A general approach to quantum dynamics using a variational master equation: Application to phonon-damped Rabi rotations in quantum dots

We develop a versatile master equation approach to describe the non-equilibrium dynamics of a two-level system in contact with a bosonic environment, which allows for the exploration of a wide range of parameter regimes within a single formalism. As an experimentally relevant example, we apply this technique to the study of excitonic Rabi rotations in a driven quantum dot, and compare its predictions to the numerical Feynman integral approach. We find excellent agreement between the two methods across a generally difficult range of parameters. In particular, the variational master equation technique captures effects usually considered to be non-perturbative, such as multi-phonon processes and bath-induced driving renormalisation, and can give reliable results even in regimes in which previous master equation approaches fail.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures. Published version, revised title, minor changes to the tex

Study of prescribing pattern of topical corticosteroids in dermatology out patients department in a tertiary care hospital in India

Background: The selection of rational yet most effective treatment is an art to be learnt by most physicians. The advent of topical glucocorticoids has changed the way inflammatory dermatological conditions are managed. However, there is a constant need to keep a check on these prescriptions for their rationality. The present study was done to review the prescribing pattern of topical corticosteroids in dermatology outpatients at a tertiary care hospital.Methods: This was a prospective observational study on 300 prescriptions of patients above 18 years of age receiving topical corticosteroids in the dermatological outpatient department of a tertiary care hospital in the time frame of June 2014 to August 2014. Data obtained was recorded in a structured case record form (CRF) and analysed for their prescribing pattern, adverse reactions and cost analysis within different socioeconomic classes. Data was analysed using relevant statistical tests. A P-value of less than 0.05 was considered significant.Results: Data was collected from 300 patients with the mean age of 38.28±11 years. The most common indication for prescription of topical steroids was eczema (22.33%). The most commonly prescribed topical steroid was clobetasol (68.66%) followed by mometasone (11%), betamethasone (9.33%) and halobetasol (3%). Cream was the most frequently prescribed formulation (85.66%). 28 patients (9.33%) out of 300 showed adverse drug reactions, of which, erythema was the most common (50%).Conclusions: Topical corticosteroids are effective drugs in an array of dermatological diseases and abundant choices are available in different formulations. Optimal therapy involves careful consideration of factors such as potency, formulation, responsiveness and the cost of the topical steroid

Advancing Ischemic Stroke Diagnosis: A Novel Two-Stage Approach for Blood Clot Origin Identification

An innovative two-stage methodology for categorizing blood clot origins is presented in this paper, which is important for the diagnosis and treatment of ischemic stroke. First, a background classifier based on MobileNetV3 segments big whole-slide digital pathology images into numerous tiles to detect the presence of cellular material. After that, different pre-trained image classification algorithms are fine-tuned to determine the origin of blood clots. Due to complex blood flow dynamics and limitations in conventional imaging methods such as computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and ultrasound, identifying the sources of blood clots is a challenging task. Although these techniques are useful for identifying blood clots, they are not very good at determining how they originated. To address these challenges, our method makes use of robust computer vision models that have been refined using information from whole-slide digital pathology images. Out of all the models tested, the PoolFormer \cite{yu2022metaformer} performs better than the others, with 93.4\% accuracy, 93.4\% precision, 93.4\% recall, and 93.4\% F1-score. Moreover, it achieves the good weighted multi-class logarithmic loss (WMCLL) of 0.4361, which emphasizes how effective it is in this particular application. These encouraging findings suggest that our approach can successfully identify the origin of blood clots in a variety of vascular locations, potentially advancing ischemic stroke diagnosis and treatment approaches

Brucellosis in Wayanad Tribal Goat Population: A Preliminary Serological Survey

Caprine brucellosis is an endemic disease and is present in many countries. It causes heavy losses in goats and is transmissible to man. The study aimed at determining the seroprevalence of caprine brucellosis for the first time by serological tests in Wayanad district of Kerala, where goat rearing is the main occupation among tribal women. A total of 24 sera were positive by the RBPT with a seroprevalence of 5.7%. Upon STAT testing of all the 420 sera, 18 out of 24 samples (4.3%) showed presence of Brucella antibodies. Considering sensitivity, specificity and ease in performing the test, it is suggested that a combination of RBPT and STAT can be used in the diagnosis of caprine brucellosis in order to control and eradicate the disease

Revealing the density of encoded functions in a viral RNA

Nikesh Patel, et al, ‘Revealing the density of encoded functions in a viral RNA’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), Vol. 112 (7): 2227-2232, February 2015, doi: http:dx.doi.org/10. 1073/pnas.1420812112. This article is freely available online through the PNAS open access option.We present direct experimental evidence that assembly of a single-stranded RNA virus occurs via a packaging signal-mediated mechanism. We show that the sequences of coat protein recognition motifs within multiple, dispersed, putative RNA packaging signals, as well as their relative spacing within a genomic fragment, act collectively to influence the fidelity and yield of capsid self-assembly in vitro. These experiments confirm that the selective advantages for viral yield and encapsidation specificity, predicted from previous modeling of packaging signal-mediated assembly, are found in Nature. Regions of the genome that act as packaging signals also function in translational and transcriptional enhancement, as well as directly coding for the coat protein, highlighting the density of encoded functions within the viral RNA. Assembly and gene expression are therefore direct molecular competitors for different functional folds of the same RNA sequence. The strongest packaging signal in the test fragment, encodes a region of the coat protein that undergoes a conformational change upon contact with packaging signals. A similar phenomenon occurs in other RNA viruses for which packaging signals are known. These contacts hint at an even deeper density of encoded functions in viral RNA, which if confirmed, would have profound consequences for the evolution of this class of pathogensPeer reviewedFinal Published versio

Evaluation of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 for supporting real-world information needs in healthcare delivery

Despite growing interest in using large language models (LLMs) in healthcare, current explorations do not assess the real-world utility and safety of LLMs in clinical settings. Our objective was to determine whether two LLMs can serve information needs submitted by physicians as questions to an informatics consultation service in a safe and concordant manner. Sixty six questions from an informatics consult service were submitted to GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 via simple prompts. 12 physicians assessed the LLM responses' possibility of patient harm and concordance with existing reports from an informatics consultation service. Physician assessments were summarized based on majority vote. For no questions did a majority of physicians deem either LLM response as harmful. For GPT-3.5, responses to 8 questions were concordant with the informatics consult report, 20 discordant, and 9 were unable to be assessed. There were 29 responses with no majority on "Agree", "Disagree", and "Unable to assess". For GPT-4, responses to 13 questions were concordant, 15 discordant, and 3 were unable to be assessed. There were 35 responses with no majority. Responses from both LLMs were largely devoid of overt harm, but less than 20% of the responses agreed with an answer from an informatics consultation service, responses contained hallucinated references, and physicians were divided on what constitutes harm. These results suggest that while general purpose LLMs are able to provide safe and credible responses, they often do not meet the specific information need of a given question. A definitive evaluation of the usefulness of LLMs in healthcare settings will likely require additional research on prompt engineering, calibration, and custom-tailoring of general purpose models.Comment: 27 pages including supplemental informatio