Communicating During COVID-19 and Other Acute-Event Scenarios: A Practical Approach.

Successfully adapting to organizational changes during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis necessitated the effective deployment of technical communication texts delineating the expectations and structures for guiding behavior and interactions. A dearth of system-wide familiarity with changes in modalities has disrupted expectations and impacted engagement. During acute events, business and technical communicators will probably not be the initial source of transition messaging. Instead, this task will fall on managers, faculty, and other front-line communicators. The authors present pragmatic recommendations for adapting familiar discourses, semiotics, and mental scripts so that communicators can more effectively intervene during crises to ease organizational transitions and decrease uncertainty.

Immunotherapy for malignant pleural mesothelioma. Current status and future prospects.

Malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM) is a rare malignancy of the pleura that is frequently resistant to conventional therapies. Immunotherapy is a promising investigational approach for MPM that has shown some evidence of clinical benefit in select patients. However, tumor-induced immunosuppression is likely a major impediment to achieving optimal clinical responses to immunotherapeutic intervention. MPM contains a variable degree of infiltrating T-regulatory cells and M2 macrophages, which are believed to facilitate tumor evasion from the host immune system. Additional immunosuppressive factors identified in other human tumor types, such as tumor-associated programmed death ligand-1 expression, may be relevant for investigation in MPM. Conventional cytoreductive therapies, such as radiation, chemotherapy, and surgery, may play a critical role in successful immunotherapeutic strategies by ablating intratumoral and/or systemic immunosuppressive factors, thus creating a host environment more amenable to immunotherapy. This article reviews the immunotherapeutic approaches being evaluated in patients with MPM and discusses how immunotherapy might be rationally combined with conventional tumor cytoreductive therapies for this disease.

Development of a novel portable multi-channel near infrared spectroscopy system.

A novel light-weight multi-channel multi-wavelength ultra-low power near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) system was designed and tested. The NIRS system was designed for clinical use to emit low power (maximum 5 mW) red and near infrared (NIR) light into human tissue and acquire, record, and display reflected light from various tissue depths. In this paper, results of initial functional tests of the system are presented. Potential clinical applications of the NIRS system include long-term non-invasive monitoring of functional activity in tissues, oxygen consumption in skeletal muscles, and tissue blood perfusion.

Evaluation of novel ECG signal processing on quantification of transient ischemia and baseline wander suppression.

The performance assessment of a novel ECG signal processing technology in Fidelity 100 (test) and four modern ECG systems (controls) was conducted. A quantitative evaluation for one control and a test system was done by simultaneous recordings on 54 patients undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) and on a biological reference signal from an ECG simulator. A qualitative performance of baseline wander suppression was done on all five systems. The results showed that the Fidelity 100 system provided excellent detection and quantification of transient ischemia and baseline wander suppression.