Hospitalized Pediatric Parainfluenza Virus Infections in a Medical Center

Background/PurposeParainfluenza viruses (PIVs) are common pathogens in respiratory tract infections. The aims of this study were to determine the clinical presentation of PIV infections in hospitalized children and to identify particular clinical indications that may effectively distinguish between different PIV serotypes.MethodsA retrospective review of data from children hospitalized with PIV infections at the Mackay Memory Hospital in Taipei between January 2005 and December 2007 was undertaken. Symptoms, signs, laboratory findings and seasonal variations between different types of PIV (serotypes 1, 2 and 3) were compared.ResultsA total of 206 patients [119 (57.8%) boys and 87 (42.2%) girls] were enrolled in the study. Seventy-four (35.9%) patients were infected with PIV serotype 1, 25 (12.1%) with serotype 2 and 107 (51.9%) with serotype 3. The most common clinical presentations were fever (81.1%), cough (66.0%), rhinorrhea (44.2%) and hoarseness (22.3%); 4.9% of the infected children also had skin rashes. No significant differences were found in average white blood cell counts and C-reactive protein levels between the three serotypes. PIV serotype 1 infections were discernible throughout the year; serotype 2 tended to cluster in the late summer and autumn of 2005 and 2007; and serotype 3 was more common in the spring and early summer.ConclusionThe clinical presentation of PIV infection in hospitalized children ranges from upper respiratory tract infection to croup, bronchiolitis and viral bronchopneumonia, with the different types of PIV infections giving rise to similar symptoms. The seasonal distribution of the different serotypes is, nevertheless, quite distinct

Estimating quality weights for EQ-5D (EuroQol-5 dimensions) health states with the time trade-off method in Taiwan

Background/PurposeEQ-5D (EuroQol-5 dimensions) is a preference-based measure of health, which is widely used in cost–utility analyses. It has been suggested that each country should develop its own value set. We therefore sought to develop the quality weights of the EQ-5D health states with the time trade-off (TTO) method in Taiwan.MethodsA total of 745 respondents consisting of employees and volunteers in 17 different hospitals were recruited and interviewed. Each of them valued 13 of 73 EQ-5D health states using the TTO method. Based on the three exclusion criteria for valuation data, only 456 (61.21%) respondents were considered eligible for data analysis. The quality weights for all EQ-5D health states were modeled by generalized estimating equations (GEEs).ResultsOver half of the responses were given negative values, and the medical personnel seemed to have a significantly higher TTO value (+0.1) than others after controlling for other predictors. The N3 model (level 3 occurred within at least 1 dimension) yielded an acceptable fit for the observed OTT data [mean absolute error (MAE) = 0.056, R2 = 0.35]. The magnitude of mean absolute differences (MADs) between Taiwan data and those from the UK, Japan, and South Korea ranged from 0.146 to 0.592, but the rank correlation coefficients were all above 0.811.ConclusionThis study reaffirms the differences in health-related preference values across countries. The high proportion of negative values might indicate that we have also partially measured the intensity of fear in addition to the utility of different health states

Band structure engineering in (Bi1-xSbx)2Te3 ternary topological insulators

Three-dimensional (3D) topological insulators (TI) are novel quantum materials with insulating bulk and topologically protected metallic surfaces with Dirac-like band structure. The spin-helical Dirac surface states are expected to host exotic topological quantum effects and find applications in spintronics and quantum computation. The experimental realization of these ideas requires fabrication of versatile devices based on bulk-insulating TIs with tunable surface states. The main challenge facing the current TI materials exemplified by Bi2Se3 and Bi2Te3 is the significant bulk conduction, which remains unsolved despite extensive efforts involving nanostructuring, chemical doping and electrical gating. Here we report a novel approach for engineering the band structure of TIs by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) growth of (Bi1-xSbx)2Te3 ternary compounds. Angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) and transport measurements show that the topological surface states exist over the entire composition range of (Bi1-xSbx)2Te3 (x = 0 to 1), indicating the robustness of bulk Z2 topology. Most remarkably, the systematic band engineering leads to ideal TIs with truly insulating bulk and tunable surface state across the Dirac point that behave like one quarter of graphene. This work demonstrates a new route to achieving intrinsic quantum transport of the topological surface states and designing conceptually new TI devices with well-established semiconductor technology.Comment: Minor changes in title, text and figures. Supplementary information adde

Power-efficient memory bus encoding using stride-based stream reconstruction

With the rapid increase in the complexity of chips and the popularity of portable devices, the performance demand is not any more the only important constraint in the embedded system. In stead, energy consumption has become one of the main design issues for contemporary embedded systems, especially for I/O interface due to the high capacitance of bus transition. In this paper, we propose a bus encoding scheme, which may reduce transitions by reconstructing active address streams with variable cached strides. The key idea is to obtain the variable strides for dierent sets of active addressing streams such that the decoder reconstructs these interlaced streams with these strides. Instead of sending the full address, the encoder may only send partial ad- dress or stride by using either one-hot or binary-inversion encoding. To exploit the locality and dynamically adjust the value of stride of active address streams, we partially compare the previous addresses of existing streams with the current address. Hence, the data transmitted on the bus can be minimally encoded. Experiments with several MediaBench benchmarks show that the scheme can achieve an average of 60% reduction in bus switching activity.Facultad de Informátic