Association between Biomarkers of Inflammation and Delirium in Critically Ill Patients with COVID-19.

Background: Critical illness with COVID-19 is associated with increased delirium duration and severity, and delirium is associated with poor health outcomes. The pathophysiology of delirium in this population is not well understood but neuroinflammation is hypothesized to play a key role. Objective: To evaluate the relationship between biomarkers of systemic inflammation and delirium in critically ill patients with COVID-19. Design: Observational retrospective data extraction study from March 1, 2020 – June 7, 2020. Biomarker levels and delirium occurrence were assessed up to the first 14 days in the intensive care unit (ICU). Setting: Two large, urban, academic referral hospitals in Indianapolis, IN Patients: Two hundred thirty-five patients admitted to the ICU with a positive SARS-Co-V2 PCR test Methods and Main Results: A total of 235 consecutive patients admitted to the ICU were included in the analysis. The cohort had a mean age of 58.6 years (SD: 15.4), 43.4% were female, 45.9% were African American, with median Acute Physiology and Chronic Evaluation-II score of 18.0 (IQR: 13.0 -15.0). Delirium occurred in 176 (79.1%). Increased levels of C-Reactive Protein (CRP) were associated with increased odds of delirium and coma (OR: 1.27, 95% CI: 1.08, 1.49, p=0.004). Increased levels of D-dimer were not associated with increased odds of delirium/coma (OR: 0.94, 95% CI 0.76, 1.16, p=0.574). Increased levels of ferritin (OR: 1.04, 95% CI 0.84, 1.29, p=0.717) and lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) were also not associated with increased odds of delirium/coma (OR: 0.86, 95% CI 0.70, 1.06, p=0.149). Elevated levels of creatine kinase (CK) levels were associated with lower odds of delirium/coma (OR: 0.71 95% CI 0.52, 0.97, p=0.033). Conclusion: Increased levels of biomarkers of inflammation and thrombosis were associated with greater odds of delirium and coma. Further studies are needed to validate these results in a larger population. “This project was funded, in part, with support from the NIH NHLBI Short-Term Training Program in Biomedical Sciences Grantfunded, in part by T35HL110854 from the National Institutes of Health. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.”

Attribute Extraction Study in the Field of Military Equipment Based on Distant Supervision

The effective organization and utilization of military equipment data is an important cornerstone for constructing knowledge system. Building a knowledge graph in the field of military equipment can effectively describe the relationship between entity and entity attribute information. Therefore, relevant personnel can obtain information quickly and accurately. Attribute extraction is an important part of building the knowledge graph. Given the lack of annotated data in the field of military equipment, we propose a new data annotation method, which adopts the idea of distant supervision to automatically build the attribute extraction dataset. We convert the attribute extraction task into a sequence annotation task. At the same time, we propose a RoBERTa-BiLSTM-CRF-SEL-based attribute extraction method. Firstly, a list of attribute name synonyms is constructed, then a corpus of military equipment attributes is obtained through automatic annotation of semistructured data in Baidu Encyclopedia. RoBERTa is used to obtain the vector encoding of the text. Then, input it into the entity boundary prediction layer to label the entity head and tail, and input the BiLSTM-CRF layer to predict the attribute label. The experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively perform attribute extraction in the military equipment domain. The F 1 value of the model reaches 77% on the constructed attribute extraction dataset, which outperforms the current state-of-art model.

Pressurized Liquid Extraction of Hemp Residue and Purification of the Extract with Liquid-Liquid Extraction

The first semi-continuous Pressurized Liquid Extraction (PLE) of hemp threshing residue with ethanol was carried out according to a 32 full factorial experimental design with pressure and temperature as independent variables at 8-10-12 MPa and 323-333-343 K, respectively. The total- and cannabidiol (CBD) yield curves were fitted to the modified two-parameter Brunner equation. Best results, concerning CBD, can be achieved at 12 MPa and 343 K. Solvent mass-consumption and operation time were considerably decreased compared to a previous supercritical fluid extraction study on the same material. Furthermore, the concentration profiles were evaluated to study the mass transfer. The winterized dry extracts were further studied in a methanol-hexane-water ternary system concerning CBD distribution ratio, showing high methanol dependency.

Study on the Effect of Dual Solvent Proportions on Composition of Rosa x damascena Concrete Oil Obtained using Soxhlet Extraction Method

Concrete oil was extracted from Rosa x damascena using different percentage ratios of solvents (petroleum ether and ethanol) by the Soxhlet extraction method. The extraction was carried out using petroleum ether and ethanol in five different percentage ratios of (v/v) (100:0, 75:25, 50:50, 25:75, 0:100) (petroleum ether:ethanol). The rotary vacuum evaporator was used to separate concrete oil and the solvents. The extracted concrete oil was analyzed using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) technique. The obtained results show that many new compounds were identified, at two different solvents and its ratios. Phenylethyl alcohol in the percentages of (61.71%), (10.07%) and (25.92%) was obtained as a major compound with the solvent percentages of (100:0), (50:50) and (75:25) (PE:E), respectively. Hexacosane (37.2%) was identified as a major compound when pure ethanol is used as a solvent. The highest number of components were identified (totally 93 components) when an equal percentage (50:50) of petroleum ether and ethanol were mixed. The usual monoterpenes components, e.g. geraniol, nerol, citronellol and linalool, were not found in the present extraction study. This study concludes that the compositions of concrete oil were mainly influenced by the type of solvents and its ratios used for the extraction