Aurelia Butler

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    Walking in their shoes: Using virtual reality to elicit empathy in healthcare providers

    Research has shown empathy gives healthcare workers the ability to provide appropriate supports and make fewer mistakes. This helps increase patient satisfaction and enhance patient outcomes, resulting in better overall care. In an upcoming issue of the Journal of Medical Imaging and Radiation Sciences, published by Elsevier, multidisciplinary clinicians and researchers from Dalhousie University performed an integrative review to synthesize the findings regarding virtual reality (VR) as a pedagogical tool for eliciting empathetic behavior in medical radiation technologists (MRTs).
    Informally, empathy is often described as the capacity to put oneself in the shoes of another. Empathy is essential to patient-centered care and crucial to the development of therapeutic relationships between carers (healthcare providers, healthcare students, and informal caregivers such as parents, spouses, friends, family, clergy, social workers, and fellow patients) and care recipients. Currently, there is a need for the development of effective tools and approaches that are standardizable, low-risk, safe-to-fail, easily repeatable, and could assist in eliciting empathetic behavior.
    This research synthesis looked at studies investigating VR experiences that ranged from a single eight-minute session to sessions lasting 20-25 minutes in duration delivered on two separate days, both in immersive VR environments where participants assumed the role of a care recipient, and non-immersive VR environments where the participants assumed the role of a care provider in a simulated care setting. The two types of studies helped researchers gain an understanding of what it is like to have a specific disease or need and to practice interacting with virtual care recipients.
    “Although the studies we looked at don’t definitively show VR can help sustain empathy behaviors over time, there is a lot of promise for research and future applications in this area,” explained lead author Megan Brydon, MSc, BHSc, RTNM, IWK Health Centre, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
    The authors conclude that VR may provide an effective and wide-ranging tool for the learning of care recipients’ perspectives and that future studies should seek to determine which VR experiences are the most effective in evoking empathetic behaviors. They recommend that these studies employ high order designs that are better able to control biases.
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    ‘Tree farts’ contribute about a fifth of greenhouse gases from ghost forests

    If a tree farts in the forest, does it make a sound? No, but it does add a smidge of greenhouse gas to the atmosphere.

    Gases released by dead trees — dubbed “tree farts” — account for roughly one-fifth of the greenhouse gases emitted by skeletal, marshy forests along the coast of North Carolina, researchers report online May 10 in Biogeochemistry. While these emissions pale in comparison with other sources, an accurate accounting is necessary to get a full picture of where climate-warming gases come from.

    A team of ecologists went sniffing for tree farts in ghost forests, which form when saltwater from rising sea levels poisons a woodland, leaving behind a marsh full of standing dead trees. These phantom ecosystems are expected to expand with climate change, but it’s unclear exactly how they contribute to the world’s carbon budget.

    “The emergence of ghost forests is one of the biggest changes happening in response to sea level rise,” says Keryn Gedan, a coastal ecologist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., who was not involved in the work. “As forests convert to wetlands, we expect over long timescales that’s going to represent a substantial carbon sink,” she says, since wetlands store more carbon than forests. But in the short term, dead trees decay and stop taking up carbon dioxide through photosynthesis, “so that’s going to be a major greenhouse gas source.”

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    To better understand how ghost forests pass gas into the atmosphere, the researchers measured greenhouse gases wafting off dead trees and soil in five ghost forests on the Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula in North Carolina. “It’s kind of eerie” out there, says Melinda Martinez, a wetland ecologist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

    But Martinez ain’t afraid of no ghost forest. In 2018 and 2019, she measured CO2, methane and nitrous oxide emissions from dead trees using a portable gas analyzer she toted on her back. “I definitely looked like a ghostbuster,” she says.

    Wetland ecologist Melinda Martinez totes a portable gas analyzer on her back to measure the “tree farts” emitted by a ghost forest tree. A tube connects the gas analyzer to an airtight seal around the trunk of the tree.M. Ardón

    Soils gave off most of the greenhouse gases from the ghost forests. Each square meter of ground emitted an average 416 milligrams of CO2, 5.9 milligrams of methane and 0.1 milligrams of nitrous oxide per hour. On average, dead trees released about 116 milligrams of CO2, 0.3 milligrams of methane and 0.04 milligrams of nitrous oxide per square meter per hour — totaling about one-fourth the soil’s emissions.

    Measuring greenhouse gases from the trees is “kind of measuring the last breath of these forests,” says Marcelo Ardón, an ecosystems ecologist and biogeochemist at North Carolina State University. The dead trees “don’t emit a ton, but they are important” to a ghost forest’s overall emissions.

    Ardón coined the term “tree farts” to describe the dead trees’ greenhouse gas emissions. “I have an 8-year-old and an 11-year-old, and fart jokes are what we talk about,” he explains. But the analogy has a biological basis, too. Actual farts are caused by microbes in the body; the greenhouse gases emitted by ghost forests are created by microbes in the soil and trees.

    In the grand scheme of carbon emissions, ghost forests’ role may be minor. Tree farts, for instance, have nothing on cow burps (SN: 11/18/15). A single dairy cow can emit up to 27 grams of methane — a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 — per hour. But accounting for even minor sources of carbon is important for fine-tuning our understanding of the global carbon budget, says Martinez (SN: 10/1/19). So it would behoove scientists not to turn up their noses at ghost tree farts.   More

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    in Computers Math

    Envisioning safer cities with AI

    Artificial intelligence is providing new opportunities in a range of fields, from business to industrial design to entertainment. But how about civil engineering and city planning? How might machine- and deep-learning help us create safer, more sustainable, and resilient built environments?
    A team of researchers from the NSF NHERI SimCenter, a computational modeling and simulation center for the natural hazards engineering community based at the University of California, Berkeley, have developed a suite of tools called BRAILS — Building Recognition using AI at Large-Scale — that can automatically identify characteristics of buildings in a city and even detect the risks that a city’s structures would face in an earthquake, hurricane, or tsunami.
    Charles (Chaofeng) Wang, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and the lead developer of BRAILS, says the project grew out of a need to quickly and reliably characterize the structures in a city.
    “We want to simulate the impact of hazards on all of the buildings in a region, but we don’t have a description of the building attributes,” Wang said. “For example, in the San Francisco Bay area, there are millions of buildings. Using AI, we are able to get the needed information. We can train neural network models to infer building information from images and other sources of data.”
    BRAILS uses machine learning, deep learning, and computer vision to extract information about the built environment. It is envisioned as a tool for architects, engineers and planning professionals to more efficiently plan, design, and manage buildings and infrastructure systems.
    The SimCenter recently released BRAILS version 2.0 which includes modules to predict a larger spectrum of building characteristics. These include occupancy class (commercial, single-family, or multi-family), roof type (flat, gabled, or hipped), foundation elevation, year built, number of floors, and whether a building has a “soft-story” — a civil engineering term for structures that include ground floors with large openings (like storefronts) that may be more prone to collapse during an earthquake. More

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    Magnetically propelled cilia power climbing soft robots and microfluidic pumps

    The rhythmic motions of hair-like cilia move liquids around cells or propel the cells themselves. In nature, cilia flap independently, and mimicking these movements with artificial materials requires complex mechanisms. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces have made artificial cilia that move in a wave-like fashion when a rotating magnetic field is applied, making them suitable for versatile, climbing soft robots and microfluidic devices. Watch a video of the artificial cilia here.
    Replicating movements found in nature — for example, the small, whip-like movements of cilia — could help researchers create better robots or microscopic devices. As cilia vibrate sequentially, they produce a traveling wave that moves water more efficiently and with a better pumping speed than when the cilia move at the same time. Previous researchers have recreated these wave-like movements, but the artificial cilia were expensive, needed sophisticated moving parts and were too large to be used for micro-scale devices. So, Shuaizhong Zhang, Jaap den Toonder and colleagues wanted to create microscale cilia that would move in a wave when a magnetic field was applied, pumping water quickly over them or acting as a soft robot that can crawl and climb.
    The researchers infused a polymer with carbonyl iron powder particles and poured the mixture into a series of identical 50 ?m-wide cylindrical holes. While the polymer cured, the team placed magnets underneath the mold, slightly altering the particles’ alignments and magnetic properties in adjacent cilia. To test the artificial cilia’s ability to move in water and glycerol, the researchers applied a rotating magnetic field. As magnets moved around the array, the cilia whipped back and forth, and flow was generated at a rate better than for most artificial cilia. Finally, the researchers flipped the array over, and it scuttled across a flat surface, reaching a maximum speed proportional to a human’s running speed, and the robot reversed when the magnetic field flipped directions. The soft robot crawled up and down a 45-degree incline, climbed vertical surfaces, walked upside down and carried an object 10 times heavier than its own weight. The researchers say that because these artificial cilia are magnetically propelled and unconnected to any other device, they could be used to produce microfluidic pumps and agile soft robots for biomedical applications.
    The authors acknowledge funding from a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant and the China Scholarship Council.
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    Researchers use 'hole-y' math and machine learning to study cellular self-assembly

    The field of mathematical topology is often described in terms of donuts and pretzels.
    To most of us, the two differ in the way they taste or in their compatibility with morning coffee. But to a topologist, the only difference between the two is that one has a single hole and the other has three. There’s no way to stretch or contort a donut to make it look like a pretzel — at least not without ripping it or pasting different parts together, both of which are verboten in topology. The different number of holes make two shapes that are fundamentally, inexorably different.
    In recent years, researchers have drawn on mathematical topology to help explain a range of phenomena like phase transitions in matter, aspects of Earth’s climate and even how zebrafish form their iconic stripes. Now, a Brown University research team is working to use topology in yet another realm: training computers to classify how human cells organize into tissue-like architectures.
    In a study published in the May 7 issue of the journal Soft Matter, the researchers demonstrate a machine learning technique that measures the topological traits of cell clusters. They showed that the system can accurately categorize cell clusters and infer the motility and adhesion of the cells that comprise them.
    “You can think of this as topology-informed machine learning,” said Dhananjay Bhaskar, a recent Ph.D. graduate who led the work. “The hope is that this can help us to avoid some of the pitfalls that affect the accuracy of machine learning algorithms.”
    Bhaskar developed the algorithm with Ian Y. Wong, an assistant professor in Brown’s School of Engineering, and William Zhang, a Brown undergraduate. More

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    ‘Zombie’ forest fires may become more common with climate change

    Winter usually kills most forest fires. But in the boreal woods that encircle the far North, some fires, like zombies, just don’t die. 

    The first broad scientific look at overwintering “zombie fires” reveals these rare occurrences can flare up the year after warmer-than-normal summers and account for up to 38 percent of the total burn area in some regions, researchers report online May 19 in Nature. As climate change accelerates in boreal forests, the frequency of zombie fires could rise and exacerbate warming by releasing more greenhouse gases from the region’s soils, which may house twice as much carbon as Earth’s atmosphere (SN: 4/11/19).

    Zombie fires hibernate underground. Blanketed by snow, they smolder through the cold, surviving on the carbon-rich fuel of peat and boreal soil and moving very slowly — just 100 to 500 meters over the winter. Come spring, the fires reemerge near the forest they previously charred, burning fresh fuel well before the traditional fire season starts. Until now, these zombie fires have remained relatively mysterious to science, known mostly from firefighter anecdotes.

    Strange coincidences on satellite images, however, got the attention of earth systems scientist Rebecca Scholten and her colleagues. “My adviser noticed that some years, new fires were starting very close to the previous year’s fire,” says Scholten, of Vrije University Amsterdam. This is unusual, she says, since boreal fires are usually sparked by random lightning or human activity. Local fire managers confirmed that these were the same fires, prompting the researchers to wonder just how often fires overwinter.

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    To find evidence of underground fires, the researchers combined firefighter reports with satellite images of Alaska and northern Canada captured from 2002 to 2018. They looked for blazes that started close to the scars left the previous year and that began before midsummer, when lightning-sparked fires usually occur.

    The team found that zombie fires are rare, accounting for 0.8 percent of the total area burned by forest fires in these regions over those 16 years, but there was lots of variability. In 2008, one zombie fire burned approximately 13,700 hectares in Alaska, about 38 percent of all burned areas that year in that state. Zombie fires were more likely to occur, and burn larger swaths of land, after warmer summers that allowed fires to reach deeper into the soil, the researchers found.

    Boreal forests are warming faster that the global average and “we’re seeing more hot summers and more large fires and intense burning,” Scholten says. That might set the stage for zombie fires to play a bigger role.

    “This is a really welcome advance which could help fire management,” says Jessica McCarty, a geographer at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, who wasn’t involved in the study. Understanding when zombie fires are more likely to occur could help firefighters identify these areas early, she says, protecting fragile landscapes that house a lot of climate warming gases.

    “Some of these soils are thousands of years old,” McCarty says. While “areas we thought were fire resistant are now fire prone” due to climate change, she says, better fire management can make a difference. “We’re not helpless.” More

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    in Computers Math

    Rising energy demand for cooling

    Due to climate change, the average global temperature will rise in the coming decades. This should also significantly increase the number of so-called cooling degree days. These measure the number of hours, in which the ambient temperature is above a certain threshold, at which a building must be cooled to keep the indoor temperature at a comfortable level. The rising values may lead to an increased installation of AC systems in households. This could lead to a higher energy demand for cooling buildings, which is already expected to increase due to climate change and population growth.
    Nip-and-tuck race between heating and cooling
    To get a better understanding of how massive this increase will be in Switzerland, Empa researchers analyzed the heating and cooling requirements of the NEST research and innovation building. “By including ambient temperatures, we were able to make a projection of the future thermal energy demand of buildings based on the climate scenarios for Switzerland. In addition to climate change, we also took population growth and the increasing use of AC devices into account,” explains Robin Mutschler, postdoc at Empa’s Urban Energy Systems lab.
    The results forecast a significant increase in the demand for cooling energy: In an extreme scenario where the whole of Switzerland would rely on air conditioning, almost as much energy would be needed for cooling as for heating by the middle of the century. In figures, this corresponds to about 20 terawatt hours (TWh) per year for heating and 17.5 TWh for cooling. The required cooling energy was calculated without regard to the technology. If this is provided by reversing a heat pump process, e.g. with COP 3 for cooling, the electricity demand for 17.5 TWh cooling energy is about 5.8 TWh.
    The heating demand of the residential units of NEST is comparable to a modern apartment building. These figures are therefore representative if is assumed that the average Swiss building is comparable to the NEST building. When this will be the case depends on the renovation rate. However, even in a more moderate scenario, the cooling demand in Switzerland will increase significantly. The researchers assume an additional energy demand of five TWh per year in this scenario.
    Strong impact on the Swiss energy system
    The energy demand of Swiss buildings today accounts for around 40 percent of the total energy demand. The main part of this is used for heating. This will probably remain this way until at least the middle of the 21st century, while the energy demand for cooling buildings is expected to increase significantly. If thermal energy is provided by heat pumps that can also cool, this potentially has a strong impact on the overall energy system and especially on electricity as an energy carrier.
    It is assumed that only a small amount of Swiss households currently own an AC unit or system. However, the number of houses with heat pumps is growing. The Empa researchers estimate that the number of households with cooling systems could rise to over 50 percent due to the increase in cooling degree days. This could lead to significant demand peaks on hot days. An additional five TWh of energy demand for cooling would be equivalent to about two percent of today’s electricity demand if cooling is provided by heat pumps. In the more extreme scenario, the electricity demand for cooling could even approach ten percent of today’s total demand. However, this will not be evenly distributed throughout the year, but will correlate with hot periods, which can lead to demand peaks. On a positive note, cooling demand is relatively well matched by electricity production from photovoltaic systems. The impact of cooling residential buildings will be significantly higher compared to office buildings, as they account for about two-thirds of the building area.
    Based on these findings, it is evident to the researchers that these developments must be taken into account when constructing new buildings and that the possibilities of passive cooling must be fully exploited. “Building architecture should no longer focus only on optimizing heat losses, especially in winter, but also on reducing heat gains in summer,” says Mutschler. This could be achieved, for example, through urban planning measures for climate adaptation at district level, the implementation of programs for heat reduction, or the reduction of glazing in buildings. “Moreover, it is crucial that policymakers also address this development and investigate ways to best meet the increasing cooling energy demand while minimizing the impact on the future decarbonized energy system,” Mutschler adds. One possible contribution to cooling buildings could come from district cooling systems, which have already been successfully implemented in Switzerland — for example in Geneva. Others are emerging, for instance in Zug. More

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    AI predicts lung cancer risk

    An artificial intelligence (AI) program accurately predicts the risk that lung nodules detected on screening CT will become cancerous, according to a study published in the journal Radiology.
    Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death worldwide, with an estimated 1.8 million deaths in 2020, according to the World Health Organization. Low-dose chest CT is used to screen people at a high risk of lung cancer, such as longtime smokers. It has been shown to significantly reduce lung cancer mortality, primarily by helping to detect cancers at an early stage when they are easier to treat successfully.
    While lung cancer typically shows up as pulmonary nodules on CT images, most nodules are benign and do not require further clinical workup. Accurately distinguishing between benign and malignant nodules is therefore crucial to catch cancers early.
    For the new study, researchers developed an algorithm for lung nodule assessment using deep learning, an AI application capable of finding certain patterns in imaging data. The researchers trained the algorithm on CT images of more than 16,000 nodules, including 1,249 malignancies, from the National Lung Screening Trial. They validated the algorithm on three large sets of imaging data of nodules from the Danish Lung Cancer Screening Trial.
    The deep learning algorithm delivered excellent results, outperforming the established Pan-Canadian Early Detection of Lung Cancer model for lung nodule malignancy risk estimation. It performed comparably to 11 clinicians, including four thoracic radiologists, five radiology residents and two pulmonologists.
    “The algorithm may aid radiologists in accurately estimating the malignancy risk of pulmonary nodules,” said the study’s first author, Kiran Vaidhya Venkadesh, a Ph.D. candidate with the Diagnostic Image Analysis Group at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. “This may help in optimizing follow-up recommendations for lung cancer screening participants.”
    The algorithm potentially brings several additional benefits to the clinic, the researchers said.
    “As it does not require manual interpretation of nodule imaging characteristics, the proposed algorithm may reduce the substantial interobserver variability in CT interpretation,” said senior author Colin Jacobs, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Medical Imaging at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen. “This may lead to fewer unnecessary diagnostic interventions, lower radiologists’ workload and reduce costs of lung cancer screening.”
    The researchers plan to continue improving the algorithm by incorporating clinical parameters like age, sex and smoking history.
    They are also working on a deep learning algorithm that takes multiple CT examinations as input. The current algorithm is highly suitable for analyzing nodules at the initial, or baseline, screening, but for nodules detected at subsequent screenings, growth and appearance in comparison to the previous CT are important.
    Dr. Jacobs and colleagues have developed other algorithms to reliably extract imaging features from the chest CT related to chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases and cardiovascular diseases. They will be investigating how to effectively integrate these imaging features into the current algorithm. More