Childbirth is an important life event that has been understudied by psychologists. Parents may find birth to be stressful, painful, and frightening, or feel supported and calm. Birth experiences can be shaped both by preexisting psychological vulnerabilities and by medical events that occur during childbirth. The birth experience may influence both parent and child well-being, helping to shape the health of the new family. This paper introduces the Birth Experiences Questionnaire (BEQ), a brief 10-item measure designed to assess stress, fear, and partner support during birth. We administered the BEQ to 51 couples (102 parents) within 1-2 days of their child's birth. Categorical principal component analysis was used to test reliability and factor structure. The BEQ showed good reliability (Cronbach's alpha = .81 for mothers, 0.80 for fathers) and internal consistency, suggesting it is acceptable for use as a unifactorial measure. The most variability was explained by a 3-factor solution, with the 3 factors reflecting Stress, Support, and Fear for mothers and Stress, Support, and Violation of Expectations for fathers. Prenatally assessed stress, depression, pregnancy-specific anxiety, and social support were all predictive of parents' BEQ scores. BEQ scores were also associated with infant Apgar scores and with couples' negative emotion word usage during an open-ended birth narrative. The BEQ differentiated between parents who had more medically complex births (e.g., labor induction, complications, and C-section delivery) versus less complex births. In conclusion, the BEQ can be administered shortly after birth to both parents, and may capture important dimensions of the perinatal experience. (PsycINFO Database Record

Associations between brain structure and early adversity have been inconsistent in the literature. These inconsistencies may be partially due to methodological differences. Different methods of brain segmentation may produce different results, obscuring the relationship between early adversity and brain volume. Moreover, adolescence is a time of significant brain growth and certain brain areas have distinct rates of development, which may compromise the accuracy of automated segmentation approaches. In the current study, 23 adolescents participated in two waves of a longitudinal study. Family aggression was measured when the youths were 12 years old, and structural scans were acquired an average of 4 years later. Bilateral amygdalae and hippocampi were segmented using three different methods (manual tracing, FSL, and NeuroQuant). The segmentation estimates were compared, and linear regressions were run to assess the relationship between early family aggression exposure and all three volume segmentation estimates. Manual tracing results showed a positive relationship between family aggression and right amygdala volume, whereas FSL segmentation showed negative relationships between family aggression and both the left and right hippocampi. However, results indicate poor overlap between methods, and different associations were found between early family aggression exposure and brain volume depending on the segmentation method used.

A single point of hardware failure in PACS is at the PACS controller, or the main archive server. When it occurs, it renders the entire PACS inoperable and crippled until the problem is diagnosed and resolved. Many current PACS do not have a fault-tolerant design or adequate back-up system for the main archive server due to several issues including cost. Several large scale PACS utilize the Tandem or cluster design but are very costly and have not been critically tested for their degree of fault tolerance. This paper describes a novel, portable, and scalable fault-tolerant PACS controller design that is affordable for most PACS implementations. Currently, most PACS controllers are based on UNIX servers. The UNIX server can be replaced by a specially designed Continuous Availability Server (CAS) consisting of three identical machines as the UNIX server that run the same operating system and application software simultaneously and independently. Any operation entering the CAS is transmitted to all three machines. A "voter" scheme is used to determine the condition of each machine. The operation is then executed step-by-step in the CAS with the majority vote. In this way, the CAS guarantees no interruption of data flow or data loss in the event of a hardware failure, and hence the term continuous availability.Hardware failure of any one or multiple components in a machine in the CAS including the power supply, processors, SCSI ports, network ports, RAID controller, and disk controllers was simulated. A series of clinical scenarios were performed while executing a simulated failure of the key hardware components within the CAS. No interruption of PACS data flow passing through the CAS was observed. It is possible to replace the UNIX server in the PACS controller by the CAS. The result is a continuous availability server immune to a single point of hardware failure. Although the current hardware cost of the CAS in the laboratory prototype is almost three times the cost of a comparable UNIX server, it is a minor cost increment in the total PACS budget and still lower in cost as compared to other large-scale designs. The CAS is scalable dependent on the specifications of the original UNIX server and portable because they run identical operating systems and application software.

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