Serum Cholinesterase, C-reactive Protein, Interleukin 6, and Procalcitonin Levels as Predictors of Mortality in Patients in the Intensive Care Unit

Objective:The prognostic utility of inflammatory markers in survival has been suggested in patients with cancer; however, evidence on their prognostic value in severely ill patients is very limited. We aimed to explore the prognostic value of cholinesterase (ChE), C-reactive protein (CRP), interleukin-6 (IL-6), and procalcitonin (PCT) in predicting mortality in patients from the intensive care unit (ICU).Methods:Serum levels of ChE, CRP, IL-6 and PCT were measured in ICU patients from December 13th, 2019 to June 28th, 2022. We assessed the predictive power of ChE, CRP, IL-6, and PCT using the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves. Furthermore, we evaluated their diagnostic accuracy by comparing the areas under the ROC curve (AUCs) along with their corresponding 95% confidence intervals (CIs). The cut-off values were determined to dichotomise these biomarkers, which were then included in multivariable logistic regression models to examine their relationship with ICU mortality.Results:Among 253 ICU patients included in the study, 66 (26%) died during the ICU stay. The AUCs to predict ICU mortality were 0.643 (95% CI, 0.566-0.719), 0.648 (95% CI, 0.633-0.735), 0.643 (95% CI, 0.563-0.723) and 0.735 (95% CI, 0.664-0.807) for ChE, CRP, IL-6 and PCT, respectively. After adjusting for age, sex and disease severity, lower ChE level (10.546 mg dL-1), IL-6 (>986.245 pg mL-1) and PCT (>0.505 μg L-1) were associated with higher mortality risk, with odd ratios of 2.70 (95% CI, 1.32-5.54), 4.99 (95% CI, 2.41-10.38), 3.24 (95% CI, 1.54-6.78) and 3.67 (95% CI, 1.45-9.95), respectively.Conclusion:ChE, CRP, IL-6 and PCT were independent ICU mortality risk factors in severely ill patients. Elevated PCT levels exhibited better predictive value than the other three biomarkers that were evaluated

MARSTRUCT benchmark study on nonlinear FE simulation of an experiment of an indenter impact with a ship side-shell structure

This paper presents a benchmark study on collision simulations that was initiated by the MARSTRUCT Virtual Institute. The objective was to compare assumptions, finite element models, modelling techniques and experiences between established researchers within the field. Fifteen research groups world-wide participated in the study. An experiment involving a rigid indenter penetrating a ship-like side structure was used as the case study. A description of how the experiment was performed, the geometry model of it, and material properties were distributed to the participants prior to their simulations. The paper presents the results obtained from the fifteen FE simulations and the experiment. It presents a comparison of, among other factors, the reaction force versus the indenter displacement, internal energy absorbed by the structure versus the indenter displacement, and analyses of the participants' ability to predict failure modes and events that were observed in the experiment. The outcome of the study is a discussion and recommendations regarding mesh size, failure criteria and damage models, interpretation of material data and how they are used in a constitutive material model, and finally, uncertainties in general

OAB-YOLOv5: One-Anchor-Based YOLOv5 for Rotated Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images

Remote sensing images are widely distributed, small in object size, and complex in background, resulting in low accuracy and slow speed of remote sensing image detection. Existing remote sensing object detection is generally based on the detector with anchors. With the proposal of a feature pyramid network (FPN) and focal loss, an anchorless detector emerges, however, the accuracy of anchorless detection is often low. First, this study analyzes the differences and characteristics of the intersection of union (IoU) and shape matchings based on anchors in mainstream algorithms and indicates that in dense or complex scenes, some labels are not easily assigned to positive samples, which leads to detection failure. Subsequently, we proposean one-anchor-based (OAB) object detection algorithm based on the idea of central point sampling in the anchor-free detector. The positive samples and negative samples are defined according to the central point sampling and distance constraint, and an anchor box is preset for each positive sample to accelerate its convergence. It reduces the complexity of the anchor-based detector, improves the inference speed, and reduces the setting of hyperparameters in the traditional matching strategy, rendering the model more flexible. Finally, in order to suppress background noise in remote sensing images, the vision transformer (ViT) is adopted to connect the neck and head, making it easier for the network to pay attention to key information. Thus, it is not easy to lose in the training process. Experiments on challenging public dataset—DOTA dataset- verified the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. The experimental results show that the mAP of the optimized OAB-YOLOv5 method is improved by 2.79%, the number of parameters is reduced by 13.2%, and the inference time is reduced by 11% compared with the YOLOv5 baseline

Cohort profile: the Liyang cohort study on chronic diseases and risk factors monitoring in China (Liyang Study)

Purpose The Liyang cohort study on chronic diseases and risk factors monitoring in China (Liyang Study) is a prospective population-based study which aims to investigate and identify the determinants of the most prevalent chronic non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and to evaluate the impact of demographic characteristics, lifestyle, dietary habits, cognition, disability and NCDs on the health-related quality of life.Participants Between March 2019 and June 2020, 10 056 individuals aged ≥18 years were administered a baseline survey through a multistage cluster random sampling in Liyang City, southern Jiangsu Province, China.Findings to date The Liyang Study included detailed sociodemographic, anthropometric and health-related behaviour, common NCDs and blood sample information. Moreover, the study gathered a series of data on specific scales including the activities of daily living, instrumental activities of daily living, abbreviated mental test, Food Frequency Questionnaire and EuroQol 5-Dimensions 5-Levels Scale. Of the 10 056 participants, 52.92% (n=5322) were female and 92.26% (n=9278) came from rural areas. The mean age was 49.9±16.2 years. Men were more likely to have a higher level of education, annual income and a paid job than women (p<0.05). The top three overall most prevalent NCDs in the study were hypertension (18.06%, n=1815), digestive diseases (7.88%, n=791), and arthritis or rheumatism (5.28%, n=530). Women had a significantly higher prevalence of diabetes (5.46%, n=290 vs 4.42%, n=209, p=0.016) and arthritis (6.04%, n=321 vs 4.42%, n=209, p<0.001) than men, while the opposite was true for chronic lung diseases such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (1.37%, n=65 vs 0.92%, n=49, p=0.032) and chronic hepatic diseases (0.80%, n=38 vs 0.47%, n=25, p=0.035).Future plans The current study will give valuable insights into the association between sociodemographic factors, health-related behaviour, diet, cognition, disability and genetic factors and the most prevalent NCDs among local community residents. Starting from 2022, a follow-up survey will be conducted every 3 years to further explore the causal relationship between the above factors and NCDs

Correlation between the photon index and X-ray luminosity of black hole X-ray binaries and active galactic nuclei:Observations and interpretation

We investigate the observed correlation between the 2-10 keV X-ray luminosity (in unit of the Eddington luminosity; lX ≡ LX/LEdd) and the photon index (G{cyrillic}) of the X-ray spectrum for both black hole X-ray binaries (BHBs) and active galactic nuclei (AGNs). We construct a large sample, with 10-9 ≲ lX ≲ 10-1. We find that G{cyrillic} is positively and negatively correlated with lX when lX ≳ 10-3 and 10-6.5 ≲ lX ≲ 10-3, respectively, while G{cyrillic} is nearly a constant when lX ≲ 10-6.5. We explain the above correlation in the framework of a coupled hot accretion flow-jet model. The radio emission always comes from the jet while the X-ray emission comes from the accretion flow and jet when lX is above and below 10-6.5, respectively. More specifically, we assume that with the increase of mass accretion rate, the hot accretion flow develops into a clumpy and further a disc-corona two-phase structure because of thermal instability. We argue that such kind of two-phase accretion flow can explain the observed positive correlation.</p