Admission Blood Pressure in Relation to Clinical Outcomes and Successful Reperfusion After Endovascular Stroke Treatment

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Optimal blood pressure (BP) targets before endovascular treatment (EVT) for acute ischemic stroke are unknown. We aimed to assess the relation between admission BP and clinical outcomes and successful reperfusion after EVT. METHODS: We used data from the MR CLEAN (Multicenter Randomized Controlled Trial of Endovascular Treatment for Acute Ischemic Stroke in the Netherlands) Registry, an observational, prospective, nationwide cohort study of patients with ischemic stroke treated with EVT in routine clinical practice in the Netherlands. Baseline systolic BP (SBP) and diastolic BP (DBP) were recorded on admission. The primary outcome was the score on the modified Rankin Scale at 90 days. Secondary outcomes included successful reperfusion (extended Thrombolysis in Cerebral Infarction score 2B-3), symptomatic intracranial hemorrhage, and 90-day mortality. Multivariable logistic and linear regression were used to assess the associations of SBP and DBP with outcomes. The relations between BPs and outcomes were tested for nonlinearity. Parameter estimates were calculated per 10 mm Hg increase or decrease in BP. RESULTS: We included 3180 patients treated with EVT between March 2014 and November 2017. The relations between admission SBP and DBP with 90-day modified Rankin Scale scores and mortality were J-shaped, with inflection points around 150 and 81 mm Hg, respectively. An increase in SBP above 150 mm Hg was associated with poor functional outcome (adjusted common odds ratio, 1.09 [95% CI, 1.04-1.15]) and mortality at 90 days (adjusted odds ratio, 1.09 [95% CI, 1.03-1.16]). Following linear relationships, higher SBP was associated with a lower probability of successful reperfusion (adjusted odds ratio, 0.97 [95% CI, 0.94-0.99]) and with the occurrence of symptomatic intracranial hemorrhage (adjusted odds ratio, 1.06 [95% CI, 0.99-1.13]). Results for DBP were largely similar. CONCLUSIONS: In patients with acute ischemic stroke treated with EVT, higher admission BP is associated with lower probability of successful reperfusion and with poor clinical outcomes. Further research is needed to investigate whether these patients benefit from BP reduction before EVT

The performance of the jet trigger for the ATLAS detector during 2011 data taking

The performance of the jet trigger for the ATLAS detector at the LHC during the 2011 data taking period is described. During 2011 the LHC provided proton–proton collisions with a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV and heavy ion collisions with a 2.76 TeV per nucleon–nucleon collision energy. The ATLAS trigger is a three level system designed to reduce the rate of events from the 40 MHz nominal maximum bunch crossing rate to the approximate 400 Hz which can be written to offline storage. The ATLAS jet trigger is the primary means for the online selection of events containing jets. Events are accepted by the trigger if they contain one or more jets above some transverse energy threshold. During 2011 data taking the jet trigger was fully efficient for jets with transverse energy above 25 GeV for triggers seeded randomly at Level 1. For triggers which require a jet to be identified at each of the three trigger levels, full efficiency is reached for offline jets with transverse energy above 60 GeV. Jets reconstructed in the final trigger level and corresponding to offline jets with transverse energy greater than 60 GeV, are reconstructed with a resolution in transverse energy with respect to offline jets, of better than 4 % in the central region and better than 2.5 % in the forward direction

Software performance of the ATLAS track reconstruction for LHC run 3

Charged particle reconstruction in the presence of many simultaneous proton–proton (pp) collisions in the LHC is a challenging task for the ATLAS experiment’s reconstruction software due to the combinatorial complexity. This paper describes the major changes made to adapt the software to reconstruct high-activity collisions with an average of 50 or more simultaneous pp interactions per bunch crossing (pileup) promptly using the available computing resources. The performance of the key components of the track reconstruction chain and its dependence on pile-up are evaluated, and the improvement achieved compared to the previous software version is quantified. For events with an average of 60 pp collisions per bunch crossing, the updated track reconstruction is twice as fast as the previous version, without significant reduction in reconstruction efficiency and while reducing the rate of combinatorial fake tracks by more than a factor two

Search for long-lived neutral particles in pp collisions at s√=13 TeV that decay into displaced hadronic jets in the ATLAS calorimeter

This paper describes a search for pairs of neutral, long-lived particles decaying in the ATLAS calorimeter. Long-lived particles occur in many extensions to the Standard Model and may elude searches for new promptly decaying particles. The analysis considers neutral, long-lived scalars with masses between 5 and 400 GeV, produced from decays of heavy bosons with masses between 125 and 1000 GeV, where the long-lived scalars decay into Standard Model fermions. The analysis uses either 10.8 fb−1 or 33.0 fb−1 of data (depending on the trigger) recorded in 2016 at the LHC with the ATLAS detector in proton–proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. No significant excess is observed, and limits are reported on the production cross section times branching ratio as a function of the proper decay length of the long-lived particles