Clean dry etching of Cu and Ni alloy metal thin film by reactive proton assisted etching

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The combined clinical impact of red blood cell distribution width and vascular calcification on cardiovascular events and mortality in patients with end-stage kidney disease

Background Little is known about how the interaction between red blood cell distribution width (RDW) and vascular calcification (VC) affects cardiovascular (CV) events and mortality in end-stage kidney disease (ESKD) patients. This study investigated the combined prognostic effect of RDW and VC in ESKD patients starting dialysis. Methods A retrospective single-center study of 582 ESKD patients was conducted. VC was assessed by calculating the aortic calcification index (ACI) using computed tomography. Patients were divided into low ACI-low RDW, low ACI-high RDW, high ACI-low RDW, and high ACI-high RDW groups based on median ACI (17.12) and RDW (14.3) values. The association between RDW and VC and the composite endpoint of CV events and death was analyzed. Results During a median follow-up of 3.1 years (range, 1.5–5.5 years), 165 CV events (28.4%) and 124 deaths (21.4%) occurred. Cox regression showed that the low ACI-high RDW (adjusted hazard ratio [HR], 1.66; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.04–2.66; p = 0.03) and high ACI-low RDW (adjusted HR, 1.95; 95% CI, 1.21–3.14; p = 0.006) groups had a greater risk of CV events and death than the low ACI-low RDW group. The high ACI-high RDW group had the greatest risk (adjusted HR, 2.23; 95% CI, 1.42–3.52; p = 0.001). The effect of the interaction between ACI and RDW on CV events and mortality was statistically significant (p = 0.005). Conclusion High RDW and VC interact to increase the risk of CV events and death in ESKD patients

For the Proper Treatment of Long Sentences in a Sentence Pattern-based English-Korean Mt System

This paper describes a sentence pattern-based English-Korean machine translation system backed up by a rule-based module as a solution to the translation of long sentences. A rule-based English-Korean MT system typically suffers from low translation accuracy for long sentences due to poor parsing performance. In the proposed method we only use chunking information on the phraselevel of the parse result (i.e. NP, PP, and AP). By applying a sentence pattern directly to a chunking result, the high performance of analysis and a good quality of translation are expected. The parsin

Novel Carbazole-Based Hole-Transporting Materials with Star-Shaped Chemical Structures for Perovskite-Sensitized Solar Cells

Novel carbazole-based hole-transporting materials (HTMs), including extended π-conjugated central core units such as 1,4-phenyl, 4,4′-biphenyl, or 1,3,5-trisphenylbenzene for promoting effective π–π stacking as well as the hexyloxy flexible group for enhancing solubility in organic solvent, have been synthesized as HTM of perovskite-sensitized solar cells. A HTM with 1,3,5-trisphenylbenzene core, coded as <b>SGT-411,</b> exhibited the highest charge conductivity caused by its intrinsic property to form crystallized structure. The perovskite-sensitized solar cells with <b>SGT-411</b> exhibited the highest PCE of 13.00%, which is 94% of that of the device derived from <i>spiro</i>-OMeTAD (13.76%). Time-resolved photoluminescence spectra indicate that <b>SGT-411</b> shows the shortest decay time constant, which is in agreement with the trends of conductivity data, indicating it having fastest charge regeneration. In this regard, a carbazole-based HTM with star-shaped chemical structure is considered to be a promising candidate HTM