Effective medical surplus recovery

We analyze not-for-profit Medical Surplus Recovery Organizations (MSROs) that manage the recovery of surplus (unused or donated) medical products to fulfill the needs of underserved healthcare facilities in the developing world. Our work is inspired by an award-winning North American non-governmental organization (NGO) that matches the uncertain supply of medical surplus with the receiving parties’ needs. In particular, this NGO adopts a recipient-driven resource allocation model, which grants recipients access to an inventory database, and each recipient selects products of limited availability to fill a container based on its preferences. We first develop a game theoretic model to investigate the effectiveness of this approach. This analysis suggests that the recipient-driven model may induce competition among recipients and lead to a loss in value provision through premature orders. Further, contrary to the common wisdom from traditional supply chains, full inventory visibility in our setting may accelerate premature orders and lead to loss of effectiveness. Accordingly, we identify operational mechanisms to help MSROs deal with this problem. These are: (i) appropriately selecting container capacities while limiting the inventory availability visible to recipients and increasing the acquisition volumes of supplies, (ii) eliminating recipient competition through exclusive single-recipient access to MSRO inventory, and (iii) focusing on learning recipient needs as opposed to providing them with supply information, and switching to a provider-driven resource allocation model. We use real data from the NGO by which the study was inspired and show that the proposed improvements can substantially increase the value provided to recipients

Blocking layer effect on dye-sensitized solar cells assembled with TiO2 nanorods prepared by dc reactive magnetron sputtering

Three different thickness dense TiO2 (150 nm, 300 nm and 450 nm respectively) films were deposited on ITO substrates by dc reactive magnetron sputtering technique. These dense TiO2 films were used as the blocking layers. After that, TiO2 nanorod films were deposited on these dense TiO2 films by same technique. Both the dense and nanorod TiO2 films have an anatase phase. The dense TiO2 films have an orientation along the [101] direction and the TiO2 nanorod films show a very strong orientation along the [110] direction. These TiO2 materials were sensitized by N719 dye and the DSSCs were assembled using them as photoelectrode. The effect of the blocking layer on the efficiency of the DSSCs is discussed. The DSSC assembled using TiO2 nanorod film with 300 nm thickness blocking layer shows a high efficiency of 2.07%

Longitudinal Causal Inference of Cognitive Function and Depressive Symptoms in Elderly People

Objective: the association between depressive symptoms (Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale [CES-D]) and subsequent cognitive function (Mini-Mental State Examination [MMSE]) is equivocal in literature. To examine the causal relationship between them, we use longitudinal data on MMSE and CESD and causal inference to illustrate the relationship between two health outcomes. Method:  Data were obtained from the Hispanic Established Populations for Epidemiologic Studies of the Elderly. Participants included 3050 noninstitutionalized Mexican Americans aged 65 and older followed from 1993-2001. Cognitive function and depressive symptoms were assessed using the MMSE and CESD at baseline and at 2, 5, and 7 years of follow-up. Independent variables were sociodemographics, CESD, medical conditions. Marginal structural causal models were employed to evaluate the extent to which cognitive function depend not only on depressive symptoms measured at a single point in time but also on an individual’s entire depressive symptoms history.  Discussion: our results indicate that if intervention to reduce 1 points of depressive symptoms were made at two years prior to assessing cognitive function, they would result in average improvement in cognitive function of 0.12, 95% CI [0.06, 0.18],P<.0001. Conclusion: The results suggest that health intervention of depressive symptoms would be useful in prevention of cognitive impair. &nbsp

The control of the diameter of the nanorods prepared by dc reactive magnetron sputtering and the applications for DSSC

The TiO2 nanorod arrays, with about 1.8 μm lengths, have been deposited on ITO substrates by dc reactive magnetron sputtering at different target-substrate distances. The average diameter of these nanorods can be modified from about 45 nm to 85 nm by adjusting the target-substrate distance from 90 mm to 50 mm. These nanorods are highly ordered and perpendicular to the substrate. Both XRD and Raman measurements show that the nanorods prepared at different target-substrate distances have only an anatase TiO2 phase. The nanorods prepared at the target-substrate distance less than 80 mm have a preferred orientation along the (220) direction. However, this preferred orientation disappears as the target-substrate distance is more than 80 mm. These TiO2 nanorods have been used as the electrodes for dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSC). The highest conversion efficiency, about 4.78%, has been achieved for TiO2 nanorods prepared at 80 mm target-substrate distance.SFRH/BSAB/862/2008, FCT, Portuga

Total Variation Regularized Tensor RPCA for Background Subtraction from Compressive Measurements

Background subtraction has been a fundamental and widely studied task in video analysis, with a wide range of applications in video surveillance, teleconferencing and 3D modeling. Recently, motivated by compressive imaging, background subtraction from compressive measurements (BSCM) is becoming an active research task in video surveillance. In this paper, we propose a novel tensor-based robust PCA (TenRPCA) approach for BSCM by decomposing video frames into backgrounds with spatial-temporal correlations and foregrounds with spatio-temporal continuity in a tensor framework. In this approach, we use 3D total variation (TV) to enhance the spatio-temporal continuity of foregrounds, and Tucker decomposition to model the spatio-temporal correlations of video background. Based on this idea, we design a basic tensor RPCA model over the video frames, dubbed as the holistic TenRPCA model (H-TenRPCA). To characterize the correlations among the groups of similar 3D patches of video background, we further design a patch-group-based tensor RPCA model (PG-TenRPCA) by joint tensor Tucker decompositions of 3D patch groups for modeling the video background. Efficient algorithms using alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) are developed to solve the proposed models. Extensive experiments on simulated and real-world videos demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approaches over the existing state-of-the-art approaches.Comment: To appear in IEEE TI

FabricFolding: Learning Efficient Fabric Folding without Expert Demonstrations

Autonomous fabric manipulation is a challenging task due to complex dynamics and potential self-occlusion during fabric handling. An intuitive method of fabric folding manipulation first involves obtaining a smooth and unfolded fabric configuration before the folding process begins. However, the combination of quasi-static actions such as pick & place and dynamic action like fling proves inadequate in effectively unfolding long-sleeved T-shirts with sleeves mostly tucked inside the garment. To address this limitation, this paper introduces an improved quasi-static action called pick & drag, specifically designed to handle this type of fabric configuration. Additionally, an efficient dual-arm manipulation system is designed in this paper, which combines quasi-static (including pick & place and pick & drag) and dynamic fling actions to flexibly manipulate fabrics into unfolded and smooth configurations. Subsequently, keypoints of the fabric are detected, enabling autonomous folding. To address the scarcity of publicly available keypoint detection datasets for real fabric, we gathered images of various fabric configurations and types in real scenes to create a comprehensive keypoint dataset for fabric folding. This dataset aims to enhance the success rate of keypoint detection. Moreover, we evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed system in real-world settings, where it consistently and reliably unfolds and folds various types of fabrics, including challenging situations such as long-sleeved T-shirts with most parts of sleeves tucked inside the garment. Specifically, our method achieves a coverage rate of 0.822 and a success rate of 0.88 for long-sleeved T-shirts folding

Risk Assessment of Arsenic in Rice Cereal and Other Dietary Sources for Infants and Toddlers in the U.S.

Currently, there are no set standards or quantitative guidelines available in the U.S. for arsenic levels in rice cereal, one of the most common first solid foods for infants. The objective of this study was to evaluate whether the detected levels of inorganic arsenic (Asi) in rice cereal in the U.S. market are safe for consumption by infants and toddlers. A risk assessment was conducted based on literature reviews of the reported Asi in rice cereal from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) survey and the recommended daily intake of rice cereal by body weight, for infants and toddlers between four and 24 months old. As a part of risk management, a maximum contaminant level (MCL) for Asi in rice cereal was computed considering overall exposure sources including drinking water, infant formula, and other infant solid foods. Hazard quotients (HQs) for acute and chronic exposures were calculated based on the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry’s (ATSDR) Minimal Risk Level (MRL)acute (5.0 × 10−3 mg/kg/day) and MRLchronic (3.0 × 10−4 mg/kg/day). A cancer slope or potency factor of 1.5 mg/kg/day was used to predict an incremental lifetime cancer risk (ILCR). Exposure assessment showed that the largest source of Asi for infants and toddlers between four and 24 months old was rice cereal (55%), followed by other infant solid food (19%), and drinking water (18%). Infant formula was the smallest source of Asi for babies (9%) at the 50th percentile based on Monte Carlo simulations. While HQacute were consistently below 1.0, HQchronic at the 50 and 75th percentiles exceeded 1.0 for both rice cereal and total sources. ILCR ranged from 10−6 (50th) to 10−5 (75th percentile). MCLs for Asi in rice cereal ranged from 0.0 (chronic) to 0.4 mg/kg (acute exposures).This article is made openly accessible in part by an award from the Northern Illinois University Libraries’ Open Access Publishing Fund

The effect of hydroxyl on dye-sensitized solar cells assembled with TiO2 nanorods

TiO2 nanorods have been prepared on ITO substrates by dc reactive magnetron sputtering technique. The hydroxyl groups have been introduced on the nanorods surface. The structure and the optical properties of these nanorods have been studied. The dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) have been assembled using these TiO2 nanorods as photoelectrode. And the effect of the hydroxyl groups on the properties of the photoelectric conversion of the DSSCs has been studiedinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio