Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the changes in the amount of pre- and post- operative stress and the associated reduction in anxiety in patients undergoing elective orthopedic surgery. Methods: Thirty-nine patients undergoing elective orthopedic surgery for benign diseases are herein studied. Anxiety was assessed using the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI Y-1), both before and after surgery. Perioperative stress was evaluated using amylase in saliva (AMY) at the time of the patient entered the operating room and thereafter on the first post-operative day. Patient satisfaction was evaluated postoperatively using a standardized questionnaire. Results: 1) The postoperative STAI Y-1 score decreased from 45.3 (preoperative) to 43.6. 2) Although, the mean postoperative amylase level was slightly increased from 55.7 KU/L to 62.9 KU/L, 61.5% of the patients showed no stress level at any time or a decrease in the postoperative AMY level. 3) Surgery of the cervical vertebra, the shoulder the clavicle, the upper extremities and the ankle tended to show a higher AMY score postoperatively. 4) According to the results of a questionnaire, the chief causes of the postoperative stress were the wound pain, thirst and lumbago. Conclusion: Both the strategies to reduce preoperative anxiety and the careful management of postoperative wound pain were found to be important factors for reducing perioperative stress.

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The education of medical personnel for triage training is very important, and training medical staff who are able to work in the disaster response is also essential. The authors introduced our practical education methods in Saga University and evaluated the educational effects of this exercise. We performed a mass casualty disaster exercise that involved simulated disaster relief operations for two days in July 2009. This exercise was designed to simulate the triage training education of the Tokyo DMAT (Disaster Medical Assistance Team). Triage and emergency medical care were also involved in this exercise. A total of 119 medical personnel participated in this exercise. We distributed self-administered questionnaires to the participants for the evaluation of the effects of education. Three times, before the training, right after the training and one year after the exercise. About 88% of the participants answered that this exercise was very instructive and interesting. They rated this simulation exercise, very favorably and believed that the knowledge gained from this exercise would be beneficial in the near future. Knowledge gained from lectures only was almost lost after one year. However, the recall of the practical exercise, including the triage simulation, was not lost after one year. The positive response to this simulation exercise suggests that this kind of practical education, including triage simulation, could be very valuable for providing medical personnel with disaster training in Japan.

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We To solve several types of project management problems, efficient project management is being demanded. Success or failure of the project hangs to the skill of project manager. However in general, it is not easy to make an excellent manager trained quickly. If the knowledge is considered to be a kind of judgment for the effective action, first of all the registration of manager's action and experience is needed. Group of low-level information and data is called knowledge in this paper. It is necessary to register the knowledge easily. But it is difficult to find the timing to register the knowledge. It is difficult to find the time that information should be registered on. This paper describes the method of finding the best timing to have to register the knowledge. I tried to take into the change in progress of the project in order to get the knowledge in addition to the EVM method. EVM (Earned Value Management) is one of the methods for scientific managing the progress of the project. On the other hand, The time that progress changes seem the best timing of registration. As the result, it has been understood that there is a possibility that the knowledge can be registered automatically. It will be necessary to achieve the function to register the knowledge at the just timing in the future.

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A temporal subtraction image which is obtained by subtraction of previous image from current one can be used for enhancing interval changes. There are still remains many problems such as mass screening data. To overcome these problems, we have proposed a registration method for temporal subtraction images of thoracic MDCT images and its application to detect lung nodules in temporal subtraction images. However, subtraction artifacts are still remained on temporal subtraction images. In this paper, we developed a new technique for detection of lung nodules based on statistical features which is obtained temporal subtraction. We applied our new method to MDCT images and satisfactory results are obtained.

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The purpose of this research was to clarify the aspect of nurses' emotional intelligence affecting their mental health. The results of this research were considered to be useful materials for supporting the maintenance and promotion of nurses' mental health. In this research, mental health was defined as a degree of positive emotion and emotional intelligence was defined as a sentimental intellect controlling emotions for the maintenance and promotion of mental and physical health. The data on 112 nurses working at two hospitals in local cities from September to December were used. The degree of their mental health was measured using the subjective well-being inventory (SUBI), and their emotional intelligence was determined using the emotional intelligence scale (EQS). PASW Statistics 18 was also used for analysis. In order to clarify the factors actually affecting mental health, a multiple linear regression analysis was conducted by specifying the degree of mental health of SUBI as the dependent variable and the factors of EQS indicating a significant correlation with the degree of mental health as the main independent variable. As a result, concerning the factors of emotional intelligence (sentimental intellect), adaptability eagerness and optimistic disposition were identified as principal factors affecting the degree of mental health, and this model accounted for 42.8 % of the dispersion. It was suggested that, most importantly one's own emotions must be recognized through verbalization so as to maintain and enhance positive emotions representing the degree of mental health.

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Fragrance of wine is likened to things closely, for example fruits. Fragrance of wines and fruits is attempted to analyze by combining three methods, i.e., solid phase micro extraction (SPME), gas chromatography (GC) and mass spectrometry (MS), and the possibility is studied for easy method of analyzing compounds which consist of an aroma by modifying isolate-identify-quantify process to separate-identify-quantify process. This trying is found to be effective to clearly separate and identify similar volatile chemical compounds. It is also revealed that same or similar chemical compounds from wine are contained among different fruits. This This result indicates that there are common discriminative compounds or key compounds and we feel them as an certain element of an aroma.result is supposed that a discriminative compound or key compounds performs as an element of an aroma.

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Nurses working in dialysis clinics are considered to be more stressful than those working in chronic disease wards. Therapeutic environment, so called "open floor" may influence the mental stress of nurses. The authors examined the relation between mental stress induced by "open floor" and job stress of nurses working in the dialysis clinics. Study subjects were 196 nurses working in dialysis clinics in Saga and Kumamoto Prefectures. In our study, 54.1% nurses answered that "Open floor environment is stressful". After using multiple regression analysis, "Strains concerning the role of nurse" (p<0.001) and "Strains concerning quality of nursing works" (p<0.001) was significantly related with the mental stress of nurses who felt stress in the "open floor" environment.

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Recently, SOM (Self Organizing Maps) is noticed as one of the analysis techniques of multi-dimension data, and it is actively studied and applied in various fields, such as medical treatment and environment. In clustering by the conventional SOM data is classified according to compressing the inputted multi-dimension data into two dimensions. However, information on the cause of existing inside data cannot be analyzed. Therefore, ICA (Independent Component Analysis) is taken in to the conventional SOM, data is decomposed into some components, and the extraction and analysis of an independent component having contained the amount of the characteristics of input data are conducted. As a result, we thought that it enables a high level clustering which solved the above-mentioned problem. In this research, we develop the analysis technique (ICASOM) which combines SOM and ICA, and prove the effectiveness by applying this method to the acceleration plethysmogram.

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Micro movement of the center in the brain and deformation of the skull is calculated precisely without approximation from the acceleration data of 7 experiments of backwards falling down. The experiment has been done in JARI, and acceleration data are taken on the head, chest, pelvis and also neck(force) using a dummy robot, which simulates a human body. As a result, the whole picture of the falling and hitting becomes clear. It is shown that (1) the postures of falling are classified into 2 types, i.e., nearly same time hitting or delayed hitting of the pelvis. (2) the accelerations of the head are classified into 2parts, i.e., head's decelerating period and hitting on the floor. (3) The depth are from 2〜3mm, which indicates the deformation of the skull is around 2mm. On the other hand, the height range from 1cm to 7cm, depend on the falling posture. (4) From the x-y component analysis, we found the vertical angles of face is about 10 deg in x and 10 deg in y.

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Niigata College of Nursing has started offering a new educational program supporting career nurses' re-training. A feature of the "virtual college" system, a component of the program, is that it combines accessibility to anyone with an internet connection, with bidirectional communication. We surveyed the opinions of end-users after they had operated the system. Survey comments such as "Because I am poor at using computers, maintenance of the system environment is impossible."; "I am very reticent to post ideas on the electronic bulletin board on the network because I cannot see the reaction of the readers."; "When using a Web camera, getting myself presentable for the camera takes time." resulted in a number of unforeseen issues being highlighted. In addition, a future challenge will be to secure the financial resources required to manage the system with its expanding base of users. These issues will need to be addressed in order for the system itself to improve, and to further advance the efficacy of the program.

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