Patients’ reports on their delusional memories from the intensive care unit: A systematic review of qualitative studies

Objective: To critically summarise the qualitative literature to understand patients’ experiences of delusional memories during their Intensive Care Unit stay. Research methodology: A systematic review of qualitative studies with meta-synthesis and meta-summary. We searched MEDLINE (via PubMed), Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), Scopus, and Web of Science to July 2022. All studies that provided qualitative insights into the subjective experience of adult patients with delusional memories in the Intensive Care Unit were selected. The Critical Assessment Skills Programme checklist was used for the quality assessment. Results: Fourteen studies were included. The 33 codes that emerged from the inductive thematic analysis were grouped into three themes: ‘The sense of danger and the terrifying aspect of death’ (feeling in danger, surrounded by death, persecuted by people around, and feeling unsafe), ‘The presence of someone or something nearby’ (perceiving the loved ones, feeling overwhelmed by scary creatures, and being neglected by those around me), and ‘The reality behind the world perceived by the senses’ (travelling the world, stimulating the senses, feeling peaceful, and living in a fantasy world). The most frequent code in the studies was ‘Be with a family member’, with an intensity of 35.7%. Conclusion: The patient's experience described as delusional is considered a real event by the person experiencing it. Further research is needed to investigate the extent to which these experiences lead to poorer early and late outcomes for patients, and to test strategies to prevent this. Implications for clinical practice: A deeper understanding of the phenomenon may help healthcare professionals to recognise precursors, symptoms and consequences of delusional memories and intervene with appropriate help. One strategy would be to further humanise care and focus on family involvement and communication with patients to overcome the factual events that can potentially alter patients’ quality of life

Approximating Spectral Impact of Structural Perturbations in Large Networks

Determining the effect of structural perturbations on the eigenvalue spectra of networks is an important problem because the spectra characterize not only their topological structures, but also their dynamical behavior, such as synchronization and cascading processes on networks. Here we develop a theory for estimating the change of the largest eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix or the extreme eigenvalues of the graph Laplacian when small but arbitrary set of links are added or removed from the network. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approximation schemes using both real and artificial networks, showing in particular that we can accurately obtain the spectral ranking of small subgraphs. We also propose a local iterative scheme which computes the relative ranking of a subgraph using only the connectivity information of its neighbors within a few links. Our results may not only contribute to our theoretical understanding of dynamical processes on networks, but also lead to practical applications in ranking subgraphs of real complex networks.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, 2 table

High concentration Yb-Er co-doped multi-component phosphate glasses for compact eye-safe optical amplifiers

In recent years, the increasing need of airborne LIght Detection And Ranging (LIDAR) systems for environmental monitoring and surveillance has noticeably boosted the development of compact eye-safe optical amplifiers. In this scenario, multi-component phosphate glasses can be regarded as ideal candidate materials as they can be doped with a large amount of rare-earth (RE) ions without clustering, thus enabling the realization of few-cm long optical amplifier sections featured by high optical gain per unit length. In this work we will report the ongoing activities and the recent results obtained by our research group on the design, processing and characterization of a series of Yb-Er co-doped phosphate glasses to be used as active materials for the core of a waveguide amplifier. The physical, thermo-mechanical, optical and spectroscopic properties of the prepared glasses have been thoroughly investigated

Optical Quality Resorbable Calcium-Phosphate Glasses for Biophotonic Applications

Recently developed calcium-phosphate glass formulations are proposed in this chapter as a new class of materials for biomedical optics and photonics. The glasses have been designed and carefully prepared in our laboratory to be dissolvable in biological fluids while being optically transparent, mechanically reliable both in dry and humid environments, and suitable for both preform extrusion and fiber drawing. Optical fibers have been drawn from these glasses using our custom-made induction heated drawing tower and showed attenuation loss values from one to two orders of magnitude lower than the counterpart polymeric-based bioresorbable devices reported in literature. In addition, the optical fibers have been implanted in living rats for several weeks and no clinical signs of any adverse effect have been found. Results on the inscription and characterization of different types of fiber Bragg grating-based optical filters will be also shown, together with the demonstration of the suitability of the above-mentioned bioresorbable optical fibers for time-domain diffuse optical spectroscopy

Development of a novel CO2splitting fixed-bed reactor based on copper-doped cerium oxide

Global warming has received widespread attention in recent years due to the accumulation of carbon dioxide. Looking at the current energy landscape, new technologies must be developed to reduce CO2 emissions. The present work is aimed to develop and test a new prototype of an innovative reactor for the conversion of CO2 into CO, operating according to a two-phase thermochemical cycle. The innovative and main aspect of this study was the use of a reactor coupled with a new type of catalyst, a copper-doped cerium oxide (Cuδ+2Ce(1-δ)O2), which allowed to decrease the temperature of the reaction up to 850°C, much lower than the models present in the literature, tested on 1300/1400°C and even beyond

High concentration Yb-Er co-doped multi-component phosphate glasses for compact eye-safe optical amplifiers

In recent years, the increasing need of airborne LIght Detection And Ranging (LIDAR) systems for environmental monitoring and surveillance has noticeably boosted the development of compact eye-safe optical amplifiers. In this scenario, multi-component phosphate glasses can be regarded as ideal candidate materials as they can be doped with a large amount of rare-earth (RE) ions without clustering, thus enabling the realization of few-cm long optical amplifier sections featured by high optical gain per unit length. In this work we will report the ongoing activities and the recent results obtained by our research group on the design, processing and characterization of a series of Yb-Er co-doped phosphate glasses to be used as active materials for the core of a waveguide amplifier. The physical, thermo-mechanical, optical and spectroscopic properties of the prepared glasses have been thoroughly investigated

TeO2-ZnO-La2O3 glass composition for mid infrared wavelengths generation and transmission in optical fibers

Numerous applications in the Mid InfraRed (Mid IR) wavelength region still require basic optical components such as sources and optical fibers as transmission medium. Thanks to its mid IR transparency and nonlinearity, tellurite glass allows for developing both these types of components. However, practical applications require materials able to handle high optical intensity through enhanced material damage threshold. We report on the synthesis of a tellurite glass in the TeO2-ZnO-La2O3 (TZL) system which presents enhanced thermo mechanical properties with respect to typical tellurite glass compositions. We measured for the TZL composition a glass transition of 626 K, hence 70 K higher than the glass transition temperature of “standard” TZN compositions. The coefficient of thermal expansion was measured to be 138.10-6/K as compared to typical value of 180.10-6/K for TZN glass. We manufactured two types of fibers to assess the prospect for achieving high average power SC sources and Mid IR transmission in TZL glass fibers. First, a high Numerical Aperture (NA) aperture fiber was developed through standard rod in tube technique, where the cladding glass tube was manufactured by extrusion. The 50 μm core fiber presents an optical attenuation value of 0.26 dB/m at 1.55 μm. As an intermediate step towards the fabrication of an antiresonant hollow core fiber for high power transmission, we manufactured a preform and drew it into a cane. A TZL glass tube, 120 mm long and 9 mm/12 mm of inner/outer diameters (ID/OD) was manufactured via rotational casting technique. This latter tube was drawn into a tube of 2 mm in diameter which was cut into sections 130 mm long. Seven of those were stacked in another tellurite glass tube 6.5 mm/12 mm of ID/OD diameters, respectively. This preform was then drawn into a microstructured cane 1.6 mm in diameter which features tubular structures periodically arranged and of uniform thickness

Assessment of a desiccant cooling system in a traditional and innovative nanofluid HVAC system

The topic of energy saving is a constant in everyday life, and it is widespread all over the world. Space heating using solar panels is the most used renewable source of energy, but the application of solar energy for cooling the fluids used for refrigeration is growing very fast. Among the techniques used for refrigeration, this work focused on Desiccant Cooling. In particular, with the use of dynamic simulation software, it was possible to study the heat supplied and the energy consumption of a Heating Ventilation Air Conditioning (HVAC) system of a university building and to compare consumption with those of a Desiccant Cooling system applied to the same building. Four different cases were simulated: two related to the HVAC system, one of which operates with water and glycol and the other one with nanofluid, and the other ones to the Desiccant Cooling system with both types of fluids mentioned above. Keeping the same energy demand of the building in all the simulations, it was found that in summer the Desiccant Cooling system had higher performance than the traditional HVAC system and that the use of the nanofluid in both types of conditioning systems further increased the performance of 21%. Simulations were carried out using TRNSYS software