Linking Representations with Multimodal Contrastive Learning

Many applications require grouping instances contained in diverse document datasets into classes. Most widely used methods do not employ deep learning and do not exploit the inherently multimodal nature of documents. Notably, record linkage is typically conceptualized as a string-matching problem. This study develops CLIPPINGS, (Contrastively Linking Pooled Pre-trained Embeddings), a multimodal framework for record linkage. CLIPPINGS employs end-to-end training of symmetric vision and language bi-encoders, aligned through contrastive language-image pre-training, to learn a metric space where the pooled image-text representation for a given instance is close to representations in the same class and distant from representations in different classes. At inference time, instances can be linked by retrieving their nearest neighbor from an offline exemplar embedding index or by clustering their representations. The study examines two challenging applications: constructing comprehensive supply chains for mid-20th century Japan through linking firm level financial records - with each firm name represented by its crop in the document image and the corresponding OCR - and detecting which image-caption pairs in a massive corpus of historical U.S. newspapers came from the same underlying photo wire source. CLIPPINGS outperforms widely used string matching methods by a wide margin and also outperforms unimodal methods. Moreover, a purely self-supervised model trained on only image-OCR pairs also outperforms popular string-matching methods without requiring any labels

A systematic review and meta-analysis comparing the efficacy and safety of ciprofol (HSK3486) versus propofol for anesthetic induction and non-ICU sedation

Background: Ciprofol (HSK3486) is a novel intravenous anesthetic agent that bears structural similarity to propofol and displays favorable pharmacodynamic characteristics such as rapid onset and offset. The meta-analysis aimed at comparing the efficacy and safety of ciprofol versus propofol in clinical practice.Methods: Medline, EMBASE, Google Scholar, Cochrane Library were searched from inception to April 2023. The primary outcome was success rate of sedation/anesthetic induction and differences in sedation/induction time. The secondary outcomes included risks of hemodynamic instability, respiratory complications, and pain on injection, as well as recovery profiles, satisfaction score, and top-up dose requirement.Results: Twelve RCTs (sedation: n = 6, anesthetic induction, n = 6, all conducted in China) involving 1,793 patients (age: 34–58 years) published from 2021 to 2023 were analyzed. Pooled results revealed no differences in success rate [risk ratio (RR) = 1, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.99 to 1.01, I2 = 0%, 1,106 patients, p = 1] and time required for successful anesthetic induction/sedation [mean difference (MD) = 7.95 s, 95% CI: −1.09 to 16.99, I2 = 97%, 1,594 patients, p = 0.08]. The risks of top-up dose requirement (RR = 0.94, p = 0.48), cardiopulmonary complications [i.e., bradycardia (RR = 0.94, p = 0.67), tachycardia (RR = 0.83, p = 0.68), hypertension (RR = 1.28, p = 0.2), hypoxemia/pulmonary depression (RR = 0.78, p = 0.24)], and postoperative nausea/vomiting (RR = 0.85, p = 0.72), as well as discharge time (MD = 1.39 min, p = 0.14) and satisfaction score (standardized MD = 0.23, p = 0.16) did not differ significantly between the two groups. However, the ciprofol group had lower risks of hypotension (RR = 0.85, p = 0.02) and pain on injection (RR = 0.17, p < 0.00001) than the propofol group. The time to full alertness was statistically shorter in the propofol group (i.e., 0.66 min), but without clinical significance.Conclusion: Our results demonstrated similar efficacy between ciprofol and propofol for sedation and anesthetic induction, while ciprofol was associated with lower risks of hypotension and pain on injection. Future studies are warranted to evaluate the efficacy and safety of ciprofol in pediatric or the elderly populations.Systematic Review Registration: (https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/), identifier (CRD42023421278)

Table1_A systematic review and meta-analysis comparing the efficacy and safety of ciprofol (HSK3486) versus propofol for anesthetic induction and non-ICU sedation.docx

Background: Ciprofol (HSK3486) is a novel intravenous anesthetic agent that bears structural similarity to propofol and displays favorable pharmacodynamic characteristics such as rapid onset and offset. The meta-analysis aimed at comparing the efficacy and safety of ciprofol versus propofol in clinical practice.Methods: Medline, EMBASE, Google Scholar, Cochrane Library were searched from inception to April 2023. The primary outcome was success rate of sedation/anesthetic induction and differences in sedation/induction time. The secondary outcomes included risks of hemodynamic instability, respiratory complications, and pain on injection, as well as recovery profiles, satisfaction score, and top-up dose requirement.Results: Twelve RCTs (sedation: n = 6, anesthetic induction, n = 6, all conducted in China) involving 1,793 patients (age: 34–58 years) published from 2021 to 2023 were analyzed. Pooled results revealed no differences in success rate [risk ratio (RR) = 1, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.99 to 1.01, I2 = 0%, 1,106 patients, p = 1] and time required for successful anesthetic induction/sedation [mean difference (MD) = 7.95 s, 95% CI: −1.09 to 16.99, I2 = 97%, 1,594 patients, p = 0.08]. The risks of top-up dose requirement (RR = 0.94, p = 0.48), cardiopulmonary complications [i.e., bradycardia (RR = 0.94, p = 0.67), tachycardia (RR = 0.83, p = 0.68), hypertension (RR = 1.28, p = 0.2), hypoxemia/pulmonary depression (RR = 0.78, p = 0.24)], and postoperative nausea/vomiting (RR = 0.85, p = 0.72), as well as discharge time (MD = 1.39 min, p = 0.14) and satisfaction score (standardized MD = 0.23, p = 0.16) did not differ significantly between the two groups. However, the ciprofol group had lower risks of hypotension (RR = 0.85, p = 0.02) and pain on injection (RR = 0.17, p Conclusion: Our results demonstrated similar efficacy between ciprofol and propofol for sedation and anesthetic induction, while ciprofol was associated with lower risks of hypotension and pain on injection. Future studies are warranted to evaluate the efficacy and safety of ciprofol in pediatric or the elderly populations.Systematic Review Registration: (https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/), identifier (CRD42023421278).</p

Search for rare decays of Z and Higgs bosons to J/ψ/\psi and a photon in proton-proton collisions at s=\sqrt{s} = 13 TeV

A search is presented for decays of $\mathrm {Z}$ and Higgs bosons to a ${\mathrm {J}/\psi }$ meson and a photon, with the subsequent decay of the ${\mathrm {J}/\psi }$ to $\mathrm {\mu ^+}\mathrm {\mu ^-}$ . The analysis uses data from proton-proton collisions with an integrated luminosity of 35.9 $\,\text {fb}^{-1}$ at $\sqrt{s}=13\,\text {TeV}$ collected with the CMS detector at the LHC. The observed limit on the $\mathrm {Z}\rightarrow {\mathrm {J}/\psi } \gamma$ decay branching fraction, assuming that the ${\mathrm {J}/\psi }$ meson is produced unpolarized, is $1.4\times 10^{-6}$ at 95% confidence level, which corresponds to a rate higher than expected in the standard model by a factor of 15. For extreme-polarization scenarios, the observed limit changes from $-13.6$ to $+8.6\%$ with respect to the unpolarized scenario. The observed upper limit on the branching fraction for $\mathrm {H} \rightarrow {\mathrm {J}/\psi } \gamma$ where the ${\mathrm {J}/\psi }$ meson is assumed to be transversely polarized is $7.6\times 10^{-4}$ , a factor of 260 larger than the standard model prediction. The results for the Higgs boson are combined with previous data from proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}=8\,\text {TeV}$ to produce an observed upper limit on the branching fraction for $\mathrm {H} \rightarrow {\mathrm {J}/\psi } \gamma$ that is a factor of 220 larger than the standard model value