Lebenswissenschaften und Ethik
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Experts predict that more IT-Security specialists will be needed in the coming years, but in current higher education in engineering disciplines, this topic is hardly addressed. Newer learning methods such as game-based learning (GBL) are enjoying an increasing popularity as their improvement in the education of subject specific topics can be proven by a variety of studies. We chose Educational Escape Rooms (EduER) as a GBL-tool to impart IT-Security in higher education of engineers. In our Escape Room (ER), the students try to solve puzzles and riddles with learned knowledge on the emphasis of cryptography. This paper first deals with a brief introduction to GBL and EduERs, followed by the design of our ER concept, containing different tasks with focus on the topic of cryptography. The tasks cover different cryptographic methods and hash algorithms, e.g. AES, RSA, SHA3. Afterwards the experimental study is presented. The study of the EduER was carried out with students from the bachelor's program in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at the OTH Regensburg. The participants were divided into three groups of 5 to 8 persons each. They received a briefing with important information, followed by the ER execution, a debriefing afterwards and an exam-like evaluation sheet to test their learned knowledge. Finally, first basic results are presented.
Epigenetic modifiers of the histone deacetylase (HDAC) family contribute to autoimmunity, cancer, HIV infection, inflammation, and neurodegeneration. Hence, histone deacetylase inhibitors (HDACi), which alter protein acetylation, gene expression patterns, and cell fate decisions, represent promising new drugs for the therapy of these diseases. Whereas pan-HDACi inhibit all 11 Zn2+-dependent histone deacetylases (HDACs) and cause a broad spectrum of side effects, specific inhibitors of histone deacetylase 6 (HDAC6i) are supposed to have less side effects. We present the synthesis and biological evaluation of Marbostats, novel HDAC6i that contain the hydroxamic acid moiety linked to tetrahydro-β-carboline derivatives. Our lead compound Marbostat-100 is a more potent and more selective HDAC6i than previously established well-characterized compounds in vitro as well as in cells. Moreover, Marbostat-100 is well tolerated by mice and effective against collagen type II induced arthritis. Thus, Marbostat-100 represents a most selective known HDAC6i and the possibility for clinical evaluation of a HDAC isoform-specific drug.
The Impact of the ObamaCare Excise Tax on Innovation and Entrepreneurship – Early Empirical Findings
(2015)
This study addresses aspects of governmental influence on innovation by analyzing the impact of the ObamaCare excise tax on the medical device industry. We initially give an overview of common approaches to measuring innovativeness and entrepreneurship, empirically assess whether existing metrics are suitable for investigating the innovation performance of the U.S. medical device industry, and define a new measure (firm innovation activity) for entrepreneurship. Then we perform a quantitative analysis to explore the impact of the tax. We analyze more than 60,000 product clearances from 1996 to 2013, using the FDA database. We find a significant relationship between product counts and revenues for one segment. Contrary to the present criticism of the excise tax, we find hardly any noteworthy response in either firm innovation activity or number of products launched in the year after the tax was introduced. The 2013 reduction of new product submissions is well within the limits of typical annual fluctuations observed in previous years. This provides a first indication that the excise tax act did not have a strong impact on innovative activities through the present.
Innovation diffusion points toward how innovations spread into the market after launch. This paper investigates diffusion dynamics at market entry time and proposes a new evolution pattern at the intersection between inventions and innovations. With this in mind, we initially prove that patent filings correlate with new product introductions in the U.S. spine market. Then we test our new theory supposing that certain patent filing threshold numbers accelerate strong economic returns in terms of innovations. We find that firms hitting certain patent filing thresholds significantly increase their product launches in the mentioned market. Moreover, the results seem to indicate that economic returns of inventions may be measured substantially. Thus, this paper suggests a new research area by utilizing our proposed concept about an Innovation Outcome Trigger Value (IOTV). Furthermore, the implications may also be interesting for practitioners, since we empirically prove that inventive activities turn out to be worthwhile, indeed.
International internships
(2018)
Students are increasingly considering expanding their cooperative experiences into the global environment. This paper investigates the experiences of students undertaking their internship capstone in other countries under the supervision of a partner institute and a participating industry sponsor. These experiences of German students interning in New Zealand (NZ), and NZ students interning in Germany offer an insight into the organisation required by the partner institutions and the comparative cultural and technical differences that these students have encountered. The international agreement between Ostbayerische Technische Hochschule (OTH) Regensburg, Germany, and the Eastern Institute of Technology (EIT), NZ, has already built a mutual framework of visiting lecturers teaching in each other's institutes, and a programme of hosting exchange students in each other's institutes. A natural progression of this partnership has now moved into the active recruitment and brokering of international internship opportunities for their respective final year Business and Information Technology (IT) students. The benefits are evident personally to the students, which are discussed in this paper, but there are also clear benefits for EIT and OTH in terms of marketing opportunities for prospective students and enriching the learning environments. This paper explores the challenges faced by the Schools of Business and Computing at EIT as it pioneers the first two years of establishing internship options for final year German exchange students within NZ, and matching final year EIT degree students to industry sponsors within Bavaria, a federal state of Germany. A qualitative approach was taken for this study with data acquired from internship students involved, the key organising lecturers from each institute, and industry sponsors from each country. A number of student, staff and industry representative interviews were conducted along with a cultural appraisal of relevant literature in the global education field. A further overview of the macro benefits for the partner institutes in terms of marketing, and programme enrichment is also part of the conclusion. The paper may be useful as a template for other institutes on developing international internship opportunities through global partners.
Background:
Pediatricians are important sources of information for parents regarding their children's health. During the COVID-19 pandemic, pediatricians faced a variety of challenges regarding information uptake and transfer to patients, practice organization and consultations for families. This qualitative study aimed at shedding light on German pediatricians’ experiences of providing outpatient care during the first year of the pandemic.
Methods:
We conducted 19 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with pediatricians in Germany from July 2020 to February 2021. All interviews were audio recorded, transcribed, pseudonymized, coded, and subjected to content analysis.
Results:
Pediatricians felt able to keep up to date regarding COVID-19 regulations. However, staying informed was time consuming and onerous. Informing the patients was perceived as strenuous, especially when political decisions had not been officially communicated to pediatricians or if the recommendations were not supported by the professional judgment of the interviewees. Some felt that they were not taken seriously or adequately involved in political decisions. Parents were reported to consider pediatric practices as sources of information also for non-medical inquiries. Answering these questions was time consuming for the practice personnel and involved non-billable hours. Practices had to adapt their set-up and organization immediately to the new circumstances of the pandemic, which proved costly and laborious as well. Some changes in the organization of routine care, such as the separation of appointments for patients with acute infection from preventive appointments, were perceived as positive and effective by some study participants. Telephone and online consultations were established at the beginning of the pandemic and considered helpful for some situations, whereas for others these methods were deemed insufficient (e.g. for examinations of sick children). All pediatricians reported reduced utilization mainly due to a decline in acute infections. However, preventive medical check-ups and immunization appointments were reported to be mostly attended.
Conclusion:
Positive experiences of reorganizing pediatric practice should be disseminated as “best practices” in order to improve future pediatric health services. Further research could show how some of these positive experiences in reorganizing care during the pandemic are to be maintained by pediatricians in the future.
In Germany, midwives are involved in extensive antenatal and postnatal care. As health professionals, they can play a key role in strengthening health literacy (HL) of parents on how to prevent chronic allergic diseases in their children. The objective of this study is to explore midwives’ perspectives regarding HL-sensitive counselling in early childhood allergy prevention (ECAP). Twenty-four qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with midwives, and data were analyzed using qualitative content analysis. Only a small number of study participants were aware of HL as a concept. However, most of these use screening and counselling strategies which consider individual information needs and which support parental HL. HL sensitivity in counselling is largely based on the midwives’ “gut feelings” and counselling experience, rather than on formal education. The midwives were largely aware of evidence-based ECAP recommendations; however, allergy prevention was not seen as a stand-alone topic but as part of their general counselling on infant feeding and hygiene. They found parents to be more open to receiving complex prevention information during antenatal counselling. In order to strengthen midwives’ roles in HL-sensitive ECAP counselling, their formal education should provide them with explicit HL knowledge and counselling skills. ECAP should be an inherent part of antenatal care.
The development of adenocarcinoma in Barrett’s esophagus is difficult to detect by endoscopic surveillance of patients with signs of dysplasia. Computer assisted diagnosis of endoscopic images (CAD) could therefore be most helpful in the demarcation and classification of neoplastic lesions. In this study we tested the feasibility of a CAD method based on Speeded up Robust Feature Detection (SURF). A given database containing 100 images from 39 patients served as benchmark for feature based classification models. Half of the images had previously been diagnosed by five clinical experts as being ”cancerous”, the other half as ”non-cancerous”. Cancerous image regions had been visibly delineated (masked) by the clinicians. SURF features acquired from full images as well as from masked areas were utilized for the supervised training and testing of an SVM classifier. The predictive accuracy of the developed CAD system is illustrated by sensitivity and specificity values. The results based on full image matching where 0.78 (sensitivity) and 0.82 (specificity) were achieved, while the masked region approach generated results of 0.90 and 0.95, respectively.
Even though artificial intelligence and machine learning have demonstrated remarkable performances in medical image computing, their level of accountability and transparency must be provided in such evaluations. The reliability related to machine learning predictions must be explained and interpreted, especially if diagnosis support is addressed. For this task, the black-box nature of deep learning techniques must be lightened up to transfer its promising results into clinical practice. Hence, we aim to investigate the use of explainable artificial intelligence techniques to quantitatively highlight discriminative regions during the classification of earlycancerous tissues in Barrett’s esophagus-diagnosed patients. Four Convolutional Neural Network models (AlexNet, SqueezeNet, ResNet50, and VGG16) were analyzed using five different interpretation techniques (saliency, guided backpropagation, integrated gradients, input × gradients, and DeepLIFT) to compare their agreement with experts’ previous annotations of cancerous tissue. We could show that saliency attributes match best with the manual experts’ delineations. Moreover, there is moderate to high correlation between the sensitivity of a model and the human-and-computer agreement. The results also lightened that the higher the model’s sensitivity, the stronger the correlation of human and computational segmentation agreement. We observed a relevant relation between computational learning and experts’ insights, demonstrating how human knowledge may influence the correct computational learning.
Limitations in computer-assisted diagnosis include lack of labeled data and inability to model the relation between what experts see and what computers learn. Even though artificial intelligence and machine learning have demonstrated remarkable performances in medical image computing, their accountability and transparency level must be improved to transfer this success into clinical practice. The reliability of machine learning decisions must be explained and interpreted, especially for supporting the medical diagnosis. While deep learning techniques are broad so that unseen information might help learn patterns of interest, human insights to describe objects of interest help in decision-making. This paper proposes a novel approach, DeepCraftFuse, to address the challenge of combining information provided by deep networks with visual-based features to significantly enhance the correct identification of cancerous tissues in patients affected with Barrett’s esophagus (BE). We demonstrate that DeepCraftFuse outperforms state-of-the-art techniques on private and public datasets, reaching results of around 95% when distinguishing patients affected by BE that is either positive or negative to esophageal cancer.