Emergency Medical Applications Research Articles

Magnetic Actuation Analysis of Chitosan Hydrogel Robots for Emergency Medical Applications

Magnetic Actuation Analysis of Chitosan Hydrogel Robots for Emergency Medical Applications

Evaluation of the Readability of Informed Consent Forms Used for Emergency Procedures

INTRODUCTION: The aim of the study was to evaluate the readability levels of informed consent forms used for patient consent before emergency procedures applied in emergency service in Necmettin Erbakan University Meram Medical Faculty Emergency Service Clinic through readability formula. METHOD: Fifteen informed patient consent forms used for emergency medical applications in Necmettin Erbakan University Meram Medical Faculty Emergency Medicine Department were evaluated. Information text available on the forms was transferred into Microsoft Word program. Average word number, syllable number and words with syllable number of four and above were calculated. Atesman and Bezirci-Yilmaz formulas defined for determining the readability level of Turkish texts and Gunning fog, Flesch kincaid formulas measuring the general readability level were used for calculating the readability level of consent forms. RESULTS: Readability levels of all consent forms were detected at average difficulty level according to Atesman formula, very difficult according to Flesch-Kincaid formula, difficult according to Gunning fog formula and at high school level according to Bezirci-Yilmaz. CONCLUSIONS: In this study, the readability level of emergency intervention consent forms used in the clinic was detected as hard and required high school or higher education level. The conclusion is that attention should be paid to this subject which is both medically and legally binding for the doctors and verbal and visual support should be provided for informing the patients in addition to consent forms.

Rapid Identification of Psychoactive Drugs in Drained Gastric Lavage Fluid and Whole Blood Specimens of Drug Overdose Patients Using Ambient Mass Spectrometry.

Psychoactive drug overdoses are life-threatening and require prompt and proper treatment in the emergency room to minimize morbidity and mortality. Prompt identification of the ingested psychoactive drugs is challenging, since witness recall is unreliable and patients' symptoms do not necessarily explain their loss of consciousness. Gas and liquid chromatography mass spectrometric analyses have been the traditionally employed methods to detect and identify abused substances; however, these techniques are time-consuming and labor-intensive. In this study, thermal desorption electrospray ionization mass spectrometry, an ambient mass spectrometric technique, was applied to rapidly characterize flunitrazepam, lysergic acid diethylamide, and 3,4-methylenedioxy-methamphetamine in drained gastric lavage fluid, and ketamine, cocaine, amphetamine and norketamine in whole blood samples. No pretreatment of the gastric lavage fluid specimens was required and the entire analytical process took less than 30 s per specimen. Liquid-liquid extraction, followed by centrifugation, was performed on the whole blood samples. The corresponding compounds were identified through matching the obtained mass spectrometric data with those provided by commercial databases. The limits-of-detection of the tested drugs in both drained gastric lavage fluid and whole blood samples are at sub ppm levels. This is sensitive enough for emergency medical application, since the quantities of medications ingested by overdosed abusers are much higher than the amounts that were tested.

Design framework for sensors and RFID tags with healthcare applications

ObjectivesThis paper presents a framework to aid in the integration of sensor and radio frequency device (e.g., RFID tags) data into IT applications. This framework is applied to the area of healthcare applications because data quality is important to improving patient care while reducing overall costs. Real-time, high quality data are critical for emergency medical applications, telemedicine, and preventive care, which sensor based applications can provide. MethodsThis is a theory-based approach, illustrated with examples from the healthcare industry. ResultsWhile the benefits of sensor-enabled applications are clear, the many design decisions faced by designers are complex. A sensor design framework is presented that links the requirements of the application with the capabilities of the many types of sensors available for healthcare. ConclusionThis framework highlights the design decisions between technology, architecture, and algorithmic solutions. This provides the tools needed to design and implement effective and efficient sensor-based IT solutions in healthcare applications.

A game theoretic approach for inter-network interference mitigation in wireless body area networks

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is an emerging technology to provide real-time health monitoring and ubiquitous healthcare services. In many applications, multiple wireless body area networks have to coexist in a small area, resulting in serious inter-network interference. This not only reduces network reliability that is especially important in emergency medical applications, but also consumes more power of WBANs. In this paper, an inter-network interference mitigation approach based on a power control algorithm is proposed. Power control is modeled as a non-cooperative game, in which both inter-network interference and energy efficiency of WBANs are considered. The existence and uniqueness of Nash Equilibrium in the game are proved, and an optimal scheme based on best response is proposed to find its Nash Equilibrium. By coordinating the transmission power levels among networks under interference environment, the total system throughput can be increased with minimum power consumed. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been illustrated by simulation results, where the performance of the proposed approach is evaluated in terms of overall utility and power efficiency and convergence speed.

Fast FCM with Spatial Neighborhood Information for Brain Mr Image Segmentation

Abstract Among different segmentation approaches Fuzzy c-Means clustering (FCM) is a welldeveloped algorithm for medical image segmentation. In emergency medical applications quick convergence of FCM is necessary. On the other hand spatial information is seldom exploited in standard FCM; therefore nuisance factors can simply affect it and cause misclassification. This paper aims to introduce a Fast FCM (FFCM) technique by incorporation of spatial neighborhood information which is exploited by a linear function on fuzzy membership. Applying proposed spatial Fast FCM (sFFCM), elapsed time is decreased and neighborhood spatial information is exploited in FFCM. Moreover, iteration numbers by proposed FFCM/sFFCM techniques are decreased efficiently. The FCM/FFCM techniques are examined on both simulated and real MR images. Furthermore, to considerably decrease of convergence time and iterations number, cluster centroids are initialized by an algorithm. Accuracy of the new approach is same as standard FCM. The quantitative assessments of presented FCM/FFCM techniques are evaluated by conventional validity functions. Experimental results demonstrate that sFFCM techniques efficiently handle noise interference and significantly decrease elapsed time.

Intelligent Management Functionality for Emergency Medical Applications Based on Cognitive Networking Principles

Telecommunications and information technology rapidly migrate towards the Future Internet (FI) era, which is characterized by powerful and complex network infrastructures, advanced applications, services and content, efficient power management as well as extensions in the business model. One of the main application areas that find prosper ground in the FI era, is medicine. In particular, latest advances in medical sciences are reflected on their capability to approach previously past-cure diseases, as well as to prevent the appearance and evolution of unpleasant situations. Those advances are often derived from interdisciplinary solutions to complex medical problems, supported by communications and electronics, which target fast, reliable and stable solutions to problems that are demanding in terms of velocity and accuracy. The goal of this paper is to present intelligent, knowledge-based management functionality capable of supporting emergency medical applications. An indicative emergency medical scenario is provided, along with extensive simulation results using the Network Simulator-2 (NS-2), for evaluating the performance of the proposed functionality.

Chemical Oxygen Generation: Evaluation of the Green Dot Systems, Inc Portable, Nonpressurized emOx Device

To evaluate the performance of the emOx emergency powdered oxygen portable nonpressurized delivery system. This device produces oxygen through chemical reaction and is marketed for emergency first aid use until professional medical assistance is available. Seven unmanned trials were conducted under standard laboratory conditions. Measures included oxygen flow, reaction canister external wall temperature, delivered gas temperature, and delivered gas relative humidity. The mean oxygen flow was 1.75 ± 1.58 L x min(-1) (mean ± SD) with a total yield of 40.4 ± 2.6 L. Oxygen flow increased slowly and with substantial variability between reactant groups, exceeding 2.0 L x min(-1) after 15.7 ± 6.4 minutes of operation. Oxygen flow briefly peaked at 5.93 ± 0.56 L x min(-1) at 17.8 ± 7.9 minutes before rapidly falling to zero. The mean oxygen fraction was 0.81 ± 0.28, exceeding 0.96 in 10.7 ± 2.9 minutes. The reaction canister external wall temperature reached 54.7 ± 7.4 °C. Delivered gas temperature varied little from ambient. Delivered gas relative humidity surpassed 75% in 8 ± 3 minutes and 90% in 15 ± 5 minutes of operation. A readily available, high concentration oxygen supply could have utility to manage many conditions in advance of the arrival of professional emergency medical services (EMS). Unfortunately, the highly variable activation time and low average oxygen flow rate make the rapid deployment value of the emOx equivocal. The limited total oxygen yield makes it inappropriate for conditions demanding significant oxygen resources. Advancement in oxygen concentrator systems likely holds far more promise than powdered chemical oxygen generation for first aid and emergency medical applications.

Improved Spectrogram Analysis for ECG Signal in Emergency Medical Applications

This paper presents the spectrogram effect of biomedical signal, especially for ECG. Simulation module developed for the spectrogram implementation. Spectrogram based on ECG signal and power spectral density together with off-line evaluation has been observed. ECG contains very important clinical information about the cardiac activities of heart. The features of small variations in ECG signal with time-varying morphological characteristics needs to be extracted by signal processing method because there are not visible of graphical ECG signal. Small variations of simulated normal and noise corrupted ECG signal have been extracted using spectrogram. The spectrogram found to be more precise over conventional FFT in finding the small abnormalities in ECG signal. These form time-frequency representations for processing time-varying signals. By using the presented method, it is ensure that high resolution time-varying spectrum estimation with no lag error can be produced. Other benefits of the method are the straightforward procedure for evaluating the statistics of the spectrum estimation.

Notärztliche Betreuung von Tumorpatienten – Sieben Fälle aus der finalen Krankheitsphase

The care of patients with cancer disease in the final stage amounts to 2.5% of all emergency-medical applications. This corresponded to the number of pediatric emergency cases. For this every emergency physician can be involved in the care of those patients. Emergency physicians may allow adapted treatment in the will or supposed will of the patient always. Therefore it is necessary to know special legal bearings of the case. We analysed seven emergency cases with patients in the final stage of their cancer disease retrospectively. For this we present seven different emergency cases with different regulatory framework for each emergency physician. The cases have shown seven possible care concepts of patients in the final stage of a cancer disease. All patients could be categorised as palliative ones. Nevertheless, the emergency physicians were alarmed by the patients' relatives because of needing professional help at the moment. The differences of the cases appeared in the regulatory framework. The seven cases have shown that different legal meanings could be important in emergency therapy of palliative patients.