93 research outputs found
Rising C-Reactive Protein and Procalcitonin Levels Precede Early Complications After Esophagectomy
BACKGROUND: Elective esophagectomy with gastric tube reconstruction carries a high risk for complications. Early and accurate diagnosis could improve patient management. Increased C-reactive protein (CRP) levels may be associated with any, surgical or infectious, complication and procalcitonin (PCT) specifically with infectious complications. METHODS: We measured CRP and PCT on post-operative days 0, 1, 2, and 3 in 45 consecutive patients. Complications were recorded up to 10 days post-esophagectomy. RESULTS: Twenty-eight patients developed a post-operative complication (5 surgical, 14 infectious, 9 combined surgical/infectious, including anastomotic leakage), presenting on day 3 or later. Elevated days 2 and 3 and a rise in CRP preceded the diagnosis of general or combined surgical/infectious complications (minimum area under the receiver operating characteristics curve (AUROC) 0.75, P = 0.006). Elevated day 3 PCT preceded combined complications (AUROC 0.86, P < 0.001). High day 1 and 3 PCT levels preceded anastomotic leakage (minimum AUROC 0.76, P = 0.005), as did the day 3 CRP levels and their increases (minimum AUROC 0.78, P = 0.002). CONCLUSIONS: This small study suggests that high or increasing CRP levels may precede the clinical diagnosis of general or surgical/infectious complications after esophagectomy. Elevated PCT levels may more specifically and timely precede combined surgical/infectious complications mainly associated with anastomotic leakage
Technical guidelines for the management of field and in vitro germplasm collections
Plant species that are vegetatively propagated, that have long life cycles and/or produce nonorthodox seeds are traditionally maintained in field collections. Maintaining plants in the field is costly and carries high risks of loss; therefore, the strategies and procedures employed to establish and maintain field collections need to be practical, rational and economic, in addition to being scientifically sound. Experience in cost-effective management of field collections lies with individual curators and is not readily available to guide others. Further, there are increasing opportunities for using in vitro methods for the conservation of crops normally conserved in the field, and there is a need to develop strategies and procedures for managing in vitro collections as routine and integral part of the overall conservation strategy of a crop or collection
Extension to order of the high-temperature expansions for the spin-1/2 Ising model on the simple-cubic and the body-centered-cubic lattices
Using a renormalized linked-cluster-expansion method, we have extended to
order the high-temperature series for the susceptibility
and the second-moment correlation length of the spin-1/2 Ising models on
the sc and the bcc lattices. A study of these expansions yields updated direct
estimates of universal parameters, such as exponents and amplitude ratios,
which characterize the critical behavior of and . Our best
estimates for the inverse critical temperatures are
and . For the
susceptibility exponent we get and for the correlation
length exponent we get .
The ratio of the critical amplitudes of above and below the critical
temperature is estimated to be . The analogous ratio for
is estimated to be . For the correction-to-scaling
amplitude ratio we obtain .Comment: Misprints corrected, 8 pages, latex, no figure
Measuring the aspect ratio renormalization of anisotropic-lattice gluons
Using tadpole inproved actions we investigate the consistency between
different methods of measuring the aspect ratio renormalization of
anisotropic-lattice gluons for bare aspect ratios \chi_0=4,6,10 and inverse
lattice spacing in the range a_s^{-1}=660-840 MeV. The tadpole corrections to
the action, which are established self-consistently, are defined for two cases,
mean link tadpoles in Landau gauge and gauge invariant mean plaquette tadpoles.
Parameters in the latter case exhibited no dependence on the spatial lattice
size, L, while in the former, parameters showed only a weak dependence on L
easily extrapolated to L=\infty.
The renormalized anisotropy \chi_R was measured using both the torelon
dispersion relation and the sideways potential method. We found good agreement
between these different approaches. Any discrepancy was at worst 3-4% which is
consistent with the effect of lattice artifacts that for the torelon we
estimate as O(\a_Sa_s^2/R^2) where R is the flux-tube radius.
We also present some new data that suggests that rotational invariance is
established more accurately for the mean-link action than the plaquette action.Comment: LaTeX 18 pages including 7 figure
Dynamic structure factor of the Ising model with purely relaxational dynamics
We compute the dynamic structure factor for the Ising model with a purely
relaxational dynamics (model A). We perform a perturbative calculation in the
expansion, at two loops in the high-temperature phase and at one
loop in the temperature magnetic-field plane, and a Monte Carlo simulation in
the high-temperature phase. We find that the dynamic structure factor is very
well approximated by its mean-field Gaussian form up to moderately large values
of the frequency and momentum . In the region we can investigate,
, , where is the correlation
length and the zero-momentum autocorrelation time, deviations are at
most of a few percent.Comment: 21 pages, 3 figure
The Functional Renormalization Group and O(4) scaling
The critical behavior of the chiral quark-meson model is studied within the
Functional Renormalization Group (FRG). We derive the flow equation for the
scale dependent thermodynamic potential at finite temperature and density in
the presence of a symmetry-breaking external field. Within this scheme, the
critical scaling behavior of the order parameter, its transverse and
longitudinal susceptibilities as well as the correlation lengths near the
chiral phase transition are computed. We focus on the scaling properties of
these observables at non-vanishing external field when approaching the critical
point from the symmetric as well as from the broken phase. We confront our
numerical results with the Widom-Griffiths form of the magnetic equation of
state, obtained by a systematic epsilon-expansion of the scaling function. Our
results for the critical exponents are consistent with those recently computed
within Lattice Monte-Carlo studies of the O(4) spin system.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figure
The instrument suite of the European Spallation Source
An overview is provided of the 15 neutron beam instruments making up the initial instrument suite of the
European Spallation Source (ESS), and being made available to the neutron user community. The ESS neutron
source consists of a high-power accelerator and target station, providing a unique long-pulse time structure
of slow neutrons. The design considerations behind the time structure, moderator geometry and instrument
layout are presented.
The 15-instrument suite consists of two small-angle instruments, two reflectometers, an imaging beamline,
two single-crystal diffractometers; one for macromolecular crystallography and one for magnetism, two powder
diffractometers, and an engineering diffractometer, as well as an array of five inelastic instruments comprising
two chopper spectrometers, an inverse-geometry single-crystal excitations spectrometer, an instrument for vibrational
spectroscopy and a high-resolution backscattering spectrometer. The conceptual design, performance
and scientific drivers of each of these instruments are described.
All of the instruments are designed to provide breakthrough new scientific capability, not currently
available at existing facilities, building on the inherent strengths of the ESS long-pulse neutron source of high
flux, flexible resolution and large bandwidth. Each of them is predicted to provide world-leading performance
at an accelerator power of 2 MW. This technical capability translates into a very broad range of scientific
capabilities. The composition of the instrument suite has been chosen to maximise the breadth and depth
of the scientific impact o
All-sky search for long-duration gravitational wave transients with initial LIGO
We present the results of a search for long-duration gravitational wave transients in two sets of data collected by the LIGO Hanford and LIGO Livingston detectors between November 5, 2005 and September 30, 2007, and July 7, 2009 and October 20, 2010, with a total observational time of 283.0 days and 132.9 days, respectively. The search targets gravitational wave transients of duration 10-500 s in a frequency band of 40-1000 Hz, with minimal assumptions about the signal waveform, polarization, source direction, or time of occurrence. All candidate triggers were consistent with the expected background; as a result we set 90% confidence upper limits on the rate of long-duration gravitational wave transients for different types of gravitational wave signals. For signals from black hole accretion disk instabilities, we set upper limits on the source rate density between 3.4×10-5 and 9.4×10-4 Mpc-3 yr-1 at 90% confidence. These are the first results from an all-sky search for unmodeled long-duration transient gravitational waves. © 2016 American Physical Society
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