In this study, three cores obtained from Burns Bog just south of the Fraser River in Delta, British Columbia, were analyzed palynologically. The paleoecology of the bog was reconstructed from the results of these analyses, together with data from vegetation studies of the bog, pollen rain and surface pollen spectrum investigations of selected wetland environments, as well as pollen tetrad and pollen productivity studies of bog ericads. The vegetation of Burns Bog was sampled by estimating species cover in selectively placed 100 m² quadrats. These field data were used in combination with an air photographic mosaic to map the eight vegetation types of the area. The palynomorph "fingerprints" of selected wetland environments, determined from pollen rain and surface pollen spectrum studies, were used to recognize analogous phases recorded in cores. Tetrad diameter and pollen productivity data for bog ericads assisted in recognizing ecologically significant ericad species that distinguished wet and dry raised bog phases. The study shows that Burns Bog has developed on Fraser River deltaic deposits which appeared above sea level just after 5,000 years BP. The seemingly synchronous emergence of the three core sites and a locality in adjacent Boundary Bay indicate a possible relative sea level decrease at this time. The silty emergent sediments are characterized by high percentages of Pinus and Picea pollen deposited by river water, and Cyperaceae pollen from local Scirpus and Carex stands. Following this emergence, sedges colonized the area, forming a sedge peat containing abundant Cyperaceae pollen. At the western end of the bog, a salt marsh developed (4,125 ± 110 BP) in response to a marine advance. This was possibly caused by a shut-off of fresh-brackish water from the Fraser River when the delta reached Point Roberts. In the eastern section of the bog, at the foot of Panorama Ridge, the sedge phase was only transient. A Myrica-Spiraea-Lysichitum swamp developed, remaining until very recently. After the sedge phase in the central part of the bog, Myrica and Spiraea thickets appeared; these were subsequently replaced by Sphagnum bog at 2,925 ± 85 years BP. In the western end of the bog, sedges were replaced by heaths, predominantly Ledum. At the foot of Panorama Ridge, Sphagnum arrived very recently. Pines seem to have invaded all sites at the 2.00 m level. The AP pollen spectrum shows that the regional upland vegetation remained unchanged throughout the history of Burns Bog until settlers cleared the forests. On the delta, however, fluctuations in alder pollen were probably associated with alder colonization of levees and swamps near the channels. Fire has played an important role in bog ecology. Natural Sphagnum accumulation processes are modified because fire destroys the vegetation of slightly higher, dry sites. Unburned wet depressions then become centers of peat accumulation. These sites eventually rise above the surrounding burned areas, which are converted to depressions. A model for raised bog development is proposed for the Fraser Lowland. The prograding delta-front is colonized by emergent aquatics growing on silts. This phase is followed by the advent of a sedge swamp perhaps containing some wetland grasses. Eventually, shrubs such as Myrica and Spiraea begin to appear, accompanied in the later stages by Ledum groenlandicum. Increased acidity of the substrate due to peat accumulation promotes Sphagnum, which eventually takes over and results in the establishment of raised bog conditions. This study, the first detailed outline of raised bog development in western North America, provides a framework for further investigations of bogs in the area. / Science, Faculty of / Botany, Department of / Graduate

The aim of this study is to determine the objectivity of Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s The Vietnam War (2017) 10-parter series in comparison to past Vietnam documentaries such as Emile de Antonio’s In the Year of the Pig (1968) and Peter Davis’ Hearts and Minds (1974). In doing so, this study observes Burns and Novick’s approaches in stylistic editing and the omission of certain narratives of the war, along with what such choices suggest of the political stances assumed by the series and its predecessors. Through each chapter, the study observes: the caustic portrayal of leaders, from their decisions to enter into and prosecute war and the effects of these decisions that remain after their leadership has ended; the way the series empathizes with first-hand veteran accounts through visual reconstruction; and the acknowledgement of the media as ever-present in the representation of the public and the war. The relation between each chapter’s focus is related to the way audiences connect with the war, whether through documented history, public opinion, and/or personal experiences. The study concludes that while the series maintains its objectivity to an extent, it gives a decidedly American perspective of the war.

Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) has been used as life-saving support for children with varying causes of respiratory and/or cardiac failure. However, few studies have assessed the utility of ECMO as a viable treatment option in the setting of pediatric burn injury. We aim to examine the outcomes of pediatric burn patients requiring ECMO support by utilizing the Extracorporeal Life Support Organization (ELSO) registry in order to elucidate whether or not ECMO should be considered in this population. A retrospective cohort study was conducted by querying the ELSO database for all pediatric patients (birth to less than 18 years) who were supported on ECMO with burn-associated cardiopulmonary failure between 1990 and 2016. ICD-9 codes 940–949.5 were utilized to identify patients with an associated burn injury. Venovenous ECMO was defined as any patient with only venous cannulas, including double-lumen venous cannulas. Venoarterial ECMO was defined as any patient with a venous and an arterial cannula, any patient originally supported on VA ECMO that was converted to venovenous, or any patient originally supported on venovenous that was converted to venoarterial ECMO. Oxygenation indices (OI) and complication rates were compared among survivors and non-survivors for both venovenous (VV) and venoarterial (VA) groups. Primary outcome variables were survival and non-survival to hospital discharge. Demographic and clinical data, along with pre-ECMO variables and ECMO complications, were analyzed for predictive mortality. A total of 113 patients met inclusion criteria for the study. Overall survival to discharge was 52.2% (n=59) for the entire cohort. 73 patients were supported on VA ECMO, while 37 patients required VV ECMO support with a survival to discharge of 47.9% (n=35) and 62.2% (n=23), respectively. There was no statistical difference for median age (p=0.765), median weight (p=0.932), or median hours on ECMO (p=0.963) between survivors and non-survivors. Three patients did not have the type of cannulation identified but were listed as “other” in the ELSO registry. Patients requiring ECMO support for respiratory failure had a higher over-all survival (55.7%, n=97) compared to those requiring ECMO for cardiac failure (33.3%, n=6) or ECPR (30%, n=10). Patients who were supported on VV ECMO for respiratory failure had the best overall survival at 62.2% (n=37) and those cannulated to VA ECMO for respiratory failure had a survival of 51.7% (n=58). Patients supported on VA ECMO for cardiac failure or ECPR support had the same survival at 33.3% (n=6 and 9 respectively). Several factors were found to be significantly associated with mortality. Cardiac arrest prior to cannulation was associated with increased mortality with an odds ratio of 3.41 (95% CI 1.29-9.06, p=0.011). There was a trend for the use of nitric oxide prior to cannulation to be associated with a decrease in mortality with an odds ratio of 0.40 (95% CI 0.16-1.01, p=0.048)Following cannulation, complications including the need for inotropes (OR 2.64, 95% CI 1.24-5.65, p=0.011), presence of gastrointestinal hemorrhage (p=0.049), and hyperglycemia (glucose > 240mg/dL) (OR 3.42, 95% CI 1.13-10.38, p=0.024) were associated with increased mortality.

No description available.

Denna licentiatavhandling syftar till att beskriva barns (0-6 år) utsatthet för olycksfallsrisker i hemmiljön genom att fokusera på omfattningen av bränn- och skållskador, föräldrars uppfattningar om påverkande faktorer till olyckshändelser samt föräldrars uppgifter om egen följsamhet till olycksförebyggande råd och anvisningar. I barnhälsovården (BHV) ges råd och anvisningar kring olika åtgärder lämpliga i förhållande till barns utveckling. Dessa råd ges kontinuerligt och under barnens 6 första år. Innehållet i råden är reglerat i det basprogram som föräldrar till alla barn i Sverige erbjuds fram till skolstart. Få studier beskriver i vilken utsträckning föräldrar följer dessa råd och vilka faktorer som påverkar dels föräldrarnas följsamhet till råden dels faktorer som påverkar risken för barnolycksfall. I denna licentiatavhandling är exemplet skållskador (ΙΙ, ΙΙΙ) beskrivet som ett av flera möjliga olycksfall i hemmiljö som barn drabbas av. / The overall aim of this licentiate thesis was to increase the knowledge about children’s (0–6 years old) exposure to accidents in the home environment through parents’ opinions about accidents and parents’ self-reported compliance with precautions. Data were collected from parents of 10-month-old children who answered a questionnaire. The questionnaire prompted responses related to parents’ background and socio-economic factors as well as questions about precautions they had taken to decrease hazards in their home. The questions focused on actions parents had taken upon receipt of preventive advice given to them during the eight-month Child Health Care nurse assessment. Thirty-two percent of the parents complied with less than half of the suggested precautions. Univariate odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (95% C I) were calculated to investigate the associations between compliance and parents’ different background/socio-economic characteristics. The variables foreign born, low occupational level, 12 years’ education or less, rented housing and information provided at Child Health Care clinics proved to be statistically significant for the non-compliant group. Multiple logistic regression analysis was performed in order to adjust the estimated odds ratios for the influence of potential confounders such as parents’ nationality, educational and occupational level, place of information and habitation. After the adjustment the variable nationality and educational level stayed significant (Ι). Data in article ΙΙ were collected from medical records, in a retrospectively designed study. Burn-injured children (0–6 years old) consulting the University Hospital or the health centres (21) during 1998 and 2002 were included. Chi-squared test was used to analyse differences in nominal data and cross-tabulation was used to analyse the proportions between the characteristics of the injuries and sex, age and nationality. There were 148 burn injuries, 80% of which were scalds caused by hot liquid (71%) or hot food (29%). The majority were to boys between one and two years old. Children of foreign-born parents were more frequently affected and the extent of injuries often larger. The data collection method in article ΙΙΙ was tape-recorded interviews, analysed by content analysis, with parents of 20 children (0–6 years old) recently suffering from scalds. Parents told their perceptions about causes of the scalds. The analysis resulted in eight categories and two themes. One theme was ‘Deviation from the normal’, which could be when something unusual happened, such as a sudden visit by a friend or when a family member was tired, stressed or ill. The tiredness could be due to fever, a cold, other illnesses or mental stress. It could also be when something was broken in the kitchen and routines were changed. ‘Misjudgement of the child’s capacity’ was the other theme, which it concerned the children’s preventive capacity, rapidity and reach. It was hard for the parents to keep up with the fast development of the small children (9 months–2 years). The parents said that they often did not realise the child’s capacities until the accident occurred. Key words: accident, burns, child, compliance, intervention, prevention and scalds / <p>Note: The papers are not included in the fulltext online.</p><p>Paper I and II in thesis as accepted manuscripts.</p>

Yes / Burns depth evaluation is a lifesaving task and very challenging that requires objective techniques to accomplish. While the visual assessment is the most commonly used by surgeons, its accuracy reliability ranges between 60 and 80% and subjective that lacks any standard guideline. Currently, the only standard adjunct to clinical evaluation of burn depth is Laser Doppler Imaging (LDI) which measures microcirculation within the dermal tissue, providing the burns potential healing time which correspond to the depth of the injury achieving up to 100% accuracy. However, the use of LDI is limited due to many factors including high affordability and diagnostic costs, its accuracy is affected by movement which makes it difficult to assess paediatric patients, high level of human expertise is required to operate the device, and 100% accuracy possible after 72 h. These shortfalls necessitate the need for objective and affordable technique. Method: In this study, we leverage the use of deep transfer learning technique using two pretrained models ResNet50 and VGG16 for the extraction of image patterns (ResFeat50 and VggFeat16) from a a burn dataset of 2080 RGB images which composed of healthy skin, first degree, second degree and third-degree burns evenly distributed. We then use One-versus-One Support Vector Machines (SVM) for multi-class prediction and was trained using 10-folds cross validation to achieve optimum trade-off between bias and variance. Results: The proposed approach yields maximum prediction accuracy of 95.43% using ResFeat50 and 85.67% using VggFeat16. The average recall, precision and F1-score are 95.50%, 95.50%, 95.50% and 85.75%, 86.25%, 85.75% for both ResFeat50 and VggFeat16 respectively. Conclusion: The proposed pipeline achieved a state-of-the-art prediction accuracy and interestingly indicates that decision can be made in less than a minute whether the injury requires surgical intervention such as skin grafting or not.

No description available.

Yes / Burns are one of the obnoxious injuries subjecting thousands to loss of life and physical defacement each year. Both high income and Third World countries face major evaluation challenges including but not limited to inadequate workforce, poor diagnostic facilities, inefficient diagnosis and high operational cost. As such, there is need to develop an automatic machine learning algorithm to noninvasively identify skin burns. This will operate with little or no human intervention, thereby acting as an affordable substitute to human expertise. We leverage the weights of pretrained deep neural networks for image description and, subsequently, the extracted image features are fed into the support vector machine for classification. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that investigates black African skins. Interestingly, the proposed algorithm achieves state-of-the-art classification accuracy on both Caucasian and African datasets.

No / The purpose of this research was to correlate in vivo spatial and spectral morphologic changes of short- to long-pulse 532 nm Nd:YAG retinal laser lesions using Fourier-domain optical coherence tomography (FD OCT), autofluorescence (AF), fluorescein angiography (FA), and multispectral imaging. Ten eyes with treatment-naive preproliferative or proliferative diabetic retinopathy were studied. A titration grid of laser burns at 20, 100, and 200 milliseconds was applied to the nasal retina and laser fluence titrated to produce four grades of laser lesion visibility: subvisible (SV), barely visible (BV, light-gray), threshold (TH, gray-white), and suprathreshold (ST, white). The AF, FA, FD-OCT, and multispectral imaging were performed 1 week before laser, and 1 hour, 4 weeks, and 3 and 6 months post-laser. Multispectral imaging measured relative tissue oxygen concentration. Laser burn visibility and lesion size increased in a linear relationship according to fixed fluence levels. At fixed pulse durations, there was a semilogarithmic increase in lesion size over 6 months. At 20 milliseconds, all grades of laser lesion were reduced significantly in size after 6 months: SV, 51%; BV, 54%; TH, 49%; and ST, 50% (P < 0.001), with retinal pigment epithelial proliferation and photoreceptor infilling. At 20 milliseconds, there was healing of photoreceptor inner segment/outer segment junction layers compared with 100- and 200-millisecond lesions. Significant increases in mean tissue oxygenation (range, four to six units) within the laser titration area and in oxygen concentration across the laser lesions (P < 0.01) were detected at 6 months. For patients undergoing therapeutic laser, there may be improved tissue oxygenation, higher predictability of burn morphology, and more spatial localization of healing responses of burns at 20 milliseconds compared with longer pulse durations over time / Optimedica Corp., the Manchester Academic Health Sciences Centre, and the NIHR Manchester Biomedical Research Centre. JD was funded by a College of Optometrists PhD Studentship, United Kingdom.

Stoney Burns (Brent LaSalle Stein) edited and published Dallas Notes, a Dallas, Texas, underground newspaper, from November 1967 through September 1970. This thesis considers whether Burns was the unifying figure in the Dallas counterculture.