Health care utilization following “digi-physical” assessment compared to physical assessment for infectious symptoms in primary care

Background The use of chat-based digital visits (eVisits) to assess infectious symptoms in primary care is rapidly increasing. The “digi-physical” model of care uses eVisits as the first line of assessment while assuming a certain proportion of patients will inevitably need to be further assessed through urgent physical examination within 48 h. It is unclear to what extent this approach can mitigate physical visits compared to assessing patients directly using office visits. Methods This pre-COVID-19-pandemic observational study followed up “digi-physical” eVisit patients (n = 1188) compared to office visit patients (n = 599) with respiratory or urinary symptoms. Index visits occurred between March 30th 2016 and March 29th 2019. The primary outcome was subsequent physical visits to physicians within two weeks using registry data from Skåne county, Sweden (Region Skånes Vårddatabas, RSVD). Results No significant differences in subsequent physical visits within two weeks (excluding the first 48 h) were noted following “digi-physical” care compared to office visits (179 (18.0%) vs. 102 (17.6%), P = .854). As part of the “digital-physical” concept, a significantly larger proportion of eVisit patients had a physical visit within 48 h compared to corresponding office visit patients (191 (16.1%) vs. 19 (3.2%), P < .001), with 150 (78.5%) of these eVisit patients recommended some form of follow-up by the eVisit physician. Conclusions Most eVisit patients (68.9%) with respiratory and urinary symptoms have no subsequent physical visits. Beyond an unavoidable portion of patients requiring urgent physical examination within 48 h, “digi-physical” management of respiratory and urinary symptoms results in comparable subsequent health care utilization compared to office visits. eVisit providers may need to optimize use of resources to minimize the proportion of patients being assessed both digitally and physically within 48 h as part of the “digi-physical” concept. Trial registration Clinicaltrials.gov identifier: NCT03474887.

Review of light field technologies

Light fields are vector functions that map the geometry of light rays to the corresponding plenoptic attributes. They describe the holographic information of scenes by representing the amount of light flowing in every direction through every point in space. The physical concept of light fields was first proposed in 1936, and light fields are becoming increasingly important in the field of computer graphics, especially with the fast growth of computing capacity as well as network bandwidth. In this article, light field imaging is reviewed from the following aspects with an emphasis on the achievements of the past five years: (1) depth estimation, (2) content editing, (3) image quality, (4) scene reconstruction and view synthesis, and (5) industrial products because the technologies of lights fields also intersect with industrial applications. State-of-the-art research has focused on light field acquisition, manipulation, and display. In addition, the research has extended from the laboratory to industry. According to these achievements and challenges, in the near future, the applications of light fields could offer more portability, accessibility, compatibility, and ability to visualize the world.

Superconducting insulators and localization of Cooper pairs

Rapid miniaturization of electronic devices and circuits demands profound understanding of fluctuation phenomena at the nanoscale. Superconducting nanowires – serving as important building blocks for such devices – may seriously suffer from fluctuations which tend to destroy long-range order and suppress superconductivity. In particular, quantum phase slips (QPS) proliferating at low temperatures may turn a quasi-one-dimensional superconductor into a resistor or an insulator. Here, we introduce a physical concept of QPS-controlled localization of Cooper pairs that may occur even in uniform nanowires without any dielectric barriers being a fundamental manifestation of the flux-charge duality in superconductors. We demonstrate – both experimentally and theoretically – that deep in the “insulating” state such nanowires actually exhibit non-trivial superposition of superconductivity and weak Coulomb blockade of Cooper pairs generated by quantum tunneling of magnetic fluxons across the wire.