The Determinants and Subsequent Effect of Self-Rated Health Status on Survival among Elderly Americans

The main aim of this study is to explore the patterns, determinants and subsequent mortality prediction of change in self-rated health in the elderly American population. To achieve this purpose, we constructed logistic regression models and Cox proportional hazard regression models with the complex survey dataset from the National Second Longitudinal Study of Aging (LSOA II) to calculate the odds ratios (OR)/ hazard ratios (HR) and confidence intervals (CI) of risk factors. Our results show that chronic disease condition and difficulty in daily activities are the main reasons for change in self-rated health status. Furthermore, change in self-rated health has significant impact on survival function in the elderly populations. When change in self-rated health status was considered, self-rated health was a stronger and more flexible predictor of mortality for elderly populations. These findings will provide important information to establish effective strategies for prolonging lifespan by improving self-rated health status for elderly populations

Prevalence of Chronic Diseases and Risk Factors for Death among Elderly Americans

The main aim of this study is to explore the effects of risk factors contributing to death in the elderly American population. To achieve this purpose, we constructed Cox proportional hazard regression models and logistic regression models with the complex survey dataset from the national Second Longitudinal Study of Aging (LSOA II) to calculate the hazard ratios (HR)/odds ratios (OR) and confidence interval (CI) of risk factors. Our results show that in addition to chronic disease conditions, many risk factors, such as demographic factors (gender and age), social factors (interaction with friends or relatives), personal health behaviors (smoking and exercise), and biomedical factors (Body mass index and emotional factors) have significant effects on death in the elderly American population. This will provide important information for elderly people to prolong lifespan regardless of whether they have chronic disease/diseases or not

The Determinants and Subsequent Effect of Self-Rated Health Status on Survival Among Elderly Americans

PURPOSE: The main aim of this study is to explore the patterns, determinants and subsequent mortality prediction of change in self-rated health in the elderly American population. METHODS: To achieve this purpose, we constructed logistic regression models and Cox proportional hazard regression models with the complex survey dataset from the National Second Longitudinal Study of Aging (LSOA II) to calculate the odds ratios (OR)/ hazard ratios (HR) and confidence intervals (CI) of risk factors. RESULTS: Our results show that chronic disease condition and difficulty in daily activities are the main reasons for change in self-rated health status. Furthermore, change in self-rated health has significant impact on survival function in the elderly populations. When change in self-rated health status was considered, self-rated health was a stronger and more flexible predictor of mortality for elderly populations. CONCLUSIONS: These findings will provide important information to establish effective strategies for prolonging lifespan by improving self-rated health status for elderly populations

Experimental study of the Couple Characteristics of the Refrigerants and Vortex Tube

Vortex tube is a simple energy separation device, also known as Ranque tube or Hilsch tube, which can separate a high-pressure stream into two different hot and cold streams. Since its simple structure and unique temperature separation characteristics, vortex tube has been widely used in various industries. In recent years, with the in-depth study of the vortex tube, it has been found that compared with the conventional expansion expander and the throttle valve, the vortex tube is much more structurally simple and efficient, respectively. Researchers have proposed the use of the vortex tube in the refrigeration system in order to reduce the throttling loss and improve system efficiency. This has important implications for improving the performance of the system, to achieve energy saving and emission reduction. However, due to the different physical properties of the different working fluid, energy separation in the vortex tube are not the same. In the existing studies on the vortex tube, the working fluid mainly used air, nitrogen, carbon dioxide and other natural refrigerants, the research about the influence of refrigerants is few. Due to the fact that the vortex tube is increasingly used in refrigeration and heating system, it is urgent to study the coupling characteristics between vortex tube and refrigerants and find optimal conditions in different systems. The different temperature separation effect of the refrigerants in the vortex tube in the low inlet pressure(300kPa) have been studied in our previous study and three fluid characteristics (specific heat ratio, kinematic viscosity, thermal conductivity) were considered as main influencing factors of energy separation. The influence of different working fluid in high pressure conditions has not been considered ,which is part of research work in this paper. The coupling characteristic between vortex tube and refrigerants wais studied and the closed loop system was constructed. R134a, R744, R32, R227ea were selected as the working fluids, experiments were carried out in different inlet pressure(500kPa?850kPa), different inlet temperature (308.15K?333.15K), different cold flow ratio (20%?97%). The temperature separation of different working fluids under different conditions were explored and the influences of different characteristics of the working fluids on the temperature separation process were discussed. These studies can help more profound understanding of the vortex tube temperature separation process, and also has certain significance on the applications of the vortex tube in the refrigeration system

Investigations on Performance of an Auto-Cascade Absorption Refrigeration System Operating with Mixed Refrigerants

Waste heat can be well utilized in absorption refrigeration systems. The auto-cascade absorption refrigeration system couldreach a lower temperature than traditional one because the non-azeotropic mixed refrigerants were used. In this paper, performances of an auto-cascade absorption refrigeration with R23/R134a/DMF (Dimethylformamide) as the working substance was analysed. Theoretical analysing results showed that, to some extent, the COP couldbe increased when the low pressure of the system decreased or the high pressure increased. The reasonable high pressure was the high turning point pressure, and reasonable low pressure was the low turning point pressure. The COP of the system monotonously increased with the increase of the mole fraction of R23. The lowest R23 mole fraction one should be the most promising

Syndromic Surveillance of Motor Vehicle Crash Related Injuries in Nebraska

Objective The objective of this pilot study is to demonstrate the value of emergency department (ED) syndromic surveillance (SS) data to aid the surveillance of motor vehicle crash (MVC) related injuries in Nebraska

P2RBox: A Single Point is All You Need for Oriented Object Detection

Oriented object detection, a specialized subfield in computer vision, finds applications across diverse scenarios, excelling particularly when dealing with objects of arbitrary orientations. Conversely, point annotation, which treats objects as single points, offers a cost-effective alternative to rotated and horizontal bounding boxes but sacrifices performance due to the loss of size and orientation information. In this study, we introduce the P2RBox network, which leverages point annotations and a mask generator to create mask proposals, followed by filtration through our Inspector Module and Constrainer Module. This process selects high-quality masks, which are subsequently converted into rotated box annotations for training a fully supervised detector. Specifically, we've thoughtfully crafted an Inspector Module rooted in multi-instance learning principles to evaluate the semantic score of masks. We've also proposed a more robust mask quality assessment in conjunction with the Constrainer Module. Furthermore, we've introduced a Symmetry Axis Estimation (SAE) Module inspired by the spectral theorem for symmetric matrices to transform the top-performing mask proposal into rotated bounding boxes. P2RBox performs well with three fully supervised rotated object detectors: RetinaNet, Rotated FCOS, and Oriented R-CNN. By combining with Oriented R-CNN, P2RBox achieves 62.26% on DOTA-v1.0 test dataset. As far as we know, this is the first attempt at training an oriented object detector with point supervision

The Viscosity Characteristics for the Mixed Refrigerant HFO-1234yf + HFC-152a

Refrigerants are improved with the development of refrigeration and air conditioning industry. Because of the long-term use of chlorine-containing halogenated hydrocarbon substances, the ozone depletion and global warming become important issues around the world. Searching for refrigerants with low GWP (Global Warming Potential) and zero ODP (Ozone Depletion Potential) is urgent. HFC-134a used to be a widely used refrigerant with zero ODP. However, its high GWP of 1300 and long atmospheric lifetime of 14 years would cause the problem of global warming. Thus, for the sake of environment, the substitution of HFC-134a is imperative. In recent years, HFO-1234yf has been regarded as one of the widely used substitutions of HFC-134a because of low GWP of 4 and similar thermophysical properties to HFC-134a. However, its COP is slightly smaller than that of HFC-134a. In order to make better use of HFO-1234yf, some HFO-1234yf + HFCs or HFO-1234yf + HCs binary mixtures were proposed as alternative refrigerants. HFC-152a with low GWP of 140 and a short atmospheric lifetime of 1.5 years was selected as component in refrigerant mixtures. The mixture HFO-1234yf + HFC-152a is a promising alternative refrigerant. Before the actual application of alternative refrigerants in the refrigeration and air conditioning systems, thermophysical properties of mixed refrigerants need to be carefully investigated. Knowledge of viscosity characteristics, as one of the major concerns in the study of the thermophysical properties of alternative refrigerants, has significant impact on heat transfer and pressure drop in the flow, and viscosity data with high accuracy are of considerable value in the calculation of heat transfer and fluid flow. Â Â Â Â Â Â Thus, in this work, the measurement of liquid viscosity of the mixture was carried out with a new type of gravitational capillary viscometer developed in our previous work. The liquid viscosity experimental system used in this paper consists of a gravitational capillary viscometer made of glass, a pressure vessel with sight glasses, a thermostatic bath system and a measurement system. The measurement system consists of a high accurate temperature measure system (the standard temperature uncertainty is less than 0.011K) and a high accurate pressure measure system (the standard pressure uncertainty is within 1.4 kPa). The expanded uncertainty of dynamic viscosity was 1.58 %. The reliability of the experimental apparatus has been validated with HFO-1234yf and the binary mixture HFC-22 + HFC-134a (0.7 + 0.3, by mole fraction) in previous work. Based on this, the gravitational capillary viscometer was firstly calibrated with HCFC-22, and then, the liquid viscosity data of the binary mixture HFO-1234yf + HFC-152a (0.81 + 0.19, by mole fraction) were given from 278.15 K to 333.15 K. Two most commonly used viscosity models based on the Andrade equation were used to correlate the experimental data of the mixture HFO-1234yf + HFC-152a (0.81 + 0.19, by mole fraction). The correlation results were discussed