Effect of albumin administration on post-operation mortality, duration on ventilator, and hospital stay on patients in cardiac intensive care: An observational study

Purpose: To justify the use of albumin infusion in patients in post-surgery cardiac intensive care unit. Methods: All patients who were hemodynamically stable before the operation and admitted into the surgical intensive care unit following coronary artery bypass, cardiopulmonary bypass, or aortic surgery, had no excessive postoperative bleeding and not on diuretic treatment, were included in the analysis. A total of 1998 patients were divided into two cohorts, viz, the first group was placed on albumin infusion (n = 999) while the second group received normal saline infusion (n = 999). Data were obtained from DICOM files of patients and records of pharmacy. Wilcoxon test or two-tailed paired t-test followed by Tukey post-hoc tests were performed for statistical analysis at 95 % of confidence level. Results: Albumin and normal saline administration did not decrease the duration of mechanical ventilation, incidence of mechanical ventilation, need for blood transfusion, and length of hospital stay (p > 0.05). Albumin infusion decreased the need for fresh frozen plasma transfusion from 85 to 67, reduced mortality (p = 0.0005, q = 3.959), lowered serum lactate level (p < 0.0001, q = 43.853), but increased cardiac index (p < 0.0001, q = 12.192) as well as financial burden (p < 0.0001, q = 95.158) for the patients, compared to normal saline group. Conclusion: In view of the foregoing, it is recommended that the use of restriction of albumin resuscitation in surgical intensive care unit should be restricted in this subset of patients evluated in this study

High-performance Coherent Optical Modulators based on Thin-film Lithium Niobate Platform

The coherent transmission technology using digital signal processing and advanced modulation formats, is bringing networks closer to the theoretical capacity limit of optical fibres, the Shannon limit. The in-phase quadrature electro-optic modulator that encodes information on both the amplitude and the phase of light, is one of the underpinning devices for the coherent transmission technology. Ideally, such modulator should feature low loss, low drive voltage, large bandwidth, low chirp and compact footprint. However, these requirements have been only met on separate occasions. Here, we demonstrate integrated thin-film lithium niobate in-phase/quadrature modulators that fulfil these requirements simultaneously. The presented devices exhibit greatly improved overall performance (half-wave voltage, bandwidth and optical loss) over traditional lithium niobate counterparts, and support modulation data rate up to 320 Gbit s-1. Our devices pave new routes for future high-speed, energy-efficient, and cost-effective communication networks

Mode division multiplexing based on ring core optical fibers

The unique modal characteristics of ring core fibers (RCFs) potentially enable the implementation of mode-division multiplexing (MDM) schemes that can increase optical data transmission capacity with either low-complexity modular multi-input multi-output (MIMO) equalization or no MIMO equalization. This paper attempts to present a comprehensive review of recent research on the key aspects of RCF-based MDM transmission. Starting from fundamental fiber modal structures, a theoretical comparison between RCFs and conventional step-index and graded-index multi-mode fibers in terms of their MDM capacity and the associated MIMO complexity is given first as the underlining rationale behind RCF-MDM. This is followed by a discussion of RCF design considerations for achieving high-mode channel count and low crosstalk performances in either MIMO-free or modular MIMO transmission schemes. The principles and implementations of RCF mode (de-)multiplexing devices are discussed in detail, followed by RCF-based optical amplifiers culminating in MIMO-free or modular-MIMO RCF-MDM data transmission schemes. A discussion on further research directions is also given

Integrated optical vortex beam receivers

A simple and ultra-compact integrated optical vortex beam receiver device is presented. The device is based on the coupling between the optical vortex modes and whispering gallery modes in a micro-ring resonator via embedded angular gratings, which provides the selective reception of optical vortex modes with definitive total angular momentum (summation of spin and orbital angular momentum) through the phase matching condition in the coupling process. Experimental characterization confirms the correct detection of the total angular momentum carried by the vortex beams incident on the device. In addition, photonic spin-controlled unidirectional excitation of whispering-gallery modes in the ring receiver is also observed, and utilized to differentiate between left- and right-circular polarizations and therefore unambiguously identify the orbital angular momentum of incident light. Such characteristics provide an effective mode-selective receiver for the eigen-modes in orbital angular momentum fiber transmission where the circularly polarized OAM modes can be used as data communications channels in multiplexed communications or as photonic states in quantum information applications