Consistent and precise localization of brain activity in human primary visual cortex by MEG and fMRI

The tomographic localization of activity within human primary visual cortex (striate cortex or V1) was examined using whole-head magnetoencephalography (MEG) and 4-T functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in four subjects. Circular checkerboard pattern stimuli with radii from 1.8 to 5.2 degrees were presented at eccentricity of 8 degrees and angular position of 45 degrees in the lower quadrant of the visual field to excite the dorsal part of V1 which is distant from the V1/V2 border and from the fundus of the calcarine sulcus. Both fMRI and MEG identified spatially well-overlapped activity within the targeted area in each subject. For MEG, in three subjects a very precise activation in V1 was identified at 42 ms for at least one of the two larger stimulus sizes (radii 4.5 and 5.2 degrees ). When this V1 activity was present, it marked the beginning of a weak wave of excitations in striate and extrastriate areas which ended at 50 ms (M50). The beginning of the next wave of activations (M70) was also marked by a brief V1 activation, mainly between 50 and 60 ms. The mean separation between V1 activation centers identified by fMRI and the earliest MEG activation was 3-5 mm.     

Effectiveness of an interprofessional education model based on the transtheoretical model of behaviour change to improve interprofessional collaboration

This study aimed to assess the effectiveness of an interprofessional education model (IPE) based on the transtheoretical model to improve the participants’ interprofessional collaborative practice. The study was conducted in Iran using a controlled before-and-after study design. The participants (n = 91) were the residents of emergency medicine and nurses of the emergency units from two teaching hospitals affiliated to Iran University of Medical Sciences. The participants in the intervention group (n = 40) were 22 residents and 18 nurses. The control group (n = 51) consisted of 20 residents and 31 nurses. The participants were classified based on their stage of readiness to change. The interventions were two-day workshops for each stage (i.e., attitude and intention). We used the Interprofessional Collaborator Assessment Rubric (ICAR) to assess the effectiveness of the developed model. The interprofessional collaboration of the participants in the intervention and control groups was assessed at four time points before and after the intervention in the real emergency unit environment. Student’s t-test and repeated measures analysis of variance (RM-ANOVA) were used to analyse the data. We used partial eta-squared (η²) for effect size calculations. The mean values of ICAR scores in the intervention and control groups were 95.63 ± 19.14 and 89.19 ± 16.11 before the intervention. The mean values of ICAR scores at 3 months after the intervention were 99.82 ± 22.32 and 88.29 ± 16.87 in the intervention and control groups, respectively. After 6 months, the mean values of ICAR scores of the intervention and control groups were 98.6 ± 23.40 and 87.98 ± 16.01, respectively. The results showed that the intervention had a medium educational effect size (partial η² = 0.06) on performance of the participants. Our results showed that an IPE model that is tailored to the learners’ stage of readiness to change improves interprofessional collaboration in the participants. The developed model could be applied for improving interprofessional collaborative performance in other IPE programmes.