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Bioethics in Malaysian Civil Courts: Implementing Judicial Interventions of Informed Consent
No full textA global overview of anatomical science education and its present and future role in biomedical curricula
Get PDFThe four main anatomical sciences, gross anatomy, histology, neuroanatomy, and embryology, are fundamental subjects for most health professionals and biomedical students. Usually taught as part of preclinical basic science training, the anatomical sciences provide a structural understanding of human or animal bodies at both macroscopic and microscopic levels. This overview characterizes how the anatomical sciences are currently taught around the globe, highlighting similarities, differences, and recent curricular transformations that were partially in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Globally, educators of the anatomical sciences navigate similar pressures, including expectations of curricular integration and reduced time for anatomical teaching. Student-centered teaching approaches and e-learning technologies have been adopted across many regions, transforming how educators engage their learners. However, not all educators are provided with technological resources to facilitate such educational advancements, particularly in regions where economic inequality and poor infrastructure hinder access to the internet. Though ethical standards guiding the procurement of human bodies have evolved over time, the sources of human bodies that academic institutions use for anatomy education vary widely. Specific regional issues complicate many aspects of anatomical science education, challenging educators to adopt novel teaching approaches. Despite some differences, every global region appears to be moving in a similar direction. However, where academic institutions fall on that trajectory differs for specific regions/countries. How these educational and technological changes influence anatomy education should be carefully considered for the strengths and weaknesses they provide and the opportunities and threats they bring.Graphical Abstract:
How the anatomical sciences are taught worldwide is constantly changing. Common themes are a reduction of teaching time and the inclusion of e-learning and new pedagogical approaches. Although there is a common direction of change, where different global regions place along that trajectory often correlates with their economic status
Sympathetic Shift and Insular Alteration: Unravelling the Link Between Anxiety and Heart Rate Variability in Parkinson's Disease
Get PDFData Availability Statement:
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.Supporting Information is available online at: https://movementdisorders.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/mds.70069#support-information-section .Background:
Anxiety and autonomic dysfunction are frequent non-motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease (PD). Their relationship, as well as the neural mechanisms underlying this relationship, remain unexplored.
Objectives:
We aimed to investigate the relationship between cardiovascular functions and anxiety in PD and the structural neural changes underlying this putative interaction. We also investigated the effect of dopaminergic medications on such a relationship.
Methods:
Fifty PD patients (27 with anxiety, PD_Anx; 23 without anxiety, PD_noAnx) and 16 age- and gender-matched healthy controls (HC) were included. Blood pressure (BP), heart rate, and heart rate variability (HRV) were assessed at rest and in response to an orthostatic challenge, both ON and OFF dopaminergic medications. Voxel-based morphometry was used to examine grey matter volume in brain areas linked to autonomic regulation and anxiety, including the amygdala, insula, cingulate cortex, hypothalamus, and putamen.
Results:
PD_Anx patients showed significantly lower HRV compared with both PD_noAnx patients and HC (P < 0.05), indicating increased sympathetic activity. Both PD groups had higher BP OFF medication compared with HC (P < 0.001, P < 0.005, respectively); there was no difference between PD_Anx and PD_noAnx (P = 0.31). Structural brain analyses showed that anxiety altered the relationship between HRV and left insula volume, with a positive correlation in PD_noAnx patients and a reversed relationship in PD_Anx patients.
Conclusions:
Anxiety in PD is associated with a shift toward sympathetic predominance, which correlates with structural changes in the insula. Insular alteration may predispose PD patients to heightened sympathetic outflow and anxiety. Changes in HRV may be interpreted as a functional indicator of anxious states in PD. © 2025 The Author(s). Movement Disorders published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society.L.R. was supported by the Clinical Academic Research Partnerships (CARP) Medical Research Council/National Institute for Health and Care Research (MRC/NIHR) grant under award number MR/T023864/1 and St George's Hospital Charity grant reference number SPF25004
Abnormal T-Cell activation and cytotoxic T-Cell frequency discriminate symptom severity in myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome
No full textData Availability:
All data generated and analysed during this study are included as Additional File 14.Electronic supplementary material is available online at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12967-025-07507-x#Sec466 .Background:
Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) is a debilitating but poorly-understood disease. ME/CFS symptoms include immune system effects alongside incapacitating fatigue and post-exertional disease exacerbation. Symptom severity can range from mild to severe and whilst symptoms can fluctuate, few people fully recover.
Methods:
Immunological profiles of people living with ME/CFS were analysed by flow cytometry, focusing on cytotoxic cells, to determine whether people with mild/moderate (n = 43) or severe ME/CFS (n = 53) expressed different immunological markers. Flow cytometry data were tested for normality and the two clinical groups were compared by t-test or Mann-Whitney U-test as appropriate.
Results:
People with mild/moderate ME/CFS had increased expression of cytotoxic effector molecules alongside enhanced proportions of early-immunosenescence cells, determined by the CD28-CD57- phenotype, indicative of persistent viral infection. In contrast, people with severe ME/CFS had higher proportions of activated circulating lymphocytes, determined by CD69+ and CD38+ expression, and expressed more pro-inflammatory cytokines, including interferon-γ, tumour necrosis factor and interleukin-17, following stimulation in vitro, indicative of prolonged non-specific inflammation. These changes were consistent across different cell types including CD8+ T cells, mucosal associated invariant T cells and Natural Killer cells, indicating generalised altered cytotoxic responses across the innate and adaptive immune system.
Conclusions:
These immunological differences likely reflect different disease pathogenesis mechanisms occurring in the two clinical groups, opening up opportunities for the development of prognostic markers and stratified treatments.This study was mainly funded by the National Institutes of Health (# R01AI103629) with additional support from NIH: 5R01AI170839-03 and from The ME Association
Whistleblowing intentions in the United Kingdom: Integrating the whistleblowing triangle and theory of planned behaviour
No full textThis thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonWhistleblowing is a topic of interest that has attracted great global attention from various stakeholders in many countries worldwide including the United Kingdom. At its core, whistleblowing has been established as one of the most effective ways to tackle unethical practices, fraud, and other illegal engagements in organisations. Whistleblowing can be explained as the action an individual takes to disclose wrongful practices or unethical practices in a firm. It can be conducted internally or externally by the individual. The reason behind disclosing this information is to obtain corrective actions from the respective parties. However, blowing the whistle is risky as the whistle blower might encounter threats, retaliation or even job loss for disclosing the information. Therefore, countries need to establish whistleblowing protection legislation and companies to create robust channels for reporting unethical practices. In the United Kingdom, the Public Interest Disclosure Act was established for the protection of whistle blowers. Since its creation, various amendments have been made and policy agencies have established policies to better protect whistle blowers. However, whistleblowing is still an action individual are reluctant to undertake.
As stated above whistleblowing has been used to tackle various unethical practices. Previous whistleblowing studies have only dealt with addressing corporate fraud or financial fraud. Researchers have created models to address corporate fraud or financial fraud. However, most studies have neglected to use whistleblowing to address food fraud. Despite food fraud cases increasing globally. This justifies the need to conduct research with regard to the whistleblowing model and food fraud.
This research aims to create a whistleblowing model by incorporating the theory of planned behaviour and the development of the whistleblowing triangle. This model will be used to understand factors that led consumers to report unethical food practices. As stated above whistleblowing is still an action that individuals are reluctant to undertake. Our study will try to understand which factors will lead consumers to report unethical food practices.
This research sheds light on the whistleblowing literature as it will develop a whistleblowing triangle and theory of planned behaviour to create a model to address food fraud. The incorporation of these two models will help us understand consumer whistleblowing intention, specifically in the United Kingdom.
On the same token, this research is unique as it uses consumers as a sample in the area of whistleblowing, previous research has focused on using employees, managers, and internal auditors. The use of consumers in the whistleblowing literature relating to food fraud is significant because consumers are very important stakeholders in the food supply chain as they are the end users or consumers of the goods. Furthermore, consumers have the power and authority to notice wrongdoing and report it. Lastly, consumers will be more inclined to take a keen interest in the topic of food fraud and whistleblowing as it directly affects their health should a company engage in food fraud, likewise, these consumers are sacrificing scarce resources in the form of money for this food therefore, they would be further inclined to ensure their resources are not being exploited by supply of fraudulent food. With the ongoing food frauds taking place consumers have now become aware of the right procedures or practices with regards to food production. As a result, they become key factors in preventing food fraud.
To understand consumer whistleblowing intention in the United Kingdom a survey was provided to consumers. The study obtained 514 respondents of which 221 were male and 291 were female. Our study highlights that ethical responsibility is positively and significantly related to brand loyalty, barriers to whistleblowing are negatively and significantly related to brand loyalty, ethical responsibility is positively and significantly related to social support, barriers to whistleblowing are positively and significantly related to social support, social support is positively and significantly related to brand loyalty, and barriers to whistleblowing is positively and insignificantly related to ethical responsibility. These findings indicated consumer whistleblowing intention. We now understand what will lead consumers to report unethical food practices in the United Kingdom. In addition, this study has provided robust managerial implications
Financial incentives and information provision for post-pandemic primary care quality recovery: a longitudinal study in Catalonia
Get PDFData sharing statement: Data from this study will be made accessible upon reasonable request.Author Accepted Manuscript: This is an ‘author accepted manuscript’: a manuscript that has been accepted for publication in British Journal of General Practice, but which has not yet undergone subediting, typesetting, or correction. Errors discovered and corrected during this process may materially alter the content of this manuscript, and the latest published version (the Version of Record) should be used in preference to any preceding versionsBackground: The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted primary care services worldwide, reducing quality-of-care. Understanding the impact of quality improvement strategies can guide system resilience. Aim: To assess whether information provision and financial incentives to primary care professionals supported recovery of pre-pandemic quality-of-care after pandemic-related declines. Design and Setting: Descriptive analysis at the primary care practice (PCP) and aggregated indicator levels in Catalonia, Spain. Method: Data on 37 quality-of-care indicators from 287 PCPs (5,250,531 adults) were analyzed monthly from 2019–2024. Financial incentives were suspended in 2020; 13 indicators were reintegrated into pay-for-performance schemes in 2021 (early-incentivised), while 24 remained unincentivised until 2023 (late-incentivised). Outcomes were annual changes in indicator results and variability, and time to recover pre-pandemic levels. A multivariate Cox model estimated the effect of incentives; K-means clustering identified PCP recovery profiles. Results: In 2021, 11/13 (85%) of early-incentivised indicators started recovering versus 5/24 (21%) of late-incentivised. By December 2024, recovery of pre-pandemic results occurred in 85% and 50%, respectively, despite larger pandemic drops in early-incentivised indicators. Early incentivization doubled the likelihood of recovery before 2023 (2.06 times), with effects varying by indicator type. However, many PCPs recovered late-incentivised indicators before incentives resumed, when only informed. Clustering revealed four PCP profiles; faster recoverers were smaller, rural practices with milder declines. Conclusion: Financial incentives accelerated quality-of-care recovery after a system shock, particularly when tailored to indicator types and practice contexts, and complemented by timely information provision. Policymakers can use these findings to guide recovery strategies and strengthen resilience in primary care.HORIZON EUROPE Health, 101095424. This study, as part of the FLASH project, has received funding by the European Union through the Horizon Europe programme, under grant agreement number 101095424. CN is also funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however, those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the granting authority European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation programme. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them. The PCR-4-ALL project has received funding under the Horizon Europe research and innovation programme (the grant agreement No 101095606)
Leadership through lived experience
Get PDFThis thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonThis study examines how remote work impacts the understanding and practices of non-profit
leadership, it does so through the lens of lived experiences. Using a Constructivist
Grounded Theory approach, the research investigates how non-profit leaders understand their
roles and adapt to challenges in remote settings.
Through 34 in-depth interviews with non-profit leaders, team members, and other
key stakeholders, in the UK, the study proposes a practice framework for remote
leadership in charitable organisations. This framework highlights four interconnected
dimensions of leadership: building relational connections, maintaining connection with
organisational culture and mission, adapting to individual needs and promoting
empowerment, and applying continuous reflection. The model builds upon our
understanding of leadership as an interpersonal and relational process. These findings
show that remote non-profit leadership is not build on operational oversight, but it is
relational and adaptive in its core.
The study offers a framework that considers the complexities of remote work in missiondriven
non-profit organisations. The findings also offer practical insights for non-profit
leaders. They highlight the importance of visibility in the digital space, trust-building,
personalised leadership approaches, and continuous reflection, to keep the remote nonprofit
teams engaged.
This study brings an updated perspective for our understanding of non-profit leadership
in remote settings, as it frames it as a relational and adaptive experience. The study
offers theoretical contributions, as well as practical applications for leaders engaging
with a dispersed workforce. This study also aims to provide contribution to the knowledge of
the non-profit sector, and through the shared knowledge, support the organisations to
continue to provide invaluable services to those in need
U-Index: A Universal Indexing Framework for Matching Long Patterns
Get PDFA related version of this article is available at arXiv:2502.14488v3 [cs.DS] (https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14488). Comments: SEA-2025 version. 18 pages, 6 figures, code available at https://github.com/u-index/u-index-rs . ACM classes: F.2.2; J.3. Submission history: From: Ragnar Groot Koerkamp: [v1] Thu, 20 Feb 2025 12:09:34 UTC (383 KB); [v2] Fri, 21 Feb 2025 13:35:43 UTC (383 KB); [v3] Tue, 27 May 2025 12:05:04 UTC (459 KB).Motivation. Text indexing is a fundamental and well-studied problem. Classic solutions to this problem either replace the original text with a compressed representation, e.g., the FM-index and its variants, or keep it uncompressed but attach some redundancy - an index - to accelerate matching, e.g., the suffix array. The former solutions thus retain excellent compressed space, but are practically slow to construct and query. The latter approaches, instead, sacrifice space efficiency but are typically faster; for example, the suffix array takes much more space than the text itself for commonly used alphabets, like ASCII or DNA, but it is very fast to construct and query.
Methods. In this paper, we show that efficient text indexing can be achieved using just a small extra space on top of the original text, provided that the query patterns are sufficiently long. More specifically, we develop a new indexing paradigm in which a sketch of a query pattern is first matched against a sketch of the text. Once candidate matches are retrieved, they are verified using the original text. This paradigm is thus universal in the sense that it allows us to use any solution to index the sketched text, like a suffix array, FM-index, or r-index.
Results. We explore both the theory and the practice of this universal framework. With an extensive experimental analysis, we show that, surprisingly, universal indexes can be constructed much faster than their unsketched counterparts and take a fraction of the space, as a direct consequence of (i) having a lower bound on the length of patterns and (ii) working in sketch space. Furthermore, these data structures have the potential of retaining or even improving query time, because matching against the sketched text is faster and verifying candidates can be theoretically done in constant time per occurrence (or, in practice, by short and cache-friendly scans of the text).
Finally, we discuss some important applications of this novel indexing paradigm to computational biology. We hypothesize that such indexes will be particularly effective when the queries are sufficiently long, and so we demonstrate applications in long-read mapping.Gabriele Fici: Supported by MUR project PRIN 2022 APML – 20229BCXNW, funded
by the European Union -– Mission 4 “Education and Research” C2 - Investment 1.1. CUP
Master_B53D23012910006.
Ragnar Groot Koerkamp: ETH Research Grant ETH-1721-1 to Gunnar Rätsch.
Rob Patro: NIH grant award number R01HG009937, NSF award CNS-1763680 and grants 252586 and
2024342821 from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative DAF, an advised fund of Silicon Valley Community
Foundation. RP is a co-founder of Ocean Genomics, Inc.
Giulio Ermanno Pibiri: European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme
(EFRA project, Grant Agreement Number 101093026). This work was also partially supported by
DAIS – Ca’ Foscari University of Venice within the IRIDE program.
Solon P. Pissis: Supported by the PANGAIA and ALPACA projects that have received funding
from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie
Skłodowska-Curie grant agreements No 872539 and 956229, respectively
Post-fire Mechanical Behaviour of Concrete Reinforced with Phragmites Australis Fibres
Get PDFAvailability of Data and Materials:
All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article.The use of natural fibres as concrete reinforcement has gained increasing attention due to their environmental benefits, renewability, and cost-effectiveness. This study investigates the post-fire mechanical behaviour of concrete reinforced with Phragmites australis fibres (PAF), a locally available and sustainable material. Concrete mixes containing 0%, 0.5%, 1%, 1.5%, and 2% fibre volume fractions were exposed to temperatures up to 600 °C for 2 h to simulate fire conditions. The effects of fibre content and temperature were assessed through measurements of slump, compressive strength, splitting tensile strength, flexural strength, and ultrasonic pulse velocity (UPV). Results showed that PAF-reinforced concrete retained considerable strength and integrity up to 400 °C, with a pronounced reduction observed at 600 °C due to fibre degradation and microcrack propagation. Regression models developed from the experimental data demonstrated strong correlations between fibre dosage, temperature, and residual mechanical properties. The analysis identified an optimal fibre content between 0.5% and 1%, which provided the best balance between thermal stability and mechanical performance. These findings highlight the potential of Phragmites australis fibres as an effective and sustainable reinforcement for improving the fire resistance of concrete structures.This research was supported by the British Council UK under the Research Environments grant (Grant No: RE-2023-129)
Enhancing Multi Object Tracking with CLIP: A Comparative Study on DeepSORT and StrongSORT
Get PDFData Availability Statement:
The data presented in this study are openly available in https://motchallenge.net (accessed on 1 September 2025), and reference [14]. Wojke, N., Bewley, A. and Paulus, D. (2017) 'Simple Online and Realtime Tracking with a Deep Association Metric', Proceedings of the
2017 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), Beijing, China, 17-20 September, pp. 3645 - 3649. doi: 10.1109/ICIP.2017.8296962.Multi object tracking (MOT) is a crucial task in video analysis but is often hindered by frequent identity (ID) switches, particularly in crowded or occluded scenarios. This study explores the integration of a vision-language model, into two tracking by detection frameworks DeepSORT and StrongSORT to enhance appearance-based re-identification. YOLOv8x is employed as the base detector due to its robust localization performance, while CLIP’s visual features replace the default appearance encoders, providing more discriminative and semantically rich embeddings. We evaluated the CLIP enhanced DeepSORT and StrongSORT on sequences from two challenging real world benchmarks: MOT15 and MOT16. Furthermore, we analyze the generalizability of YOLOv8x when trained on the MOT20 benchmark and applied to the chosen trackers on MOT15 and MOT16. Our findings show that both CLIP enhanced trackers substantially reduce ID switches and improve ID-based tracking metrics, with CLIP StrongSORT achieving the most consistent gains. In addition, YOLOv8x demonstrates strong generalization capabilities for unseen datasets. These results highlight the effectiveness of incorporating vision language models into MOT frameworks, particularly under visually challenging conditions.This research received no external funding
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