The economic burden of cervical cancer from diagnosis to one year after final discharge in Henan Province, China: A retrospective case series study.

BACKGROUND: In China, the disease burden of cervical cancer remains substantial. Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines are expensive and not yet centrally funded. To inform immunization policy, understanding the economic burden of the disease is necessary. This study adopted a societal perspective and investigated costs and quality of life changes associated with cervical cancer from diagnosis to one year after final discharge in Henan province, China. METHODS: Inpatient records of cervical cancer patients admitted to the largest cancer hospital in Henan province between Jan. 2017 and Dec. 2018 were extracted. A telephone interview with four modules was conducted in Jun.-Jul. 2019 with a 40% random draw of patients to obtain direct non-medical costs and indirect costs associated with inpatients, costs associated with outpatient visits, and changes in quality of life status using the EQ-5D-5L instrument. Direct medical expenditures were converted to opportunity costs of care using cost-to-charge ratios obtained from hospital financial reports. For each clinical stage (IA-IV), total costs per case from diagnosis to one year after final discharge were extrapolated based on inpatient records, responses to the telephone interview, and recommendation on outpatient follow-ups by Chinese cervical cancer treatment guidelines. Loss in quality-adjusted life years was obtained using the 'under the curve' method and regression predictions. RESULTS: A total of 3,506 inpatient records from 1,323 patients were obtained. Among 541 randomly selected patients, 309 completed at least one module of the telephone interview. The average total costs per case associated with cervical cancer from diagnosis to one year after final discharge ranged from $8,066-$22,888 (in 2018 US Dollar) and the quality-adjusted life years loss varied from 0.05-0.26 for IA-IV patients. CONCLUSIONS: The economic burden associated with cervical cancer is substantial in Henan province. Our study provided important baseline information for cost-effectiveness analysis of HPV immunization program in China

Enhance the Visual Representation via Discrete Adversarial Training

Adversarial Training (AT), which is commonly accepted as one of the most effective approaches defending against adversarial examples, can largely harm the standard performance, thus has limited usefulness on industrial-scale production and applications. Surprisingly, this phenomenon is totally opposite in Natural Language Processing (NLP) task, where AT can even benefit for generalization. We notice the merit of AT in NLP tasks could derive from the discrete and symbolic input space. For borrowing the advantage from NLP-style AT, we propose Discrete Adversarial Training (DAT). DAT leverages VQGAN to reform the image data to discrete text-like inputs, i.e. visual words. Then it minimizes the maximal risk on such discrete images with symbolic adversarial perturbations. We further give an explanation from the perspective of distribution to demonstrate the effectiveness of DAT. As a plug-and-play technique for enhancing the visual representation, DAT achieves significant improvement on multiple tasks including image classification, object detection and self-supervised learning. Especially, the model pre-trained with Masked Auto-Encoding (MAE) and fine-tuned by our DAT without extra data can get 31.40 mCE on ImageNet-C and 32.77% top-1 accuracy on Stylized-ImageNet, building the new state-of-the-art. The code will be available at https://github.com/alibaba/easyrobust.Comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 2022, https://github.com/alibaba/easyrobus

Characterization of low-gain silicon sensors for high temporal resolution applications

El HL-LHC ((High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider) es una actualización planificada del LHC (Large Hadron Collider) con el objetivo de aumentar aún más la luminosidad (la cantidad de colisiones de partículas que ocurren en un cierto periodo de tiempo) del LHC, para hacer frente a esta actualización, se requiere desarrollar una serie de tecnologías innovadoras. En el experimento de CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid), se ha desarrollado un nuevo sistema de detectores con alta resolución temporal, conocido como Minimum Ionizing Particle Timing Detector (MTD). En este trabajo, se llevó a cabo una caracterización eléctrica de uno de los componentes principales del MTD, conocido como Low Gain Avalanche Detector (LGAD). El objetivo fue comprender sus propiedades y comportamiento eléctrico, así como determinar sus puntos de trabajo para su posterior aplicación en experimentos de CMS. Para lograr esto, se realizaron mediciones de las relaciones corriente-voltaje (I-V) y capacitancia-voltaje (C-V) de estos sensores. Esto permitió determinar parámetros clave como el voltaje de la capa de ganancia, la capacitancia final y el voltaje de ruptura. Además, se llevó a cabo una investigación sobre el efecto de la irradiación en los sensores LGAD, revelando una variación significativa en su comportamiento eléctrico en función de los niveles de radiación.The HL-LHC (High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider) is a planned upgrade to the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) aimed at further increasing the luminosity (the number of particle collisions occurring within a certain period of time) of the LHC. Achieving this improvement requires the development of a series of innovative technologies. In the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment, a new detector system with high temporal resolution has been developed, known as the Minimum Ionizing Particle Timing Detector (MTD). In this study, an electrical characterization of one of the main components of the MTD, called the Low Gain Avalanche Detector (LGAD), was conducted. The goal was to comprehend its properties and electrical behavior, as well as to determine its operational parameters for subsequent application in CMS experiments. To achieve this, measurements were carried out on the current-voltage (I-V) and capacitance-voltage (C-V) relationships of these sensors. This allowed for the determination of key parameters such as the gain layer voltage, final capacitance, and breakdown voltage. Furthermore, an investigation into the irradiation effect on LGAD sensors was conducted, revealing a significant variation in their electrical behavior based on radiation levels.Grado en Físic