Category Archives: Physiology

Physiology

Seymour native, husband prepare to open chiropractic practice – Seymour Tribune

With seven years of college behind her, MacKenzie Ryczek is ready to apply what she learned.

The 25-year-old Seymour native and her husband, Nick Ryczek, graduated from the first and largest college of chiropractic Oct. 23.

That wrapped up MacKenzies postsecondary journey, which started with earning a Bachelor of Arts in science with a major in biology and minor in kinesiology and integrative physiology from Hanover College in 2017 and a Doctorate of Chiropractic from Palmer College of Chiropractic this year.

Now, she and Nick are making an adjustment in opening their own business, New Wave Chiropractic, in Greenwood in the spring of 2021.

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I am most looking forward to being able to serve the community, MacKenzie said. Its not a secret that people are getting sicker, yet we are spending the most on health care out of any other country. I want to be a part of the change that is needed to get people back to being healthy. Now more than ever, people are in need of a health change.

MacKenzie said she was in seventh grade when she decided she wanted to attend Palmer.

I have always wanted to be in the health field to help people, but I wanted to do something other than prescribe medications, she said. Chiropractic is about helping people find the root cause of their health concerns and heal them from the inside out.

She graduated from Seymour High School in 2013 before going on to Hanover to earn her undergraduate degree.

I feel that my education from Seymour and Hanover prepared me very well for graduate school, MacKenzie said. Not only the type of classes I took, but the amount of effort the classes required really made me prioritize my education.

The process of applying to chiropractic school included an application with two academic references, an essay and a phone interview.

No specific undergraduate degree is required, but you do have to have a certain amount of science-based classes in order to start the program, MacKenzie said.

Palmer was the only chiropractic school she visited as a prospective student and the only school she wanted to attend. The main campus is in Iowa, and other schools are in San Jose, California, and Port Orange, Florida.

I wanted to go to Palmer in Davenport, Iowa, because it was the first chiropractic college and so much history lives there, she said of the worlds first chiropractic school that was established in 1897.

At Palmer, MacKenzie said she received an excellent education and made many lifelong friends who are now valuable colleagues.

During her first trimester, she joined a club called AMPED, or Advanced Mentorship Program for Entrepreneurial Development.

This group met every week to train on communication, leadership and various business principles to prepare you for opening a practice after graduation, she said. I attended countless conferences and leadership retreats with this organization that has prepared me so much for what I am doing right now.

Making the grade was important to MacKenzie, and that showed by being named to the deans list eight times at Palmer.

I focused on learning and retaining as much information as I could during the classes to prepare for the five parts of chiropractic board exams, she said.

October was a big month because she and Nick were married Oct. 3 and followed that up 20 days later with graduation.

She and Nick met at Palmer.

We were in the same graduating class and had almost every class together for over three years, MacKenzie said. The intensity and demanding nature of going to school at Palmer can put strain on relationships, so it was nice to be able to share that stress and experience with Nick. Being able to graduate together made it easy for us to focus on the same goals right after graduation.

Nick, a Wisconsin native, said it wasnt until his early undergraduate years he realized he wanted to be a chiropractor.

I always knew I wanted to go into health care and help people, but I didnt exactly know where I fit into that until I was introduced to chiropractic, he said. The natural approach of chiropractic really spoke to me, and from that point on, I knew I wanted to go to chiropractic school and practice this amazing form of healing.

Nick said he was lucky to meet MacKenzie at Palmer.

Chiropractic school is pretty tough, so having her to go through everything with me was amazing, Nick said. We were able to keep each other going through the hard times and celebrate the good times together.

The ceremony Oct. 23 was MacKenzies third graduation. Her parents, James Harvey II and Tracy Harvey of Seymour, were in attendance.

It meant so much to be able to walk across the stage and be ceremonially promoted to doctor, she said. I have been in school since 2013 receiving a higher education. This is the first time in my life that I dont have a class to attend or an assignment to do. It feels surreal that I have finally accomplished what I set out to do many years ago.

Getting married and graduating in the same month was almost like running a marathon, she said.

It took a lot of planning and tons of phone calls to be able to graduate with my new last name, she said. It was nice to be able to celebrate the entire month of October with friends and family on our accomplishments.

MacKenzie decided she wanted to open her own practice after she joined AMPED.

This group really gave me the courage and determination to do that, she said. After Nick and I started dating, I brought him into the group and shared my goals and dreams, and I was lucky that he had the same goals, and everything just seemed to work out.

They chose Greenwood for several reasons.

I am very familiar with the area, its really close to Indianapolis but not as busy, its a very family-oriented town and it is going through some major growth, as well, MacKenzie said. We visited Greenwood a few times to just drive around, and it really felt like home.

The Ryczeks will be the only chiropractors and plan to have at least two employees at the start and hire more as they grow.

They are certified in Torque Release Technique, an instrument-based system of analyzing the spine that allows them to make adjustments as gentle and specific as possible. They also are trained to see pregnant women, infants and children of all ages.

Were so excited to start this chapter of our lives and be able make a huge impact on the health of our community, Nick said of opening the practice.

MacKenzie hopes her success story inspires others to pursue their dreams and work toward achieving them.

I hope to serve as an example in that you can do anything you set your mind to, she said. It doesnt matter where you come from, how strange anyone thinks your dream is. You can do whatever you are determined to do. It just takes effort, and it may take a ton of time, but it is so worth it in the end.

Ryczek file

Name: MacKenzie Ryczek

Age: 25

Hometown: Seymour

Residence: Greenwood

Education: Seymour High School (2013); Hanover College (Bachelor of Arts in science with a major in biology and minor in kinesiology and integrative physiology, 2017); Palmer College of Chiropractic (Doctorate of Chiropractic, 2020)

Occupation: Chiropractor

Family: Husband, Nick Ryczek; parents, James Harvey II and Tracy Harvey

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Seymour native, husband prepare to open chiropractic practice - Seymour Tribune

Physiology

The role of the microbiota in human genetic adaptation – Science

Getting to the guts of local evolution

The microbiota of mammals is a product of coevolution. However, humans exhibit a range of adaptive peculiarities that can be quite geographically specific. The human microbiota also displays a variety of community compositions and a range of overlapping and redundant metabolic characteristics that can alter host physiology. For example, lactase persistence is a genetic characteristic of European populations, but in populations lacking the lactase gene, milk sugar digestion is endowed by the microbiota instead. Suzuki and Ley review the evidence for the role that the microbiota plays in local adaptation to new and changing human circumstances.

Science, this issue p. eaaz6827

When human populations expanded across the globe, they adapted genetically to local environments in response to novel selection pressures. Drivers of selection include exposure to new diets, climates, or pathogens. Humans harbor microbiotas that also respond to changes in local conditions and changes in their hosts. As a result, microbiotas may alter the adaptive landscape of the host through modification of the environment. Examples include changes to a foods nutritional value, the hosts tolerance to cold or low amounts of oxygen, or susceptibility to invading pathogens. By buffering or altering drivers of selection, the microbiota may change host phenotypes without coevolution between host and microbiota. Functions of the microbiota that are beneficial to the host may arise randomly or be acquired from the environment. These beneficial functions can be selected without the host exerting genetic control over them. Hosts may evolve the means to maintain beneficial microbes or to pass them to offspring, which will affect the heritability and transmission modes of these microbes. Examples in humans include the digestion of lactose via lactase activity (encoded by the LCT gene region) in adults and the digestion of starch by salivary amylase (encoded by the AMY1 gene)both are adaptations resulting from shifts in diet. The allelic variation of these genes also predicts compositional and functional variation of the gut microbiota. Such feedback between host alleles and microbiota function has the potential to influence variation in the same adaptive trait in the host. How the microbiota modifies host genetic adaptation remains to be fully explored.

In this paper, we review examples of human adaptations to new environments that indicate an interplay between host genes and the microbiota, and we examine in detail the LCTBifidobacterium and the AMY1Ruminococcus interactions. In these examples, the adaptive host allele and adaptive microbial functions are linked. We propose host mechanisms that can replace or recruit beneficial microbiota functions during local adaptation. Finally, we search for additional examples where microbiotas are implicated in human genetic adaptations, in which the genetic basis of adaptation is well described. These range from dietary adaptations, where host and microbial enzymes can metabolize the same dietary components (e.g., fatty acid and alcohol metabolism), through climate-related adaptations, where host and microbes can induce the same physiological pathway (e.g., cold-induced thermogenesis, skin pigmentation, and blood pressure regulation), to adaptations where hosts and microbes defend against the same local pathogens (e.g., resistance to malaria, cholera, and others). These examples suggest that microbiota has the potential to affect host evolution by modifying the adaptive landscape without requiring coevolution.

Well-studied examples of local adaptation across diverse host species can be revisited to elucidate previously unappreciated roles for the microbiota in host-adaptive evolution. In the context of human adaptation, knowledge of microbial functions and host genemicrobe associations is heavily biased toward observations made in Western populations, as these have been the most intensively studied to date. Testing many of the interactions proposed in this Review between host genes under selection and the microbiota will require a wider geographic scope of populations in their local contexts. Because genes under strong selection in humans are often involved in metabolic and other disorders and can vary between populations, future investigations of host genemicrobe interactions that relate to human adaptation may contribute to a deeper understanding of microbiota-related diseases in specific populations. Investigating host genemicrobe interactions in a wider variety of human populations will also help researchers go beyond collections of anecdotes to form the basis of a theory that takes microbial contributions to host adaptation into account in a formal framework. A better understanding of reciprocal interactions between the host genome and microbiota in the context of adaptive evolution will add another dimension to our understanding of human evolution as we moved with our microbes through time and space.

When human populations adapt genetically to new environments, their microbiotas may also participate in the process. Microbes can evolve faster than their host, which allows them to respond quickly to environmental change. They also filter the hosts environment, thereby altering selective pressures on the host. Illustrated here are examples of interactions between adaptive host alleles and adaptive microbiota functions where the microbiota likely modified the adaptive landscape in response to changes in diet (e.g., changes in levels of starch and milk consumption), exposure to local pathogens (e.g., malaria parasites and Plasmodium spp.), and changes in local climate (e.g., cold stress and hypoxia). In this paper, we discuss the resulting relationships between host-adaptive alleles and microbiota functions.

As human populations spread across the world, they adapted genetically to local conditions. So too did the resident microorganism communities that everyone carries with them. However, the collective influence of the diverse and dynamic community of resident microbes on host evolution is poorly understood. The taxonomic composition of the microbiota varies among individuals and displays a range of sometimes redundant functions that modify the physicochemical environment of the host and may alter selection pressures. Here we review known human traits and genes for which the microbiota may have contributed or responded to changes in host diet, climate, or pathogen exposure. Integrating hostmicrobiota interactions in human adaptation could offer new approaches to improve our understanding of human health and evolution.

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The role of the microbiota in human genetic adaptation - Science

Physiology

Nobel Prize history from the year you were born – Kenosha News

Since 1901, Nobel Prizes have honored the worlds best and brightest and showcased the work of brilliant and creative minds, thanks to Swedish businessman Alfred Nobel, who made his fortune with the invention of dynamite.

The Prize in Physiology or Medicine often honors those whose discoveries led to medical breakthroughs, new drug treatments, or a better understanding of the human body that benefit us all.

The Prize in Literature celebrates those skilled in telling stories, creating poetry, and translating the human experience into words. The Prizes in Chemistry and Physics remind most of us how little we understand of genetics, atomic structures, or the universe around us, celebrating the scientists who further knowledge. A later addition to the award roster, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences is not an original Prize, but was established by the Central Bank of Sweden in 1968 as a memorial to Alfred Nobel. It applauds those who can unravel the mysteries of markets, trade, and money.

The Peace Prize celebrates, in Nobels words, the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses, sometimes risking their lives to do so.

So precious are the awards that the medals of German physicists Max von Laue and James Franck, stored away for safekeeping in Copenhagen during World War II, were dissolved in acid to keep them away from approaching Nazi troops. After the war, the gold was reconstituted from the acid and recast into new medals.

But Nobel history has not been entirely noble. In 1939, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, known for his policy of appeasement toward Nazi Germany, was nominated for the Peace Prize. In an act of irony and protest, members of the Swedish Parliament nominated Adolf Hitler. That nomination was withdrawn. Some recipients have ordered oppressive crackdowns on their own people or ignored genocides, either before or after receiving the Prize. The 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was given to Germanys Fritz Haber, who invented a method of producing ammonia on a large scale, which was helpful in making fertilizer. But the same chemist helped develop the chlorine gas that was used as a chemical weapon in World War I.

Stacker looked at facts and events related to the Nobel Prizes each year from 1931 to 2020, drawing from the Nobel Committees recollections and announcements, news stories, and historical accounts.

Take a look, and see what was happening with the Nobel Prizes the year you were born.

You may also like: 100 years of military history

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Nobel Prize history from the year you were born - Kenosha News

Physiology

Is The Secret to Saving Migratory Birds in the Meal Prep? – Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute

The Bird House team at the Smithsonians National Zoo has many beaks to feed, including 23 species of migratory songbirds and shorebirds. But what happens when they are hungry to migrate and theres nowhere to go? Curator Sara Hallager and nutritionist Erin Kendrick share some of the valuable lessons they have learned from taking these marvelous migrators under their wing.

Come fall and spring, migratory songbirds and shorebirds are programmed to do two things: fly and eat. In preparing for the long journey ahead, these birds exhibit a normal behavior called migratory restlessness. During this period, they dont sleep much at night. They eat more. They put on a lot of weight. They expend all that energy (and those extra calories) as they embark on their marvelous migrations.

But what happens when those birds cannot travel, say, because they are housed in a Zoo? Do they gorge themselves, even though they have nowhere to go? How do keepers and Zoo nutritionists help individual animals stay physically fit and healthy, even as their physiology changes naturally with the seasons?

The answer lies in the meal prep.

Before we get into the ins-and-outs of our birds diets, lets look at how they eat in the wild.

ABOVE: Mealworms are on the menu for the Zoos American avocets. To help them acclimate to sharing a space with their caretakers, keeper Lori Smith crouches a short distance away. She tosses the tasty snacks onto a placemat, and the avocets gobble them up.

Songbirds know its time to migrate in the fall, when their food staples (like bugs and berries) decrease. In the spring, they get the urge to migrate back to their breeding grounds for one reasoninsectswhich provide essential protein to newly hatched chicks. There arent enough insects in the tropics to feed both year-round residents and visitors, so migratory species return home in the spring. There, they find an abundance of food resources for themselves and their chicksuntil the cycle begins again.

Like songbirds, shorebirds follow their prey: aquatic and terrestrial insects, crustaceans, mollusks and very small fish. Most insects are only on the menu during the Northern Hemisphere summers. To find food the rest of the year, shorebirds need to fly south.

Stopover points, including the Delaware Bay on the Eastern Shore, are critical to shorebirds journeys. They fill up on fattening foods, such as nutrient-rich horseshoe crab eggs. Food is fuel. Without enough of it, a bird may leave the stopover point late and miss the opportunity to mate. They may find a mate, but lack the energy to breed. Or, they may die during the grueling journey.

Migratory birds in human care do not have to worry about finding food like their wild counterparts do. However, our experience has shown us that these birds can gain (or lose) weight very quickly with the seasons, even if their diets remain the same. They appear to be hard-wired to do this.

ABOVE: Over the summer,we celebrated the arrival of three wood thrush chickstwo females and one maleJune 9, 10 and 12. This was incredibly exciting for several reasons, not the least of which is that mom hatched at the Zoo last year.

Knowing that their weight fluctuates depending on the season, we use what we know about each species food preferences, weight and physiology to make daily tweaks and seasonal adjustments to their diets. A species-appropriate, nutritionally balanced diet will support a migratory bird over its lifetime, through breeding, raising chicks, growth and eventually geriatric care. As such, we aim to keep them within the weight ranges that their wild counterparts exhibit.

During breeding season, songbirds drive for insect consumption increases greatly. So, we increase the amount of insects we feed them, and decrease our plant-based offerings. Heading into winter, we do the opposite. Because there are naturally fewer insects, we feedand the birds consumemore plant parts.

Shorebirds seem to have hearty appetites year-round. They receive pellets formulated for insectivorous animals as well as chopped shrimp, krill, mealworms crickets, clam meat, mussels and the occasional crab. It has been remarkable how well they have taken to their Zoo diets. Some birds even consumed pellets immediately upon arrival!

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Is The Secret to Saving Migratory Birds in the Meal Prep? - Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute

Physiology

Kinesiology Doctoral Students Win NEACSM Awards at 2020 Annual Meeting – UMass News and Media Relations

Kinesiology doctoral students Robert Marcotte and Joseph Gordon III received scholarship awards during the annual New England Chapter of the American College of Sports Medicine (NEACSM) Fall Conference held virtually Oct. 15 and 16.

Marcotte received the Linda S. Pescatello 2020 Doctoral Scholarship, and Gordon received the Lawrence E. Armstrong Minority Scholarship. Both scholarships are awarded based on academic excellence, professional experience, professional activities such as attending conferences and workshops, publication of peer-reviewed research, and skill in obtaining grants.

I continue to be impressed by and very proud of our graduate students, both individually and collectively, says professor and chair of kinesiology Jane Kent. Both Jay and Rob are emerging scholars in their areas of research. They are also providing important leadership outside the lab, as well. I wish them the best of luck as they pursue their dissertation studies.

Marcotte is a member of associate professor John Sirards Physical Activity and Health Lab. For his dissertation, Marcotte is developing a scalable and convenient method to estimate the relative intensity of physical activities using wearable activity trackers (i.e., accelerometers) and evaluate its validity under naturalistic, free-living settings.

It's an honor to be recognized for the efforts I have been putting into my academics and research thus far, says Marcotte. My achievements are a result of the support and encouragement of my advisor, Dr. John Sirard, and my lab mates. We strive to produce quality work and motivate one another to continue moving forward on our projects, and for that I am grateful!

Gordon specializes in muscle physiology under the supervision of Kent. His work in Kents Muscle Physiology Lab investigates the effects of aging, sex-differences, fat deposition and training on muscle function. His dissertation research will examine the effects of fat deposition on the biochemical environment, muscle architecture, and functional performance of a variety of populations using magnetic resonance (MR) techniques.

Under normal circumstances I would feel happy to be selected for any merit-based award, says Gordon. That being said, this year I also feel particularly proud to earn this award with the social climate of our country being as polarized as it has been in its history. My goal is to perennially shed light on the disproportionate underrepresentation of all people of color within research, academia, and STEM. I hope this acknowledgement is one way to increase awareness about inherently disadvantaged populations, and others can feel encouraged to provide resources for these groups.

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Kinesiology Doctoral Students Win NEACSM Awards at 2020 Annual Meeting - UMass News and Media Relations

Physiology

Explained: From dolphins and whales, new insights on Covid-19 – The Indian Express

By: Express News Service | New Delhi | Updated: December 5, 2020 8:06:51 amRain, an Atlantic bottlenose dolphin. (University of California - Santa Cruz)

When infected by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, people experience a drop in oxygen levels in their blood. This makes them vulnerable to damage in a large range of tissues. Compare this with marine mammals such as dolphins and whales, which spend their lifetime switching between environments of high and low oxygen levels, but tolerate both because their bodies have adapted that way.

In a review article published in Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology on Thursday, ecologist and evolutionary biologist Terrie Williams of the University of CaliforniaSanta Cruz explores how the diving physiology of marine mammals can help us understand the effects of Covid-19. Williams has spent decades studying the physiology of marine mammals and their extraordinary ability to perform strenuous activities while holding their breath for long periods under water. Texas A&M University marine biologist Randall Davis has co-authored the paper with her.

Marine mammals have ways to protect themselves and allow their organs to keep functioning while holding their breath for hours at a time. But to be able do that, they have had to undergo a whole suite of biological adaptations.

The fact that humans lack these adaptations makes it important for people to protect themselves from infection with this virus. Damage to oxygen-deprived tissues happens fast and can be irreversible, which may account for the long-term effects we are beginning to see in people after coronavirus infections, Williams said in a statement on her research. Follow Express Explained on Telegram

The heart and brain are especially sensitive to oxygen deprivation, and marine mammals have multiple mechanisms to protect these and other critical organs

Marine mammals have a capacity for carrying much more oxygen than humans.

Some marine mammals contract their spleen during dives, which releases oxygen-rich blood cells into the circulation.

To avoid blood clots resulting from such high concentrations of red blood cells, many marine mammal species lack a clotting mechanism found in other mammals.

Marine mammals have greatly increased concentrations of oxygen-carrying proteins such as myoglobin in heart and skeletal muscles, and neuroglobin and cytoglobin in the brain.

Numerous safety factors enable tissues in marine mammals to withstand low oxygen and the subsequent reperfusion of tissues with oxygenated blood. In humans, reperfusion after a heart attack or stroke often leads to additional tissue damage.

According to Williams, the solutions that marine mammals have evolved provide a natural template for understanding the potential for damage to oxygen-deprived tissues in humans.

There are so many ramifications of shutting down the oxygen pathway, and I think thats what were seeing in these Covid patients, she said.

Our heart and brain cells are meant to last a lifetime, and we cannot replace them once they are damaged, she added. Dolphins and whales have natural protections that humans lack, so we are highly vulnerable to hypoxia.

The research was funded by the Office of Naval Research.

Source: University of CaliforniaSanta Cruz

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Explained: From dolphins and whales, new insights on Covid-19 - The Indian Express

Physiology

Utilizing consumer cameras for contact-free physiological measurement in telehealth and beyond – Microsoft

Our research is enabling robust and scalable measurement of physiology. Cameras on everyday devices can be used to detect subtle changes in light reflected from the body caused by physiological processes. Machine learning algorithms are then used to process the camera images and recover the underlying pulse and respiration signals that can then be used for health and wellness tracking.

According to the CDC WONDER Online Database, heart disease is currently the leading cause of death for both men and women in the United States. However, most deaths due to cardiovascular diseases could be prevented with suitable interventions. Early detection of changes in health and well-being can have a significant impact on the success of these interventions and boost the chances of positive outcomes. Atrial fibrillation (AFib) is an example of a symptom that can indicate increased risk of heart disease, and when detected early, it can inform interventions that help to reduce risk of stroke.

Physiological sensing plays an important role in helping people track their health and detect the onset of symptoms. However, there are barriers to conducting physiological sensing that act as a disincentive, such as access to medical devices and the inconvenience of performing regular measurements. Making physiological sensing more accessible and less obtrusive can reduce the burden on people to perform physiological assessments of this kind and help catch early warning signs of symptoms like AFib.

Over the past decade, researchers have discovered that increasingly available webcams and cellphone cameras combined with AI algorithms can be used as effective health sensors. These methods involve measurement of very subtle changes in the appearance of the body across time, in many cases changes imperceptible to the unaided human eye, to recover physiological information. In essence, as ambient light in a room hits your body, some is absorbed and some is reflected. Physiological processes such as blood flow and breathing change the appearance of the body very subtly over time.

A smartphone camera can pick up this reflected light, and the changes in pixel intensities over time can be used to recover the underlying sources of these variations (namely a persons pulse and respiration). Using optical models grounded in our knowledge of these physiological processes, a video of a person can be processed to determine their pulse rate, respiration, and even the concentration of oxygen in their blood.

Building on previous work, our team of researchers from Microsoft Research, University of Washington, and OctoML have collaborated to create an innovative video-based on-device optical cardiopulmonary vital sign measurement approach. The approach uses everyday camera technology (such as webcams and mobile devices) and a novel convolutional attention network, called MTTS-CAN, to make real-time cardio-pulmonary measurements possible on mobile platforms with state-of-the-art accuracy. Our paper, Multi-Task Temporal Shift Attention Networks for On-Device Contactless Vitals Measurement, has been accepted at the 34th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2020) and will be presented in a Spotlight talk on Monday, December 7th at 6:15PM- 6:30PM (PT).

Camera-based physiological sensing has numerous fitness, well-being and clinical applications. For everyday consumers, it could make home monitoring and fitness tracking more convenient. Imagine if your treadmill or smart at-home fitness equipment could continuously track your vitals during your run without you needing to wear a device or sync the data. In clinical contexts, camera-based measurements could enable a cardiologist to more objectively analyze a patients heart health over a video call. Contact sensors, necessary for monitoring vitals in intensive care, can damage the skin of infantsremote sensing could provide a more comfortable solution.

Perhaps the most obvious application for camera-based physiological sensing is in telehealth. The SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic is transforming the face of healthcare around the world. One example of this revolution can be seen in the number of medical appointments held via teleconference, which has increased by more than an order of magnitude because of stay-at-home orders and greater burdens on healthcare systems. This is due to the desire to protect healthcare workers and restrictions on travel, but telehealth also benefits patients by saving them time and costs. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention is recommending the use of telehealth strategies when feasible to provide high-quality patient care and reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission in healthcare settings. The COVID-19 virus has been linked to increased risk of myocarditis and other serious cardiac (heart) conditions, and experts are suggesting that particular attention should be given to cardiovascular and pulmonary protection during treatment.

In most telehealth scenarios, however, physicians lack access to objective measurements of a patients condition because of the inability to capture signals such as the patients vital signs. This concerns many patients because they worry about the quality of the diagnosis and care they can receive without objective measurements. Ubiquitous sensing could help transform how telehealth is conducted, and it could also contribute to establishing telehealth as a mainstream form of healthcare.

It can take many years for new technologies such as these to transition from research discoveries to mature applications. The fields of AI and computer vision, as a whole, are six decades old, yet it is only in the past 10 years that many applications have started to reach fruition. Research on camera-based vital sign monitoring began much more recentlywithin the past 15 yearsso there is still a lot of effort required to help it reach maturity.

Contact sensors (electrocardiograms, oximeters) are the current gold standard for measurement of heart and lung function, yet these devices are still not ubiquitously available, especially in low-resource settings. The development of video-based contactless sensing of vital signs presents an opportunity for highly scalable physiological monitoring. Computer vision for remote cardiopulmonary measurement is a growing field, and there is room for improvement in the existing methods.

First, the accuracy of measurements is critical to avoid false alarms or misdiagnoses. The US Federal Drug Administration (FDA) mandates that testing of a new device for cardiac monitoring should show substantial equivalence in accuracy with a legal predicate device (for example, a contact sensor). This standard has not been obtained in non-contact approaches. Second, designing models that run on-device helps reduce the need for high-bandwidth internet connections, making telehealth more practical and accessible. Our method, detailed below, works to improve accuracy with a newly designed algorithm (see Figure 1) and runs on-device.

Camera-based cardiopulmonary measurement is also a highly privacy-sensitive application. This data is personally identifiable, combining videos of a patients face with sensitive physiological signals. Therefore, streaming and uploading data to the cloud to perform analysis is not ideal. This motivated our focus to develop methods that run on devicehelping keep peoples data under their control.

Finally, the ability to run at a high frame rate enables opportunistic sensing (for example, obtaining measurements each time you look at your phone) and helps capture waveform dynamics that could be used to detect atrial fibrillation, hypertension, and heart rate variability where high-frame rates (at least 100Hz) are a requirement to yield precise measurements of the waveform dynamics.

To help address the gaps in the current research, we developed an algorithm for multi-parameter physiological measurement that can run on a standard mid-range mobile phone, even at high frame rates. The method uses a type of deep learning algorithm called a convolutional neural network and analyzes pixels in a video over time to extract estimates of heart and respiration rates. The algorithm extracts two representations of the face: 1) the motion representation that contains the temporal changes pixel information and 2) the appearance representation that helps guide the network toward the spatial regions of the frame to focus on. Our specific design of this method is called a multi-task temporal shift convolutional attention network (MTTS-CAN). See Figure 2 below for details.

We introduced several features to help address the challenges of privacy, portability, and precision in contactless physiological measurement. Our end-to-end MTTS-CAN performs efficient temporal modeling and removes sources of noise without any added computational overhead by leveraging temporal shift operations rather than 3D convolutions, which are computationally onerous.

These shift operations allow the model to capture complex temporal dependencies, which are particularly important for recovering the subtle dynamics of the pulse and respiration signals. An attention module improves signal source separation by helping the model learn which regions of the video frame to apply greater importance to, and a multi-task mechanism shares the intermediate representations between pulse and respiration to jointly estimate both simultaneously.

Multi-task learning is effective for two reasons. First, the heart rhythms are correlated with breathing patterns meaning the two signals share some common propertiesthis is a principle known as Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia (RSA). Second, by sharing many of the preliminary processing steps, we can dramatically reduce the computation required.

By combining these three techniques, our proposed network can run on a mobile CPU and achieve state-of-the-art accuracy and inference speed. Ultimately, these features result in significant improvements for gathering real physiological signals, like heart rate and pulse (see Figure 3).

One concern with optical measurement of vital signs is whether performance will work equally across people, including all skin types and appearances (for example, those with facial hair, wearing cosmetics, head coverings, or glasses). We have worked on characterizing these differences and helping to reduce them using personalization and data augmentation. Improving sensing technology to create equitable performance is a central focus to this research.

We hope that this work advances the speed at which scalable non-contact sensing can be adopted. Atrial fibrillation (AFib) is just one of most common cardiovascular symptoms that impact millions of people and could be better detected with more accurate, easily deployed non-contact health sensing systems. Our work is a step in this direction. Through our research we are continuing to develop methods for sensing other physiological parameters, such as blood oxygen saturation and pulse transit time.

If youre interested in learning more about our research in physiological sensing, there are a number of resources available. Our project page is a hub for publications and related content, including links to open-source code. We also recently gave a webinar on contactless camera-based health sensing that further elaborates on this work and dives deeper into how the technology works. Register now to watch the on-demand webinar/Q&A.

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Utilizing consumer cameras for contact-free physiological measurement in telehealth and beyond - Microsoft

Physiology

OCTC to offer 4-week winter session – The Owensboro Times

Owensboro Community & Technical College will offer a condensed four-week winter session due to the popularity of the initial offering in 2019. This term will begin on Dec. 14 and run through Jan. 10.

The session will include online courses in a condensed format, including Accounting; Principles of Marketing; Introduction to Art; Introduction to Biology; Basic Anatomy/Physiology with lab and Basic Anatomy/Physiology Lab (paired courses); Human Anatomy and Physiology/Human A7P with Lab (paired courses); Introduction to Computers; Basic Public Speaking; Introduction to Interpersonal Communication; and History of Women in America.

For the full listing of OCTC Winter session courses,click here. This is an opportunity for students to get ahead, catch up, or lighten their course load for future semesters.

Registration is open now and will continue through Dec. 14.

New students can sign up in person at the START Center, located in the upper level of the Campus Center at 4800 New Hartford Road, open 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m Monday through Thursday.

For a virtual or scheduled appointment new students may emailoctc.startcenter@kctcs.edu or call 270-686-4522.

Current students may register online or see an advisor in the Pathfinder Den, located in the lower level of the Campus Center.or a personal or virtual appointment students may call 270-686-4683 or emailoctc.pathfinderden@kctcs.edu.

See the article here:
OCTC to offer 4-week winter session - The Owensboro Times

Physiology

December: optimal stress levels | News and features – University of Bristol

Scientists have created an evolutionary model to predict how animals should react in stressful situations.

Almost all organisms have fast-acting stress responses, which help them respond to threats but being stressed uses energy, and chronic stress can be damaging.

The new study by an international team, including researchers from the Universities of Bristol and Exeter, suggests most animals remain stressed for longer than is optimal after a stress-inducing incident.

The reasons for this are not clear, but one possibility is that there is a limit to how quickly the body can remove stress hormones from circulation.

While the physiological basis for the stress response system has been extensively studied, we previously understood remarkably little about why this system has evolved,"saidDr Sian Englishfrom the University of Bristols School of Biological Sciences.

Weve shown that considering both mechanisms of hormone clearance, and features of the environment - how predictable the threat is across time - can help explain the universal stress response, and how it varies.

Our findings are all the more relevant today when we live in such uncertain times, and stress being a topic of every day discussion."

Dr English worked with experts in mathematical modelling, including Bristol Professor, John McNamara and Dr Tim Fawcett from the University of Exeter, to develop the conceptual framework and to consider the broader implications on stress in fish, birds and mammals.

We have created one of the first mathematical models to understand how organisms have evolved to deal with stressful events," said Dr Fawcett.

It combines existing research on stress physiology in a variety of organisms with analysis of optimal responses that balance the costs and benefits of stress.

We know stress responses vary hugely between different species and even among individuals of the same species as we see in humans.

Our study is a step towards understanding why stress responses are so variable.

The researchers define stress as the process of an organism responding to stressors (threats and challenges in their environment), including both detection and the stress response itself.

A key point highlighted in the study is the importance of how predictable threats are.

The model suggests that an animal living in a dangerous environment should have a high "baseline" stress level, while an animal in a safer environment would benefit from being able to raise and reduce stress levels rapidly.

"Our approach reveals environmental predictability and physiological limits as key factors shaping the evolution of stress responses," said lead author Professor Barbara Taborsky, of the University of Bern.

"More research is needed to advance scientific understanding of how this core physiological system has evolved."

The study was carried out by the universities of Bern, Exeter, Bristol, Stockholm and Turku, and the Brain Mind Institute at cole polytechnique fdrale de Lausanne.

Funding was provided by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Paper:

Towards an evolutionary theory of stress responses, by Taborsky, B., English, S., Fawcett, T.W. et al.; in Trends in Ecology & Evolution.

Life Sciences at the University of BristolThe Faculty of Life Sciences brings together the five Schools of:

We have a long-standing tradition of excellence in research and teaching. Our broad range of expertise opens up a wealth of opportunities for all our students. Hereyou can study a range of challenging, research-focused, undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, all taught in the context of world-leading research environments, usingspecialist equipment and facilities. We also work closely with the Faculty of Health Sciences contributing to the delivery of the University's three professional programmes:Medicine,DentistryandVeterinary Science.

Our research addresses a range of the important challenges in the life sciences. From tackling ecosystem and global change, to innovation in fundamental biosciences for better human, animal, plant and ocean health. From understanding animal and human behaviour and wellbeing, to developing future synthetic biotechnologies and so driving the UK's bioeconomy. Early career research training in the faculty is supported by a powerful range of3 and 4 year Doctoral Training Programmes.

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December: optimal stress levels | News and features - University of Bristol