National Essential Medicines List and policy practice: A case study of China’s health care reform

BACKGROUND: In 2009, China implemented the national essential medicines system by enacting the National Essential Medicines List 2009. According to the policy of this system, primary health care institutions can only stock and use essential medicines on the prescribed List. Meanwhile, each province can choose to make its own list of supplemented medicines. The goal of the study is to provide suggestions for emerging problems and identify future policy-making trends. METHODS: In this study, we statistically analyzed the National Essential Medicines List 2009 and lists of supplemented medicines of all 29 provinces. We also examined the rationality of such medicines based on the DELPHI method and literature review, after which we studied the provincial supplements in relation to the national essential medicines system. RESULTS: We demonstrated that the National Essential Medicines List 2009 provides a comprehensive coverage of diseases as well as reasonable varieties of drugs for their treatment. The average number of supplemented medicines in 29 provinces is 207, with each medicine included in 2.9 provincial lists on average. Only 2.6% supplemented medicines are included by more than half of the provinces (>15), indicating great regional variance. Among the 32 most frequently supplemented medicines, only 18 meet the selection principles, including two with strict usage restrictions. CONCLUSION: The structure and selection of the National Essential Medicines List 2009 are relatively reasonable. The main problems, however, include the excessive and non-scientific selection of medicines on the supplemented medicines list. The function of the provincial lists of supplemented medicines has not been achieved, which has influenced the effectiveness of the national essential medicines system in China

RoboGPT: an intelligent agent of making embodied long-term decisions for daily instruction tasks

Robotic agents must master common sense and long-term sequential decisions to solve daily tasks through natural language instruction. The developments in Large Language Models (LLMs) in natural language processing have inspired efforts to use LLMs in complex robot planning. Despite LLMs' great generalization and comprehension of instruction tasks, LLMs-generated task plans sometimes lack feasibility and correctness. To address the problem, we propose a RoboGPT agent\footnote{our code and dataset will be released soon} for making embodied long-term decisions for daily tasks, with two modules: 1) LLMs-based planning with re-plan to break the task into multiple sub-goals; 2) RoboSkill individually designed for sub-goals to learn better navigation and manipulation skills. The LLMs-based planning is enhanced with a new robotic dataset and re-plan, called RoboGPT. The new robotic dataset of 67k daily instruction tasks is gathered for fine-tuning the Llama model and obtaining RoboGPT. RoboGPT planner with strong generalization can plan hundreds of daily instruction tasks. Additionally, a low-computational Re-Plan module is designed to allow plans to flexibly adapt to the environment, thereby addressing the nomenclature diversity challenge. The proposed RoboGPT agent outperforms SOTA methods on the ALFRED daily tasks. Moreover, RoboGPT planner exceeds SOTA LLM-based planners like ChatGPT in task-planning rationality for hundreds of unseen daily tasks, and even other domain tasks, while keeping the large model's original broad application and generality

Exploring the Applicability of Building Energy Performance Certification Systems in Underground Stations in China

To improve the energy efficiency of underground metro stations, and in view of the absence of a comprehensive energy performance evaluation system for underground stations, this study introduced building Energy Performance Certification (EPC) tools into underground stations and conducted a comparative analysis of their applicability. The findings indicated that due to the unique characteristics of underground stations, China’s current EPC system was inapplicable to them. Specifically, (1) for basic items, although evaluation methods were available, due to the limited energy use data for the statistical method, the self-reference method was preferred, but its calculation encountered issues with missing reference values; (2) for prescribed items, the emphasis should be placed on the energy efficiency requirements of energy use systems rather than those of the thermal performance of envelopes; (3) for alternative items, the energy recovery measures related to the heat dissipation of trains and the piston wind should be addressed. Furthermore, a case study was conducted for verification of the proposed energy evaluation method, and the EPC system was updated based on the results of the comparison. The authors hope that this study will help improve China’s energy evaluation methods for underground stations and serve as a reference for expanding the EPC system to include public transportation buildings

An Immunoassay for Dibutyl Phthalate Based on Direct Hapten Linkage to the Polystyrene Surface of Microtiter Plates

BACKGROUND: Dibutyl phthalate (DBP) is predominantly used as a plasticizer inplastics to make them flexible. Extensive use of phthalates in both industrial processes and other consumer products has resulted in the ubiquitous presence of phthalates in the environment. In order to better determine the level of pollution in the environment and evaluate the potential adverse effects of exposure to DBP, immunoassay for DBP was developed. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: A monoclonal antibody specific to DBP was produced from a stable hybridoma cell line generated by lymphocyte hybridoma technique. An indirect competitive enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (icELISA) employing direct coating of hapten on polystyrene microtiter plates was established for the detection of DBP. Polystyrene surface was first oxidized by permanganate in dilute sulfuric acid to generate carboxyl groups. Then dibutyl 4-aminophthalate, which is an analogue of DBP, was covalently linked to the carboxyl groups of polystyrene surface with 1-ethyl-3-(3-dimethylaminopropyl) carbodiimide hydrochloride (EDC). Compared with conjugate coated format (IC(50)=106 ng/mL), the direct hapten coated format (IC(50)=14.6 ng/mL) improved assay sensitivity after careful optimization of assay conditions. The average recovery of DBP from spiked water sample was 104.4% and the average coefficient of variation was 9.95%. Good agreement of the results obtained by the hapten coated icELISA and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry further confirmed the reliability and accuracy of the icELISA for the detection of DBP in certain plastic and cosmetic samples. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: The stable and efficient hybridoma cell line obtained is an unlimited source of sensitive and specific antibody to DBP. The hapten coated format is proposed as generally applicable because the carboxyl groups on modified microtiter plate surface enables stable immobilization of aminated or hydroxylated hapten with EDC. The developed hapten coated icELISA can be used as a convenient quantitative tool for the sensitive and accurate monitoring DBP in water, plastic and cosmetic samples

High-Resolution Multi-View Light-Sheet Imaging System with Comprehensive Tissue Clearing Compatibility and Large Field of View

Light-sheet fluorescence microscopy stands out in the field of bioimaging as its rapid imaging speed, deep penetration depth, and reduced phototoxicity and photobleaching. However, an essential step in imaging large tissues is optical clearing. This process removes lipids, pigments, and calcium phosphate, which are not conducive to clear imaging, and matches the specimen's refractive index with the imaging medium to achieve high transparency. Numerous optical clearing strategies are employed, categorized into three main types: hydrophobic, hydrophilic, and hydrogel-based, each with distinct refractive indices. Typically, biologists design an optical system tailored to a specific sample and clearing method, restricting it to one fixed refractive index. This thesis hereby proposes a light-sheet system compatible with various tissue clearing methods with large field of view. The system also integrates multi-view reconstruction algorithm to maintain stable high resolution. Its performance is assessed by measuring the point spread function and imaging different specimens: Tg(flk1:mcherry) zebrafish in water, mouse retina cleared by CLARITY, αMHCCre; R26VT2/GK mouse rainbow heart cleared by CUBIC, and mouse descending aorta cleared by iDISCO+. The system demonstrated robustness across multiple optical clearing approaches while maintaining high resolution and a large field of view. It offers the possibility for biologists to explore diverse tissue clearing strategies and study various tissues using a single system

Modeling, Simulation and Analysis of Intermediate Fixed Piezoelectric Energy Harvester

To address the problem that piezoelectric energy harvesters are difficult to apply in certain environments, this paper establishes the theoretical study of the intermediate fixed disc piezoelectric energy harvester (IFDPEH) based on the unimorph under concentrated force. The reliability of the model was indirectly verified by numerical simulation and Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) simulation. The effects of load, radius ratio (piezoelectric layer/intermediate support), thickness ratio (piezoelectric layer/total thickness), and elastic modulus ratio (substrate/piezoelectric layer) on electrical energy were studied. The results indicate that the radius/thickness ratios of the IFDPEH based on aluminum and beryllium bronze are 0.05/0.31 and 0.05/0.48, respectively. In addition, through parameter comparison, it is found that the most important parameters affecting IFDPEH power are radius ratio and large load. The results are demonstrated to be meaningful for broadening the application of piezoelectric energy harvesters by the derived closed-form equations for the electrical energy along the diameters of the piezoelectric discs in the z-direction

Modeling, Simulation and Analysis of Intermediate Fixed Piezoelectric Energy Harvester

To address the problem that piezoelectric energy harvesters are difficult to apply in certain environments, this paper establishes the theoretical study of the intermediate fixed disc piezoelectric energy harvester (IFDPEH) based on the unimorph under concentrated force. The reliability of the model was indirectly verified by numerical simulation and Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) simulation. The effects of load, radius ratio (piezoelectric layer/intermediate support), thickness ratio (piezoelectric layer/total thickness), and elastic modulus ratio (substrate/piezoelectric layer) on electrical energy were studied. The results indicate that the radius/thickness ratios of the IFDPEH based on aluminum and beryllium bronze are 0.05/0.31 and 0.05/0.48, respectively. In addition, through parameter comparison, it is found that the most important parameters affecting IFDPEH power are radius ratio and large load. The results are demonstrated to be meaningful for broadening the application of piezoelectric energy harvesters by the derived closed-form equations for the electrical energy along the diameters of the piezoelectric discs in the z-direction