Determinants of Patients’ Behavioral Intention and Loyalty in Private Hospitals in Chengdu, China

Purpose: Behavioral intention and loyalty of patients to use the hospital service have been widely discussed to enhance profitability and sustainability in the hospitality industry. This research investigates the causal relationship between medical cost reasonableness, healthcare technicality, interpersonal behavior, service quality, patient satisfaction, behavioral intention, and patient loyalty. Research design, data, and methodology: This study applied a quantitative method to distribute an online questionnaire to 500 patients who use the medical service of private hospitals in Chengdu. The sample techniques are judgmental, convenience, and snowball samplings. The Item Objective Congruence (IOC) Index and the pilot test (n=50) by Cronbach’s Alpha were conducted before the data collection. The data was analyzed through Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). Results: All hypotheses are supported in this study. Medical costs, reasonableness, healthcare technicality, and interpersonal behavior significantly influence service quality. In addition, service quality has the strongest significant influence on patient satisfaction. Patient satisfaction significantly influences patient loyalty and behavioral intention. Conclusions: In practice, the study can contribute to hospitals and healthcare service providers to consider the significant determinants that can enhance the higher level of patient loyalty for their profitability and sustainability. Furthermore, the government can design policies and incentivized mechanisms to raise the healthcare service standard nationwide

Dynamic establishment of restorable lightpaths in WDM optical networks

Lightpath provisioning for dynamic traffic is an important issue in WDM optical networks. Meanwhile, in order for a lightpath to survive a network failure, both a primary lightpath and a backup lightpath need to be found for each demand. A demand will be blocked if either cannot be provided. Fast restoration and efficient lightpath establishment are two capabilities sought by service providers. In this thesis, we provide our approaches to address these two issues. Current path-based proactive restoration scheme pre-computes a backup lightpath when a primary lightpath is setup. Better spare capacity utilization can be achieved using backup multiplexing technique; however, long restoration time is inevitable because of the end-to-end signaling required to setup the backup lightpath upon failure. We present a new proactive lightpath restoration method that computes one primary lightpath and two backup lightpath segments for each traffic demand. Simulation results showed that the new method could significantly reduce the restoration time with only minor increase in capacity requirement. We also propose an efficient establishment scheme of restorable lightpaths. Three heuristic ideas are proposed to exploit the wavelength usage information and to make link channels across the network used more evenly, leading to lower blocking probability. Simulation shows that, the load balancing routing algorithm (LBA), with our heuristic cost functions for primary path selection and backup path selection, achieves comparable performance as the centralized algorithm does. However, LBA asks for much less information to be disseminated, and therefore is more scalable

DYNAMIC CONSTRUCTION CONTROL METHOD FOR A DEEP FOUNDATION PIT WITH SAND-PEBBLE GEOLOGY

Taking the water-rich sand and pebble geology deep foundation pit of Jinfu Station of Chengdu Metro Line 6 as the research object, combined with the ladder excavation method of slotting, utilizing finite difference software FLAC 3D as well as on-site monitoring result, the deformation law of the diaphragm wall during the dynamic excavation of the foundation pit is analysed, and the influence of the relative stiffness between the vertical and horizontal walls of the foundation pit on the lateral deformation of the retaining structure is discussed. The results show that while using the ladder excavation method of slotting, the maximum lateral displacement of the underground diaphragm walls decreases gradually with the excavation depth of the foundation pit, which occurs at the intersection of the middle point of the oblique excavation line and the step distance section of the transverse excavation. Additionally, the lateral displacement increases closer to the excavation section. The lateral displacement of the envelope enclosure mainly depends on the relative constraint stiffness of the vertical and horizontal underground diaphragm wall of the foundation pit. The use of the ladder layered excavation method of slotting can effectively reduce the lateral displacement of the underground diaphragm wall. The simulated result and on-site monitoring result are nearly the same. These results can provide a corresponding theory and engineering basis for the selection of excavation methods for the same type of sand and pebble stratum foundation pit

Phase unwrapping in optical metrology via denoised and convolutional segmentation networks

The interferometry technique is corn commonly used to obtain the phase information of an object in optical metrology. The obtained wrapped phase is subject to a 27 pi ambiguity. To remove the ambiguity and obtain the correct phase, phase unwrapping is essential. Conventional phase unwrapping approaches are time-consuming and noise sensitive. To address those issues, we propose a new approach, where we transfer the task of phase unwrapping into a multi-class classification problem and introduce an efficient segmentation network to identify classes. Moreover, a noise-to-noise denoised network is integrated to preprocess noisy wrapped phase. We have demonstrated the proposed method with simulated data and in a real interferometric system.China Scholarship Council (CSC) [201704910730]; National Science Foundation (NSF) [1455630]Open access journalThis item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]

Astragaloside IV inhibits pathological functions of gastric cancer-associated fibroblasts through regulation of HOXA6/ZBTB12 axis

[email protected], [email protected] Cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) play critical roles in the tumor microenvironment and exert tumor-promoting or tumor-retarding effects on cancer development. Astragaloside IV has been suggested to rescue the pathological impact of CAFs in gastric cancer. This study aimed to investigate the potential mechanism of astragaloside IV in the regulation of CAF pathological functions in gastric cancer development. Homeobox A6 (HOXA6), and Zinc Finger and BTB Domain Containing 12 (ZBTB12) are highly expressed in gastric CAFs compared with normal fibroblasts (NFs) based on the GSE62740 dataset. We found that astragaloside IV-stimulated CAFs suppressed cell growth, migration, and invasiveness of gastric cancer cells. HOXA6 and ZBTB12 were downregulated after astragaloside IV treatment in CAFs. Further analysis revealed that HOXA6 or ZBTB12 knockdown in CAFs also exerted inhibitory effects on the malignant phenotypes of gastric cells. Additionally, HOXA6 or ZBTB12 overexpression in CAFs enhanced gastric cancer cell malignancy, which was reversed after astragaloside IV treatment. Moreover, based on the hTFtarget database, ZBTB12 is a target gene that may be transcriptionally regulated by HOXA6. The binding between HOXA6 and ZBTB12 promoter in 293T cells and CAFs was further confirmed. HOXA6 silencing also induced the downregulation of ZBTB12 mRNA and protein in CAFs. Astragaloside IV was demonstrated to regulate the expression of ZBTB12 by mediating the transcriptional activity of HOXA6. Our findings shed light on the therapeutic value of astragaloside IV for gastric cancer

A new micro scale FE model of crystalline materials in micro forming process

Micro forming of metals has drawn global attention due to the increasing requirement of micro metal products. However, the size effects become significant in micro forming processes and affect the application of finite element (FE) simulation of micro forming processes. Dividing samples into small areas according to their microstructures and assigning individual properties to each small area are a possible access to micro forming simulation considering material size effects. In this study, a new model that includes both grains and their boundaries was developed based on the observed microstructures of samples. The divided subareas in the model have exact shapes and sizes with real crystals on the sample, and each grain and grain boundaries have their own properties. Moreover, two modelling methods using different information from the microstructural images were introduced in detail. The two modelling methods largely increase the availability of various microstructural images. The new model provides accurate results which present the size effects well