Early prediction of COVID-19 outcome using artificial intelligence techniques and only five laboratory indices

We aimed to develop a prediction model for intensive care unit (ICU) hospitalization of Coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) patients using artificial neural networks (ANN). We assessed 25 laboratory parameters at first from 248 consecutive adult COVID-19 patients for database creation, training, and development of ANN models. We developed a new alpha-index to assess association of each parameter with outcome. We used 166 records for training of computational simulations (training), 41 for documentation of computational simulations (validation), and 41 for reliability check of computational simulations (testing). The first five laboratory indices ranked by importance were Neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio, Lactate Dehydrogenase, Fibrinogen, Albumin, and D-Dimers. The best ANN based on these indices achieved accuracy 95.97%, precision 90.63%, sensitivity 93.55%. and F1-score 92.06%, verified in the validation cohort. Our preliminary findings reveal for the first time an ANN to predict ICU hospitalization accurately and early, using only 5 easily accessible laboratory indices

Elemental Depth Profiling of Intact Metal-Organic Framework Single Crystals by Scanning Nuclear Microprobe

The growing field of MOF-catalyst composites often relies on postsynthetic modifications for the installation of active sites. In the resulting MOFs, the spatial distribution of the inserted catalysts has far-reaching ramifications for the performance of the system and thus needs to be precisely determined. Herein, we report the application of a scanning nuclear microprobe for accurate and nondestructive depth profiling of individual UiO-66 and UiO-67 (UiO = Universitetet i Oslo) single crystals. Initial optimization work using native UiO-66 crystals yielded a microbeam method which avoided beam damage,y while subsequent analysis of Zr/Hf mixed-metal UiO-66 crystals demonstrated the potential of the method to obtain high-resolution depth profiles. The microbeam method was further used to analyze the depth distribution of postsynthetically introduced organic moieties, revealing either core-shell or uniform incorporation can be obtained depending on the size of the introduced molecule, as well as the number of carboxylate binding groups. Finally, the spatial distribution of platinum centers that were postsynthetically installed in the bpy binding pockets of UiO-67-bpy (bpy = 5,5'dicarboxyy-2,2'-bipyridine) was analyzed by microbeam and contextualized. We expect that the method presented herein will be applicable for characterizing a wide variety of MOFs subjected to postsynthetic modifications and provide information crucial for their optimization as functional materials

Electronic stopping of slow protons in oxides: Scaling properties

Electronic stopping of slow protons in ZnO, VO2 (metal and semiconductor phases), HfO2, and Ta2O5 was investigated experimentally. As a comparison of the resulting stopping cross sections (SCS) to data for Al2O3 and SiO2 reveals, electronic stopping of slow protons does not correlate with electronic properties of the specific material such as band gap energies. Instead, the oxygen 2p states are decisive, as corroborated by density functional theory calculations of the electronic densities of states. Hence, at low ion velocities the SCS of an oxide primarily scales with its oxygen density.Financial support of this work by the FWF (FWF-Project No. P22587-N20 and FWF-Project No. P25704-N20) is gratefully acknowledged. M. A. and J. I. J. acknowledge financial support by the Gobierno Vasco-UPV/EHU Project No. IT756-13, and the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (Grants No. FIS2013-48286-C02-02-P and FIS2016-76471-P). Fabrication and characterization of VO2 films at Vanderbilt University (CMG and RFH) was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (DMR-1207507). A research infrastructure fellowship of the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research (SSF) under Contract No. RIF14-0053 supporting accelerator operation is acknowledged.Peer Reviewe