs. Body mass index was 27.1 ± 8.4. The over half of the study participants practice on smoking. The average level of SBP in the study’s participants was initially 124.6 mmHg, after 3 years, it increased by an average of 8.6 mmHg and became 133.2, the average level of DBP was 82.2 mmHg, which became higher by 6.2 mmHg and became 88.4 mmHg. According to the regression analysis, higher consumption of carbohydrates, MUFAs, SFAs, and total fats increased SBP by 9.3, 12.3, 46.1, and 5.3 mmHg, respectively. However, with the use of PUFAs, an inverse relationship was found, an increase in PUFA sources in the diet by 100 g reduces SBP by 43.3 mmHg. An effect of all nutrients was not significantly reduced at 3 years on SBP when adjusted for age, sex, and waist circumference. CONCLUSION: In accordance with the performed analysis in this cohort of subjects, that a significant percentage of these people are overweight or obese, the diet of the Kazakh population does not differ from the eating habits of residents of other countries. The examined individuals received an excess amount of energy from carbohydrates, fat, and SFA, an irrational diet was significantly correlated with an increase in blood pressure.

Creation of Automated Reporting on ECG Studies as Part of the SkiaAtlas Software Package

In medical practice, digital technologies are increasingly being used to automate the work of doctors. This is necessary to reduce the risk of medical errors by reducing the impact on neuropsychological indicators, such as concentration, attention and visual apparatus of a person when performing routine procedures. One of these areas is the creation of reporting generator programs that allow you to reduce the time in the formation of a standard workflow.

Effectiveness of a mobile-based HIV prevention intervention for the rural and low-income population, with incentive policies for doctors in Liangshan, China: a randomized controlled trial protocol

BackgroundThe HIV/AIDS epidemic is a concerning problem in many parts of the world, especially in rural and poor areas. Due to health service inequality and public stigma towards the disease, it is difficult to conduct face-to-face interventions. The widespread use of mobile phones and social media applications thus provide a feasible and acceptable approach for HIV prevention and education delivery in this population. The study aims to develop a generalizable, effective, acceptable, and convenient mobile-based information intervention model to improve HIV-related knowledge, attitudes, practices, and health outcomes in poverty-stricken areas in China and measure the impact of incentive policies on the work of village doctors in Liangshan, China.MethodsA randomized controlled trial design is used to evaluate the effectiveness of an 18-month mobile-based HIV prevention intervention, collaborating with local village doctors and consisting of group-based knowledge dissemination and individualized communication on WeChat and the Chinese Version of TikTok in Liangshan, China. Each village is defined as a cluster managed by a village doctor with 20 adults possessing mobile phones randomly selected from different families as participants, totaling 200 villages. Clusters are randomized (1:1:1) to the Control without mobile-based knowledge dissemination, Intervention A with standardized compensation to the village doctors, or Intervention B with performance-based compensation to the village doctors. The intervention groups will receive biweekly messages containing HIV-related educational modules. Data will be collected at baseline and 6-, 12-, and 18-month periods for outcome measurements. The primary outcomes of the study are HIV-related knowledge improvement and the effectiveness of village doctor targeted incentive policies. The secondary outcomes include secondary knowledge transmission, behavioral changes, health outcomes, social factors, and study design’s acceptability and reproducibility. These outcomes will be explored via various qualitative and quantitative means.DiscussionThe findings will provide insights into the effectiveness, generalizability, and challenges of the mobile-based HIV prevention intervention for the population living in rural communities with low education levels and will guide the development of similar models in other low-income and culturally isolated regions.Trial registrationClinicalTrial.gov: NCT05015062; Registered on June 6, 2022.

A Poetics of Embeddedness: J. M. Coetzee’s Dissertation on Beckett

J. M. Coetzee’s 1969 dissertation on Samuel Beckett, which remains unpublished, has been addressed variously within Coetzee studies, but we have not yet appreciated the close relation between this extraordinary postgraduate work and Coetzee’s later fiction. This is partly because Coetzee later distanced himself both from Beckett and from the mathematics important to his dissertation but seemingly at odds with his later creative practice as a novelist. In this essay I provide an account of the literary-critical and literary-historical context of Coetzee’s postgraduate research. Rarely have we seen an instance where one major writer is both a major influence on another but also the subject of that other’s rigorous academic study. From the infertile soil of the field of stylostatistics, this essay aims to trace the unlikely flowering of Coetzee’s doctoral work in his later writings and in the development of what I term a poetics of embeddedness. Coetzee’s early work as a forerunner in the digital humanities, and his writings on form, style, and linguistic skepticism, also shed light on contemporary debates about postcritique and the possibility of politically committed literature.

Automatic delineation of organ at risk in cervical cancer radiotherapy based on ensemble learning.

The automatic delineation of organs at risk (OARs) can help doctors make radiotherapy plans efficiently and accurately, and effectively improve the accuracy of radiotherapy and the therapeutic effect. Therefore, this study aims to propose an automatic delineation method for OARs in cervical cancer scenarios of both after-loading and external irradiation. At the same time, the similarity of OARs structure between different scenes is used to improve the segmentation accuracy of OARs in difficult segmentations. Our ensemble model adopted the strategy of ensemble learning. The model obtained from the pre-training based on the after-loading and external irradiation was introduced into the integrated model as a feature extraction module. The data in different scenes were trained alternately, and the personalized features of the OARs within the model and the common features of the OARs between scenes were introduced. Computer tomography (CT) images for 84 cases of after-loading and 46 cases of external irradiation were collected as the train data set. Five-fold cross-validation was adopted to split training sets and test sets. The five-fold average dice similarity coefficient (DSC) served as the figure-of-merit in evaluating the segmentation model. The DSCs of the OARs (the rectum and bladder in the after-loading images and the bladder in the external irradiation images) were higher than 0.7. Compared with using an independent residual U-net (convolutional networks for biomedical image segmentation) model [residual U-net (Res-Unet)] delineate OARs, the proposed model can effectively improve the segmentation performance of difficult OARs (the sigmoid in the after-loading CT images and the rectum in the external irradiation images), and the DSCs were increased by more than 3%. Comparing to the dedicated models, our ensemble model achieves the comparable result in segmentation of OARs for different treatment options in cervical cancer radiotherapy, which may be shorten time for doctors to sketch OARs and improve doctor's work efficiency.

Engaging with Doctoral Work during the Pandemic

This article describes the acceleration toward digital conferencing that happened due to COVID-19 safety procedures as well as how one’s ancestral legacy of trauma could affect how one dealt with the arrival of the pandemic as a collective trauma. This paper describes the researcher’s experience in developing “embodied digital storytelling” as a post-phenomenological art-based research methodology as well as how the use of this methodology intertwined with the study of ancestral legacy and the arrival of a pandemic. The reader will follow the researcher’s experience in developing the methodology, finding her topic, and conducting her research during the pandemic. The article ends with an account of reclaiming a sense of belonging despite all the challenges discussed.