ABSTRACT
OBJECTIVE: The ai/m of this study was to compare the self-reported confidence of novices in using a smartphone-enabled video otoscope, a microscope and loupes for ear examination and external ear canal procedures. METHOD: Medical students (n = 29) undertook a pre-study questionnaire to ascertain their knowledge of techniques for otoscopy and aural microsuction. Participants underwent teaching on ear anatomy, examination and procedural techniques using a microscope, loupes and smartphone-enabled video otoscopes. Confidence and preference using each modality was rated using a Likert-like questionnaire. RESULTS: After teaching, all modalities demonstrated a significant increase in confidence in ear examination (p < 0.0001). Confidence in using the smartphone-enabled otoscope post-teaching was highest (p = 0.015). Overall, the smartphone-enabled video otoscope was the preferred method in all other parameters assessed including learning anatomy or pathology (51.72 per cent) and learning microsuction (65.51 per cent). CONCLUSION: Smartphone-enabled video otoscopes provide an alternative approach to ear examination and aural microsuction that can be undertaken outside of a traditional clinical setting and can be used by novices.
Subject(s)
Otoscopes , Students, Medical , Humans , Otoscopy/methods , Self Report , SmartphoneABSTRACT
When a circular aperture is uniformly illuminated, it is possible to observe in the far field an image of a bright circle surrounded by faint rings known as the Airy pattern or Airy disk. This pattern is described by the first-order Bessel function of the first type divided by its argument expressed in circular coordinates. We introduce the higher-order Bessel functions with a vortex azimuthal factor to propose a family of functions to generalize the function defining the Airy pattern. These functions, which we call vortex Jinc functions, happen to form an orthogonal set. We use this property to investigate their usefulness in fitting various surfaces in a circular domain, with applications in precision optical manufacturing, wavefront optics, and visual optics, among others. We compare them with other well-known sets of orthogonal functions, and our findings show that they are suitable for these tasks and can pose an advantage when dealing with surfaces that concentrate a considerable amount of their information near the center of a circular domain, making them suitable applications in visual optics or analysis of aberrations of optical systems, for instance, to analyze the point spread function.
ABSTRACT
We describe an adaptive grid method-of-lines (MOL) solution procedure for modelling charge transport and recombination in organic semiconductor devices. The procedure we describe offers an efficient, robust and versatile means of simulating semiconductor devices that allows for much simpler coding of the underlying equations than alternative simulation procedures. The MOL technique is especially well-suited to modelling the extremely stiff (and hence difficult to solve) equations that arise during the simulation of organic-and some inorganic-semiconductor devices. It also has wider applications in other areas, including reaction kinetics, combustion and aero- and fluid dynamics, where its ease of implementation also makes it an attractive choice. The MOL procedure we use converts the underlying semiconductor equations into a series of coupled ordinary differential equations (ODEs) that can be integrated forward in time using an appropriate ODE solver. The time integration is periodically interrupted, the numerical solution is interpolated onto a new grid that is better matched to the solution profile, and the time integration is then resumed on the new grid. The efficacy of the simulation procedure is assessed by considering a single layer device structure, for which exact analytical solutions are available for the electric potential, the charge distributions and the current-voltage characteristics. Two separate state-of-the-art ODE solvers are tested: the single-step Runge-Kutta solver Radau5 and the multi-step solver ODE15s, which is included as part of the Matlab ODE suite. In both cases, the numerical solutions show excellent agreement with the exact analytical solutions, yielding results that are accurate to one part in 1 x 10(4). The single-step Radau5 solver, however, is found to provide faster convergence since its efficiency is not compromised by the periodic interruption of the time integration when the grid is updated.
