Financial incentives to improve organ donation: what is the opinion of the Vaud French-speaking population?

BACKGROUND: With the increase of the organ shortage, several authors assume that financial incentives would improve organ donation rates and fill the unbalance between the demand and the organs available for transplant medicine. This line of argument has been criticised with people arguing that an exchange of money for organs would violate the legal and the ethical principle of gratuity, decrease voluntarism and increase the body parts commodification phenomena. PURPOSE: Switzerland is often highlighted as having under-average organ donation rates compared to other European countries. In this paper we investigate the opinions of the Vaud French-speaking population concerning direct, indirect and non financial incentives in order to assess their opinions and anticipate the further debate. METHODS: As part of a broad survey about the organ donation decision-making process, questions about incentives for both living and deceased organ donation were addressed to Vaud inhabitants and physicians. RESULTS: The data collected showed that respondents were opposed to rewarding both living and deceased organ donation. The analysis of positive answers showed that indirect and non financial incentives were the most likely choice to acknowledge the donor’s act. People in critical financial situations preferred direct financial incentives. CONCLUSIONS: These results showed that altruism and gratuity were key-values in the organ donation and transplantation social perceptions of the respondents. Thus, we assume that introducing financial incentives could tarnish the image of transplant medicine. Nevertheless, further studies are needed to evaluate if their introduction would improve the organ donation rates or decrease voluntarism

Electrical Characterization of a Thin Edgeless N-on-p Planar Pixel Sensors For ATLAS Upgrades

In view of the LHC upgrade phases towards the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC), the ATLAS experiment plans to upgrade the Inner Detector with an all-silicon system. Because of its radiation hardness and cost effectiveness, the n-on-p silicon technology is a promising candidate for a large area pixel detector. The paper reports on the joint development, by LPNHE and FBK of novel n-on-p edgeless planar pixel sensors, making use of the active trench concept for the reduction of the dead area at the periphery of the device. After discussing the sensor technology, and presenting some sensors' simulation results, a complete overview of the electrical characterization of the produced devices will be given.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figures, to appear in the proceedings of the 15th International Workshops on Radiation Imaging Detector

Development of Edgeless n-on-p Planar Pixel Sensors for future ATLAS Upgrades

The development of n-on-p "edgeless" planar pixel sensors being fabricated at FBK (Trento, Italy), aimed at the upgrade of the ATLAS Inner Detector for the High Luminosity phase of the Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC), is reported. A characterizing feature of the devices is the reduced dead area at the edge, achieved by adopting the "active edge" technology, based on a deep etched trench, suitably doped to make an ohmic contact to the substrate. The project is presented, along with the active edge process, the sensor design for this first n-on-p production and a selection of simulation results, including the expected charge collection efficiency after radiation fluence of $1 \times 10^{15} {\rm n_{eq}}/{\rm cm}^2$ comparable to those expected at HL-LHC (about ten years of running, with an integrated luminosity of 3000 fb$^{-1}$) for the outer pixel layers. We show that, after irradiation and at a bias voltage of 500 V, more than 50% of the signal should be collected in the edge region; this confirms the validity of the active edge approach.Comment: 20 pages, 9 figures, submitted to Nucl. Instr. and Meth.

Novel Silicon n-on-p Edgeless Planar Pixel Sensors for the ATLAS upgrade

In view of the LHC upgrade phases towards HL-LHC, the ATLAS experiment plans to upgrade the Inner Detector with an all-silicon system. The n-on-p silicon technology is a promising candidate for the pixel upgrade thanks to its radiation hardness and cost effectiveness, that allow for enlarging the area instrumented with pixel detectors. We report on the development of novel n-in-p edgeless planar pixel sensors fabricated at FBK (Trento, Italy), making use of the "active edge" concept for the reduction of the dead area at the periphery of the device. After discussing the sensor technology and fabrication process, we present device simulations (pre- and post-irradiation) performed for different sensor configurations. First preliminary results obtained with the test-structures of the production are shown.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, to appear in the proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Radiation Effects on Semiconductor Materials Detectors and Device

Performance of Irradiated Thin Edgeless N-on-P Planar Pixel Sensors for ATLAS Upgrades

In view of the LHC upgrade phases towards the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC), the ATLAS experiment plans to upgrade the Inner Detector with an all-silicon system. Because of its radiation hardness and cost effectiveness, the n-on-p silicon technology is a promising candidate for a large area pixel detector. The paper reports on the joint development, by LPNHE and FBK of novel n-on-p edgeless planar pixel sensors, making use of the active trench concept for the reduction of the dead area at the periphery of the device. After discussing the sensor technology, a complete overview of the electrical characterization of several irradiated samples will be discussed. Some comments about detector modules being assembled will be made and eventually some plans will be outlined.Comment: 6 pages, 13 figures, to appear in the proceedings of the 2013 Nuclear Science Symposium and Medical Imaging Conference. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1311.162

Measurement of the Charge Collection Efficiency after Heavy Non-Uniform Irradiation in BaBar Silicon Detectors

We have investigated the depletion voltage changes, the leakage current increase and the charge collection efficiency of a silicon microstrip detector identical to those used in the inner layers of the BaBar Silicon Vertex Tracker (SVT) after heavy non-uniform irradiation. A full SVT module with the front-end electronics connected has been irradiated with a 0.9 GeV electron beam up to a peak fluence of 3.5 x 10^14 e^-/cm^2, well beyond the level causing substrate type inversion. We irradiated one of the two sensors composing the module with a non-uniform profile with sigma=1.4 mm that simulates the conditions encountered in the BaBar experiment by the modules intersecting the horizontal machine plane. The position dependence of the charge collection properties and the depletion voltage have been investigated in detail using a 1060 nm LED and an innovative measuring technique based only on the digital output of the chip.Comment: 7 pages, 13 figures. Presented at the 2004 IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium, October 18-21, Rome, Italy. Accepted for publication by IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Scienc