Adaptive Guideline-based Treatment Workflows with AdaptFlow

One goal in modern medicine is to increase the treatment quality. A major step towards this aim is to support the execution of standardized, guideline-based clinical protocols, which are used in many medical domains, e.g., for oncological chemotherapies. Standardized chemotherapy protocols contain detailed and structured therapy plans describing the single therapy steps (e.g., examinations or drug applications). Therefore, workflow management systems offer good support for these processes. However, the treatment of a particular patient often requires modifications due to unexpected infections, toxicities, or social factors. The modifications are described in the treatment protocol but not as part of the standard process. To be able to further execute the therapy workflows in case of exceptions running workflows have to be adapted dynamically. Furthermore, the physician should be supported by automated exception detection and decision support for derivation of necessary modifications. The AdaptFlow prototype offers the required support for the field of oncological chemotherapies by enhancing a workflow system with dynamic workflow adaptation and rule based decision support for exception detection and handling

Donor deferral rates after the implementation of a new German blood donor questionnaire

Background: The implementation of a new national German blood donor questionnaire was proposed to improve donor and recipient safety. Methods: We compared deferral/exclusion rates of whole blood donors before (May 2010, n = 64,735) and after (May 2011, n = 71,687) the implementation of a new blood donor questionnaire. Considering seasonal variations, analysis was performed with respect to collection site (mobile vs. fixed), sex, donor status (first-time vs. repeat), age, and the frequencies of sexual risk behavior and other reasons for deferral. Results: We observed a statistically significant increase (p < 0.001) of the overall deferral/exclusion rate from 6.2 to 8.1%, irrespective of type of collection site (fixed: from 6.0 to 8.5%; mobile: from 6.2 to 8.0%), sex (females: from 7.5 to 9.9%; males: from 5.1 to 6.6%), donor status (first-time donors: from 19.7 to 24.7%; repeat donors: from 4.6 to 6.3%) or age (18–29 years: from 9.1 to 11.7%; 60–71 years: from 5.1 to 6.6%). Confidential self-exclusion increased from 0.08 to 0.14% (p < 0.001). Besides risk behavior, various medical reasons could be identified that explain this increase. Conclusions: The new blood donor questionnaire resulted in an increased deferral/exclusion of all donor groups. Thus the impact on future blood supply must be considered carefully, and long-term studies and investigation of donor acceptance will be needed

Characterizing quantum instruments: from non-demolition measurements to quantum error correction

In quantum information processing quantum operations are often processed alongside measurements which result in classical data. Due to the information gain of classical measurement outputs non-unitary dynamical processes can take place on the system, for which common quantum channel descriptions fail to describe the time evolution. Quantum measurements are correctly treated by means of so-called quantum instruments capturing both classical outputs and post-measurement quantum states. Here we present a general recipe to characterize quantum instruments alongside its experimental implementation and analysis. Thereby, the full dynamics of a quantum instrument can be captured, exhibiting details of the quantum dynamics that would be overlooked with common tomography techniques. For illustration, we apply our characterization technique to a quantum instrument used for the detection of qubit loss and leakage, which was recently implemented as a building block in a quantum error correction (QEC) experiment (Nature 585, 207-210 (2020)). Our analysis reveals unexpected and in-depth information about the failure modes of the implementation of the quantum instrument. We then numerically study the implications of these experimental failure modes on QEC performance, when the instrument is employed as a building block in QEC protocols on a logical qubit. Our results highlight the importance of careful characterization and modelling of failure modes in quantum instruments, as compared to simplistic hardware-agnostic phenomenological noise models, which fail to predict the undesired behavior of faulty quantum instruments. The presented methods and results are directly applicable to generic quantum instruments.Comment: 28 pages, 21 figure

Widespread disruption of host transcription termination in HSV-1 infection.

Herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1) is an important human pathogen and a paradigm for virus-induced host shut-off. Here we show that global changes in transcription and RNA processing and their impact on translation can be analysed in a single experimental setting by applying 4sU-tagging of newly transcribed RNA and ribosome profiling to lytic HSV-1 infection. Unexpectedly, we find that HSV-1 triggers the disruption of transcription termination of cellular, but not viral, genes. This results in extensive transcription for tens of thousands of nucleotides beyond poly(A) sites and into downstream genes, leading to novel intergenic splicing between exons of neighbouring cellular genes. As a consequence, hundreds of cellular genes seem to be transcriptionally induced but are not translated. In contrast to previous reports, we show that HSV-1 does not inhibit co-transcriptional splicing. Our approach thus substantially advances our understanding of HSV-1 biology and establishes HSV-1 as a model system for studying transcription termination.This work was supported by MRC Fellowship grant G1002523 and NHSBT grant WP11-05 to LD, and DFG grant FR2938/1–2 to C.C.F. We thank Viv Connor for excellent technical assistance and Professor Rozanne Sandri-Goldin (University of California) for the ΔICP27 mutant and complementing cell line. The support of the Cluster of Excellence (Nucleotide lab) to P.R. is acknowledged.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from NPG via http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms812

RF-Separated Beam Project for the M2 Beam Line at CERN

Within the framework of the Physics Beyond Colliders initiative at CERN, discussions are underway on the feasibility of producing radio-frequency (RF) separated beams for Phase-2 of the AMBER experiment at the M2 beam line in the North experimental area of the CERN SPS. The technique of RF separation is applied to enrich the content of a certain particle type within a beam consisting of different species at the same momentum. It relies on the fact that each particle type has a different velocity, decreasing with rest mass. The successor of the COMPASS experiment, AMBER, requires for its Phase-2 measurements high-intensity, high-purity kaon (and antiproton) beams, which cannot be delivered with the currently existing conventional M2 beam line. The present contribution introduces the principle of RF separation and explains its dependence on different parameters of beam optics and hardware. The first examination of potential showstoppers for the RF-separated beam implementation is presented, based on the particle production rates, beam line transmission for specific optics settings, limitations for overall beam intensity and purity posed by beam line acceptance and radiation protection. Different beam optics settings have been examined, providing either focused or parallel beams inside the RF cavities. The separation and transmission capability of the different optics settings for realistic characteristics of RF cavities are discussed and the preliminary results of the potential purity and intensity of the RF-separated beam are presented. They illustrate the high importance of an RF-separated kaon beam for many of the AMBER Phase-2 data taking programs, such as spectroscopy, prompt-photon production, Primakoff reactions and kaon charge-radius measurement

Rezensionen

Rezension zu: 1) Steffi Robak: Kulturelle Formationen des Lernens: zum Lernen deutscher Expatriates in kulturdifferenten Arbeitskontexten in China - die versäumte Weiterbildung. Münster: Waxmann 2012. ISBN 978-3-8309-2756-3. 2) Regina Egetenmeyer, Ingeborg Schüßler (Hg.): Akademische Professionalisierung in der Erwachsenenbildung/Weiterbildung Baltmannsweiler: Schneider Verl. Hohengehren 2012. ISBN 978-3-8340-1029-2. 3) Stephen Frank: eLearning und Kompetenzentwicklung: ein unterrichtsorientiertes didaktisches Modell. Bad Heilbrunn: Klinkhardt 2012. ISBN 978-3-7815-1861-2. 4) Werner Lenz: Bildung - eine Streitschrift. Abschied vom lebenslänglichen Lernen. Wien: Locker 2012. ISBN 978-3-85409-606-1. 5) Horst Rippien: Bildungsdienstleistung eLearning: didaktisches Handeln von Organisationen in der Weiterbildung. Wiesbaden: VS Verl. f. Sozialwiss. 2012. ISBN 978-3-531-18704-4. 6) Renate Luise Werner: Bildung im Alter - Überlegungen zur Allgemeinbildung im demografischen Wandel. Hamburg: Kovac 2012. ISBN 978-3-8300-6163-2

Experimental quantification of spatial correlations in quantum dynamics

Correlations between different partitions of quantum systems play a central role in a variety of many-body quantum systems, and they have been studied exhaustively in experimental and theoretical research. Here, we investigate dynamical correlations in the time evolution of multiple parts of a composite quantum system. A rigorous measure to quantify correlations in quantum dynamics based on a full tomographic reconstruction of the quantum process has been introduced recently [Á. Rivas et al., New Journal of Physics, 17(6) 062001 (2015).]. In this work, we derive a lower bound for this correlation measure, which does not require full knowledge of the quantum dynamics. Furthermore we also extend the correlation measure to multipartite systems. We directly apply the developed methods to a trapped ion quantum information processor to experimentally characterize the correlations in quantum dynamics for two- and four-qubit systems. The method proposed and demonstrated in this work is scalable, platform-independent and applicable to other composite quantum systems and quantum information processing architectures. We apply the method to estimate spatial correlations in environmental noise processes, which are crucial for the performance of quantum error correction procedures