7,466 research outputs found
Patient-reported outcomes measures and patient preferences for minimally invasive glaucoma surgical devices.
BackgroundMany therapeutic options are available to glaucoma patients. One recent therapeutic option is minimally invasive glaucoma surgical (MIGS) devices. It is unclear how patients view different treatments and which patient-reported outcomes would be most relevant in patients with mild to moderate glaucoma. We developed a questionnaire for patients eligible for MIGS devices and a patient preference study to examine the value patients place on certain outcomes associated with glaucoma and its therapies.ObjectivesTo summarize the progress to date.MethodsQuestionnaire development: We drafted the questionnaire items based on input from one physician and four patient focus groups, and a review of the literature. We tested item clarity with six cognitive interviews. These items were further refined. Patient preference study: We identified important benefit and risk outcomes qualitatively using semi-structured, one-on-one interviews with patients who were eligible for MIGS devices. We then prioritized these outcomes quantitatively using best-worst scaling methods.ResultsQuestionnaire testing: Three concepts were deemed relevant for the questionnaire: functional limitations, symptoms, and psychosocial factors. We will evaluate the reliability and validity of the 52-item draft questionnaire in an upcoming field test. Patient preference study: We identified 13 outcomes that participants perceived as important. Outcomes with the largest relative importance weights were "adequate IOP control" and "drive a car during the day."ConclusionsPatients have the potential to steer clinical research towards outcomes that are important to them. Incorporating patients' perspectives into the MIGS device development and evaluation process may expedite innovation and availability of these devices
Investigating the time-dependent behaviour of Boom clay under thermo-mechanical loading
Among the various laboratory studies to investigate the
Thermo-Hydro-Mechanical (THM) behaviour of Boom clay, relatively few were
devoted to the time dependent behaviour, limiting any relevant analysis of the
long-term behaviour of the disposal facility. The present work aims at
investigating the time-dependent behaviour of Boom clay under both thermal and
mechanical loading. High-pressure triaxial tests at controlled temperatures
were carried out for this purpose. The tests started with constant-rate thermal
and/or mechanical consolidation and ended with isobar heating and/or isothermal
compression at a constant stress rate or by step loading. Significant effects
of temperature as well as of compression and heating rates were observed on the
volume change behaviour. After being loaded to a stress lower than the
pre-consolidation pressure (5 MPa) at a low temperature of 25\degree C and at a
rate lower than 0.2 kPa/min, the sample volume changes seemed to be quite
small, suggesting a full dissipation of pore water pressure. By contrast, after
being subjected to high loading and heating rates (including step loading or
step heating), the volume changes appeared to be significant, particularly in
the case of stresses much higher than the pre-consolidation pressure. Due to
low permeability, full consolidation of Boom clay required a long period of
time and it was difficult to distinguish consolidation and creep from the total
volume change with time
Tunable THz Surface Plasmon Polariton based on Topological Insulator-Layered Superconductor Hybrid Structure
We theoretically investigate the surface plasmon polariton (SPP) at the
interface between 3D strong topological insulator (TI) and layered
superconductor-magnetic insulator structure. The tunability of SPP through
electronic doping can be enhanced when the magnetic permeability of the layered
structure becomes higher. When the interface is gapped by superconductivity or
perpendicular magnetism, SPP dispersion is further distorted, accompanied by a
shift of group velocity and penetration depth. Such a shift of SPP reaches
maximum when the magnitude of Fermi level approaches the gap value, and may
lead to observable effects. The tunable SPP at the interface between layered
superconductor and magnetism materials in proximity to TI surface may provide
new insight in the detection of Majorana Fermions.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure
Imbalanced Classification in Medical Imaging via Regrouping
We propose performing imbalanced classification by regrouping majority
classes into small classes so that we turn the problem into balanced multiclass
classification. This new idea is dramatically different from popular loss
reweighting and class resampling methods. Our preliminary result on imbalanced
medical image classification shows that this natural idea can substantially
boost the classification performance as measured by average precision
(approximately area-under-the-precision-recall-curve, or AUPRC), which is more
appropriate for evaluating imbalanced classification than other metrics such as
balanced accuracy
Mold Fabrication for 3D Dual Damascene Imprinting
Previously, a damascene process based on nanoimprint lithography has been proposed (Schmid G M, et al. in J Vac Sci Technol B 24(3) 1283, 2006) to greatly reduce the fabrication steps of metal interconnection in integrated circuit. For such a process to become a viable technique, a mold having two pattern levels with precise alignment between them must be fabricated first. To this end, this work demonstrates a “self-aligned” fabrication process where the two pattern levels would be perfectly aligned if ignoring the noise during e-beam writing. The process is based on one EBL on a bi-layer resist stack, with the sensitivity for the top layer much higher than that of the bottom layer, which enables separate pattern transfer of the two pattern levels. Using ZEP-520A and poly(dimethylglutarimide) (PMGI) resists, we fabricated pillars having a diameter of 150 nm sitting on ridges having a width of 1.5 μm, which can be used to create via-holes and trenches for IC interconnect by nanoimprint lithography. The current process can also find applications in other areas that require two-level patterning with precise alignment between them
A study on the thermal conductivity of compacted bentonites
Thermal conductivity of compacted bentonite is one of the most important
properties in the design of high-level radioactive waste repositories where
this material is proposed for use as a buffer. In the work described here, a
thermal probe based on the hot wire method was used to measure the thermal
conductivity of compacted bentonite specimens. The experimental results were
analyzed to observe the effects of various factors (i.e. dry density, water
content, hysteresis, degree of saturation and volumetric fraction of soil
constituents) on the thermal conductivity. A linear correlation was proposed to
predict the thermal conductivity of compacted bentonite based on experimentally
observed relationship between the volumetric fraction of air and the thermal
conductivity. The relevance of this correlation was finally analyzed together
with others existing methods using experimental data on several compacted
bentonites
ADTR: Anomaly Detection Transformer with Feature Reconstruction
Anomaly detection with only prior knowledge from normal samples attracts more
attention because of the lack of anomaly samples. Existing CNN-based pixel
reconstruction approaches suffer from two concerns. First, the reconstruction
source and target are raw pixel values that contain indistinguishable semantic
information. Second, CNN tends to reconstruct both normal samples and anomalies
well, making them still hard to distinguish. In this paper, we propose Anomaly
Detection TRansformer (ADTR) to apply a transformer to reconstruct pre-trained
features. The pre-trained features contain distinguishable semantic
information. Also, the adoption of transformer limits to reconstruct anomalies
well such that anomalies could be detected easily once the reconstruction
fails. Moreover, we propose novel loss functions to make our approach
compatible with the normal-sample-only case and the anomaly-available case with
both image-level and pixel-level labeled anomalies. The performance could be
further improved by adding simple synthetic or external irrelevant anomalies.
Extensive experiments are conducted on anomaly detection datasets including
MVTec-AD and CIFAR-10. Our method achieves superior performance compared with
all baselines.Comment: Accepted by ICONIP 202
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