Identification of a novel human polyomavirus in organs of the gastrointestinal tract

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Covid-19 triage in the emergency department 2.0: how analytics and AI transform a human-made algorithm for the prediction of clinical pathways

The Covid-19 pandemic has pushed many hospitals to their capacity limits. Therefore, a triage of patients has been discussed controversially primarily through an ethical perspective. The term triage contains many aspects such as urgency of treatment, severity of the disease and pre-existing conditions, access to critical care, or the classification of patients regarding subsequent clinical pathways starting from the emergency department. The determination of the pathways is important not only for patient care, but also for capacity planning in hospitals. We examine the performance of a human-made triage algorithm for clinical pathways which is considered a guideline for emergency departments in Germany based on a large multicenter dataset with over 4,000 European Covid-19 patients from the LEOSS registry. We find an accuracy of 28 percent and approximately 15 percent sensitivity for the ward class. The results serve as a benchmark for our extensions including an additional category of palliative care as a new label, analytics, AI, XAI, and interactive techniques. We find significant potential of analytics and AI in Covid-19 triage regarding accuracy, sensitivity, and other performance metrics whilst our interactive human-AI algorithm shows superior performance with approximately 73 percent accuracy and up to 76 percent sensitivity. The results are independent of the data preparation process regarding the imputation of missing values or grouping of comorbidities. In addition, we find that the consideration of an additional label palliative care does not improve the results

Zur währungspolitischen Situation der Entwicklungsländer | Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Stabilisierung

On the Monetary Situation of the Developing Countries. Possibilities and limits of Stabilization The monetary problem of the developing countries lies in the now already chronic balance-of-payments deficits. Their chief determinants are of both a structural nature (e. 8. monocultures, complementary structures, inadequate infrastructure) and a monetary nature (e.8. inflationary trend). On account of the only limited available stock of currency reserves, the need to adjust and restore foreign trade equilibrium is becoming ever more urgent. In this connection, a fundamental distinction must be drawn between: - long-range possibilities of stabilization, e.g. transfer of technology to developing countries, strengthening of their export capacity to improve the infrastructure, generation of “trust“ that permits private investors to import capital and re-invest profits in the country, etc., and - short-range possibilities of stabilization, which are suitable only for bridging momentary balance-of-payments difficulties and therefore must not replac.ea long-range restructurization process in the developing countries (but also in the industrial countries). These possibilities include in particular the credit facilities of the IMF, the allocation of special drawing rights (and their link with development aid), the role of the exchange rate, the formation of raw material producers cartels and, lastly, the methods proposed for export price and export earnings stabilization. The report reaches the conclusion that in international monetary policy - despite the many possibilities available for short-term remedying of liquidity' bottlenecks - only symptoms will be treated as long as countries with chronic deficits have not been completely integrated into the overall economic process. At present, solutions are still often frustrated by “technical and economic operationality” and “political acceptance” of the proposed reform efforts. Hence, there will continue to be more or less strong monetary turbulencein the future, too

The ALICE Transition Radiation Detector: construction, operation, and performance

The Transition Radiation Detector (TRD) was designed and built to enhance the capabilities of the ALICE detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). While aimed at providing electron identification and triggering, the TRD also contributes significantly to the track reconstruction and calibration in the central barrel of ALICE. In this paper the design, construction, operation, and performance of this detector are discussed. A pion rejection factor of up to 410 is achieved at a momentum of 1 GeV/ c in p–Pb collisions and the resolution at high transverse momentum improves by about 40% when including the TRD information in track reconstruction. The triggering capability is demonstrated both for jet, light nuclei, and electron selection