Devastating chest wall necrotizing fasciitis following pigtail catheter drainage

SummaryPigtail catheter for drainage of pleural effusion has gained popularity. Complication related to the insertion of these small-bore catheter is low. In this report, we highlight two cases with devastating necrotizing fasciitis of chest wall following pigtail catheter insertion

Do green practices really attract customers? The sharing economy from sustainable supply chain management perspective

The notion of the sharing economy has been introduced in many sectors and provided significant benefits to consumers and asset owners. Despite the remarkable improvement of the sharing economy in recent years, its relationship with sustainability remains insufficiently researched. This study adopts a sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) perspective. A large-scale survey with 420 participants showed that investment recovery (IR) practices and corporate social responsibility (CSR) conducted by sharing economy platforms significantly and positively affect customers’ intention to use sharing economy-based services/products, whereas internal green management (IGM), supplier green management (SGM), eco-design (ECD) and customer green management (CGM) practices do not. A follow-up qualitative study with ten participants provided further explanations and supported the findings of the survey. This study links the sharing economy and sustainability by testing the effectiveness of sharing economy platforms’ sustainable practices and proposes the best practices for sharing economy platforms to maintain a long-term sustainable marketplace

A case of acute appendicitis with Vibrio fluvialis peritonitis

AbstractHuman infections caused by Vibrio fluvialis are rarely reported. The most common clinical presentation of V. fluvialis infection is acute gastroenteritis with diarrhea. Reported extra-intestinal infections caused by V. fluvialis have included bacteremia, hemorrhagic cellulitis and cerebritis. Peritonitis is an uncommon clinical presentation of Vibrio infections, and most cases have occurred in patients receiving peritoneal dialysis or those with liver cirrhosis. Herein, we report the first case of acute appendicitis with V. fluvialis peritonitis

Dual Associated Encoder for Face Restoration

Restoring facial details from low-quality (LQ) images has remained a challenging problem due to its ill-posedness induced by various degradations in the wild. The existing codebook prior mitigates the ill-posedness by leveraging an autoencoder and learned codebook of high-quality (HQ) features, achieving remarkable quality. However, existing approaches in this paradigm frequently depend on a single encoder pre-trained on HQ data for restoring HQ images, disregarding the domain gap between LQ and HQ images. As a result, the encoding of LQ inputs may be insufficient, resulting in suboptimal performance. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel dual-branch framework named DAEFR. Our method introduces an auxiliary LQ branch that extracts crucial information from the LQ inputs. Additionally, we incorporate association training to promote effective synergy between the two branches, enhancing code prediction and output quality. We evaluate the effectiveness of DAEFR on both synthetic and real-world datasets, demonstrating its superior performance in restoring facial details.Comment: Technical Repor

Mortality of continuous infusion versus intermittent bolus of meropenem: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials

BackgroundMeropenem belongs to the carbapenem class, which is categorized as beta-lactam antibiotics. These antibiotics are administered in intermittent bolus doses at specific time intervals. However, the continuous infusion approach ensures sustained drug exposure, maintaining the drug concentration above the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) throughout the entire treatment period. This study aimed to find out the association between continuous infusions of meropenem and mortality rates.Materials and methodsWe conducted a search of the PubMed/Medline, EMBASE, Cochrane Central, and ClinicalTrials.gov databases up to 14 August 2023. The six randomized controlled trials (RCTs) were identified and included in our analysis. The random-effects model was implemented using Comprehensive Meta-Analysis software to examine the outcomes.ResultsOur study included a total of 1,529 adult patients from six randomized controlled trials. The primary outcome indicated that continuous infusion of meropenem did not lead to reduction in the mortality rate (odds ratio = 0.844, 95% CI: 0.671–1.061, P =0.147). Secondary outcomes revealed no significant differences in ICU length of stay (LOS), ICU mortality, clinical cure, or adverse events between continuous infusion and traditional intermittent bolus strategies of meropenem. Notably, we observed significant improvements in bacterial eradication (odds ratio 19 = 2.207, 95% CI: 1.467–3.320, P < 0.001) with continuous infusion of meropenem. Our study also suggested that performing continuous infusion may lead to better bacterial eradication effects in resistant pathogens (coefficient: 2.5175, P = 0.0138*).ConclusionContinuous infusion of meropenem did not result in the reduction of mortality rates but showed potential in improving bacterial eradication. Furthermore, this strategy may be particularly beneficial for achieving better bacterial eradication, especially in cases involving resistant pathogens

Solving Solar Neutrino Puzzle via LMA MSW Conversion

We analyze the existing solar neutrino experiment data and show the allowed regions. The result from SNO's salt phase itself restricts quite a lot the allowed region's area. Reactor neutrinos play an important role in determining oscillation parameters. KamLAND gives decisive conclusion on the solution to the solar neutrino puzzle, in particular, the spectral distortion in the 766.3 Ty KamLAND data gives another new improvement in the constraint of solar MSW-LMA solutions. We confirm that at 99.73% C.L. the high-LMA solution is excluded.Comment: 6 eps figure

Effect of end-stage renal disease on long-term survival after a first-ever mechanical ventilation: a population-based study

The 30-day, 6-month, and 1-, 2-, 5-, and 10-year survival rate differences in the ESRD Pos and ESRD Neg groups from the beginning. (DOCX 17 kb

Empirical Review of Smart Contract and DeFi Security: Vulnerability Detection and Automated Repair

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is emerging as a peer-to-peer financial ecosystem, enabling participants to trade products on a permissionless blockchain. Built on blockchain and smart contracts, the DeFi ecosystem has experienced explosive growth in recent years. Unfortunately, smart contracts hold a massive amount of value, making them an attractive target for attacks. So far, attacks against smart contracts and DeFi protocols have resulted in billions of dollars in financial losses, severely threatening the security of the entire DeFi ecosystem. Researchers have proposed various security tools for smart contracts and DeFi protocols as countermeasures. However, a comprehensive investigation of these efforts is still lacking, leaving a crucial gap in our understanding of how to enhance the security posture of the smart contract and DeFi landscape. To fill the gap, this paper reviews the progress made in the field of smart contract and DeFi security from the perspective of both vulnerability detection and automated repair. First, we analyze the DeFi smart contract security issues and challenges. Specifically, we lucubrate various DeFi attack incidents and summarize the attacks into six categories. Then, we present an empirical study of 42 state-of-the-art techniques that can detect smart contract and DeFi vulnerabilities. In particular, we evaluate the effectiveness of traditional smart contract bug detection tools in analyzing complex DeFi protocols. Additionally, we investigate 8 existing automated repair tools for smart contracts and DeFi protocols, providing insight into their advantages and disadvantages. To make this work useful for as wide of an audience as possible, we also identify several open issues and challenges in the DeFi ecosystem that should be addressed in the future.Comment: This paper is submitted to the journal of Expert Systems with Applications (ESWA) for revie