Phoca vitulina swallowing physiology using videofluoroscopy: Creating a comparative rehabilitation model
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background Up to 150 wild harbor seal pups (Phoca vitulina) are admitted annually to our rescue centre. All require medical management including gavage feeding until weaned to whole fish prior to release back to the wild. The rehabilitation model is personnel intensive requiring animal restraint and force feeding. To the best of our knowledge, no systematic imaging has been conducted on the upper aerodigestive tract of wild seal pups. As a result, the information regarding their swallowing physiology is limited as are ways in which to optimize their feeding and swallowing rehabilitation. Our objectives were to develop a videofluoroscopic swallowing study (VFSS) protocol and to determine the feasibility of conducting a VFSS with a wild seal. Methods Feasibility parameters included the determination of: contrast delivery methods, image capture and analyses, and the operational and infrastructure requirements. A Siemens mobile c‐arm fluoroscopy unit and retrofitted tub were utilized for imaging. After thawing, we injected whole flash‐frozen herring with liquid barium suspension (105% w/v). Recently weaned seals (N = 2) were imaged at 30 frames per second with loss less capture. Two blinded raters evaluated swallow physiology across 6 metrics with disagreements resolved by consensus. Results were summarized descriptively. Results We conducted a freely‐behaving videofluoroscopic swallowing study on two infant seals (1 male: 8 wks, 3 d; 1 female: 5 wks, 3 d). Personnel included veterinarian, veterinary technicians (2), imaging technician and VFSS raters (2). Five boluses were administered to each seal (67–90 g each) with a total exposure of 2 min, 54 sec. We identified three distinct swallow phases: preparatory (preswallow), oropharyngeal and esophageal. The preparatory phase was characterized by airway closure and base of tongue (BOT) positioning. The oropharyngeal phase included bolus transport via BOT retraction, repeated anterior‐superior hyolaryngeal excursion, and posterior pharyngeal wall contraction. Bolus propulsion to the stomach occurred during the esophageal phase. Conclusions We have successfully conducted the first‐ever VFSS on wild seal pups. With this protocol, we will gather the first normative swallowing data, enhance diagnostic capabilities and potentially improve feeding and swallowing rehabilitation for this population. Ultimately, this will inform our development of the first cross‐species conceptual swallowing framework between seals and humans facilitating a synergistic knowledge translation model. Support or Funding Information Dr. Skoretz’ startup funding from the Faculty of Medicine and the School of Audiology and Speech Sciences at UBC provided support for this project. This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal .
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".