Outcomes of acute pulmonary embolism in hospitalized patients with cancer

Background Cancer-associated pulmonary embolism (PE) places a significant burden on patients and health care systems. Methods A retrospective cross-sectional analysis of the National Inpatient Sample (NIS) database was performed in patients with acute PE from 2002 to 2014. Among patients hospitalized with PE, we investigated the differences in clinical outcomes and healthcare utilization in patients with and without cancer. A multivariate logistic regression model was applied to calculate adjusted odds ratios (OR) to estimate the impact of cancer on clinical outcomes. Wilcoxon rank sum tests were used to determine the differences in healthcare utilization between the two cohorts. Results Among 3,313,044 patients who were discharged with a diagnosis of acute PE, 84.2% did not have cancer, while 15.8% had cancer as a comorbidity (56% metastatic cancer, 35% solid tumor without metastasis, and 9% lymphoma). Patients with cancer had a higher mean age but lower rates of common comorbidities except for coagulation deficiency than patients without a cancer diagnosis. In patients with cancer, the rate of IVC filter placement was higher (21.7% vs. 13.11%, OR 1.76 (95% CI 1.73–1.79); p < 0.0001) and thrombolytic use lower (1.34% vs. 2.15%, OR 0.68 (95% CI 0.64–0.72); p < 0.0001). Patients with cancer hospitalized for PE had a higher all-cause in-hospital mortality (11.8% vs. 6.6%, OR 1.79 (95% CI 1.75–1.83); p < 0.0001), longer length of stay (6 vs. 5 days; p < 0.0001), higher total charge per hospitalization ($30,885 vs. $27,273; p < 0.0001), and higher rates of home health services upon discharge (35.8% vs. 23.2%; p < 0.0001) compared with those without cancer. Conclusion Concurrent cancer diagnosis in patients hospitalized for acute PE was associated with a 90% increase in all-cause mortality, longer length of stay, higher total charge per hospitalization, and higher rates of home health services upon discharge. The majority (56%) of patients with cancer had metastatic disease. Furthermore, there were identifiable differences in the intervention for acute PE between the two groups.

Phase tracking algorithms detect both real and imaginary components of outer hair cell nonlinear membrane capacitance that exhibits dielectric loss.

Outer hair cell (OHC) nonlinear membrane capacitance (NLC) represents voltage-dependent sensor charge movements within prestin (SLC26a5) that drive OHC electromotility. Dielectric loss, a shift in charge movement phase from purely capacitive to resistive, is likely indicative of prestin interaction with the viscous lipid bilayer and has been suggested to correspond to prestin power output. The frequency response of NLC in OHC membrane patches has been measured with phase tracking and complex capacitance methodologies. While the latter approach can directly determine the presence of dielectric loss by assessing charge movement both in and out of phase with driving voltage, the former has been suggested to fail in this regard. Here we show that standard phase tracking in the presence of dielectric loss does indeed register this loss. Such estimates of NLC correspond to the absolute magnitude of complex NLC, indicating that total charge movement regardless of phase is assessed, thereby validating past and present measures of NLC frequency response that limits its effectiveness at high frequencies. This observation has important implications for understanding the role of prestin in cochlear amplification.

Pixel readout IC for CdTe detectors operating in single photon counting mode with interpixel communication

This paper presents a readout integrated circuit (IC) of pixel architecture called MPIX (Multithreshold PIXels), designed for CdTe pixel detectors used in X-ray imaging applications. The MPIX IC area is 9.6 mm × 20.3 mm and it is designed in a CMOS 130 nm process. The IC core is a matrix of 96 × 192 square-shaped pixels of 100 µm pitch. Each pixel contains a fast analog front-end followed by four independently working discriminators and four 12-bit ripple counters. Such pixel architecture allows photon processing one by one and selecting the X-ray photons according to their energy (X-ray colour imaging). To fit the different range of applications the MPIX IC has 8 possible different gain settings, and it can process the X-ray photons of energy up to 154 keV. The MPIX chip is bump-bonded to the CdTe 1.5 mm thick pixel sensor with a pixel pitch of 100 µm. To deal with the charge sharing effect coming from a thick semiconductor pixel sensor, multithreshold pattern recognition algorithm is implemented in the readout IC. The implemented algorithm operates both in the analog domain (to recover the total charge spread between neighboring pixels, when a single X-ray photon hits the border of the pixel) and in the digital domain (to allocate a hit position to a single pixel).

Влияние анодной и катодной плазмы на работу электронного диода со взрывоэмиссионным катодом

The results of modeling and experimental investigation of the formation of anode and cathode plasmas in a vacuum diode with an explosive-emission cathode during the generation of a pulsed electron beam with a current density of 0.3-0.4 kA/cm^2 and an accelerating voltage of 300-500 kV are presented. It is shown that the concentration of the anode plasma does not exceed 10^10 cm^-3 and it does not significantly contribute to the operation of the diode. However, the complete desorption of molecules from the working surface of the explosive-emission cathode and the high efficiency of shock ionization of atoms ensure the formation of a cathode gas plasma with a concentration of 10^16 cm^-3. It is found that the charge of the explosive-emission plasma layer is significantly less than the charge of the electron beam and the main source of electrons is not an explosive-emission plasma, but a cathode gas plasma. In this case, the electron current is limited by the concentration of the cathode plasma. The use of a cathode with a developed surface (a cathode with a carbon fabric coating) allows increasing the total charge of the electron beam by more than 1.5 times without changing the cathode diameter and the anode-cathode gap.

Characterization of the palladium plasma produced by nanosecond pulsed 532 nm and 1064 nm wavelength lasers

Palladium plasma produced by nanosecond pulsed 532 nm and 1064 nm wavelengths lasers is studied with the help of planer Langmuir probe. The experiment is conducted over a wide range of the laser fluence (1.6–40 J cm−2). The measured time of flight ions distributions are used to infer total charge, kinetic energy of the palladium ions and plasma parameters. Our results indicate that the ion charge produced by both laser wavelengths is an increasing function of the laser fluence. Initially, the ion charge produced by 1064 nm is lower than 532 nm, but it increases at much faster rate with the rise of laser fluence as the inverse bremsstrahlung plasma heating prevails at higher plasma densities. The most probable kinetic energy of the Pd ions produced by 1064 nm wavelength is also lower than that of 532 nm. The time varying plasma electron temperature and electron density are derived from the current–voltage plots of the two plasmas. For both wavelengths, the electron temperature and electron density rapidly climb to a maximum value and then gradually decline with time. However, in case of the 532 nm, the electron temperature and electron density remain consistently high throughout the laser plasma. The results are compared the available literature and discussed by considering surface reflectivity, ablation rate of the Pd target and laser plasma heating. The results presented in this work will provide more insight into the process of laser ablation and can be useful for the development of laser-plasma ion sources.

Miniaturized peptidomimetics and nano-vesiculation in endothelin types through probable nano-disk formation and structure property relationships of endothelins’ fragments

Endothelins (ETs), which are multi-functional-peptides with potential for antagonist-based-therapy in various physiological-malfunctionings, including cardiovascular, nephrological, oncologic, and diabetic conditions, may produce newer chemical entities and drug leads. The present study deals with molecular-modeling of the ETs’ sub-types, ET-I, II, and III to find the structure property-relationship (SPR) of the ETs, and individual fragments derived from the ET sub-type ET-I. The ETs peptidic tails’ amino acid (AA) sequence’s structural differences and similarities, various dissected fragments of the ET-I, and SPR comparison with the sarafotoxin-6b (SRT-6b), a structurally-related snake-venom, showed points of dissimilarities for their structural specifications, geometric disposition, and physico-chemical properties. The generation of miniaturized (shortened sequence) peptides towards offering peptidomimetic compounds of near- and far-values compared SPR with estimations for log P, hydration energy, and other molecular and quantitative structure activity relationship (QSAR) were based on random and ordered-fragments derived from the original ET-I AA’s sequence, and sequential distance changes in the original ET-I sequence’s chain of 1–21 AA. The feasibility of alternate and bond length parameters-based possible cysteine–cysteine cyclizations, sequence homology, AA’s positional demarcation, and presence/absence of cysteines, homology-based basic non-cysteine and cysteines-AA based cyclization, total structure and fragments end-to-end cyclizations, and geometrical analogy-based miniaturized sequence of the shorter AAs from the original ET-I sequence, together with mutated replacements with naturally constituent AAs of the ETs, and SRT-6 sequences were utilized. The major findings of the fragmented sequences, and sequences at par with the original ETs to provide structures similar to the size, volume and with molecular and electronic properties of electrostatic potential and total charge density distribution, crucial factors in receptor bindings were investigated. The SPRs, molecular properties, and QSAR values were estimated to compare and validate the findings with the known homologous compounds, ET-I, and its known and potent antagonists. The study resulted in leads of smaller and larger sizes of peptide-based compounds which may have prospects as potent antagonist and in future needs their bioactivity evaluations after the synthesis. Moreover, approach to plausible vesiculation of the ETs, and the involved processes and structural requirements, together with the molecular interactions in settling a nano-vesicle of the peptidic structure with a possible mechanism is also suggested.

SpookyNet: Learning force fields with electronic degrees of freedom and nonlocal effects

Machine-learned force fields combine the accuracy of ab initio methods with the efficiency of conventional force fields. However, current machine-learned force fields typically ignore electronic degrees of freedom, such as the total charge or spin state, and assume chemical locality, which is problematic when molecules have inconsistent electronic states, or when nonlocal effects play a significant role. This work introduces SpookyNet, a deep neural network for constructing machine-learned force fields with explicit treatment of electronic degrees of freedom and nonlocality, modeled via self-attention in a transformer architecture. Chemically meaningful inductive biases and analytical corrections built into the network architecture allow it to properly model physical limits. SpookyNet improves upon the current state-of-the-art (or achieves similar performance) on popular quantum chemistry data sets. Notably, it is able to generalize across chemical and conformational space and can leverage the learned chemical insights, e.g. by predicting unknown spin states, thus helping to close a further important remaining gap for today’s machine learning models in quantum chemistry.

Model of a single-electron transistor based on endohedral fullerene (Sc3N)@C80

In this work within the framework of the density functional theory and the method of nonequilibrium Green’s functions the dependences of the total energy of molecules C80-SET and (Sc3N)@C80 - SET on their total charge, the dependence of the total energy from the gate voltage and the stability diagram of the single-electron transistor have been determined. It is noted that for transition to switch to on mode (Sc3N)@C80-SET it is necessary to apply the gate voltage in the range from 0.019 ≤ VG ≤ 5.940 with the bias voltage -2.040 ≤ VSD ≤ 2.155 V. Considering that at values of bias voltage equal to –0.381 ≤ VSD ≤ 0.533 V there is no voltage on the substrate (VG = 0 V) and electric current does not flow. It is shown that the total energy at negative values of charge is higher than at positive charges and that the area of the Coulomb rhombus in fullerene with scandium nitride is 5.3 times larger than in “pure” fullerene.

Changes in the compound zeta potential of erythrocyte membranes in patients with arterial hypertension and obesity

The development of microcirculatory disorders is considered to be one of the earliest changes in the cardiovascular system with a combination of arterial hypertension (AH) and obesity. The rheological properties of blood play a significant role in the system of microcirculation. An important place in changing the rheological characteristics of blood is largely assigned to erythrocytes. Aggregation of erythrocytes is closely related to the magnitude of the surface-bound charge of their membranes or zeta potential of erythrocyte membranes. Purpose. To study the state of compound zeta potential of erythrocyte membranes in patients with hypertension and obesity. Material and methods. The study included 112 patients with AH and Index of Mass Corporal more than 30 kg/m2 (main group); the control group consisted of 25 people without AH and obesity. All patients of the main group received standard antihypertensive, lipid-lowering and hypoglycemic therapy to achieve the target levels of the indices under correction. Results. The level of compound zeta potential of erythrocyte membranes in patients with AH and obesity was significantly lower than in the control group and amounted to 1.57 ± 0.06 × 107 and 1.67 ± 0.03 × 107, respectively (p < 0.05). At the same time, in patients of the main group with an increase in AH, lower indices were noted. In patients with AH and obesity, a significant inverse correlation was found between the compound zeta potential of erythrocyte membranes and the degree of hypertension, which indicates a negative effect of hypertension on the rheological properties of blood at the microvasculature level. A correlation analysis was carried out to evaluate the association between Index of Mass Corporal and zeta potential of erythrocyte membranes in obese hypertensive patients. A negative direct correlation was revealed (r = 0.7, p < 0.05). Conclusion: a decrease in the total charge of erythrocytes can be considered as an early sign of microrheological disorders in patients with a controlled course of arterial hypertension and obesity.