8,419 research outputs found
Electrocardiographic patch devices and contemporary wireless cardiac monitoring.
Cardiac electrophysiologic derangements often coexist with disorders of the circulatory system. Capturing and diagnosing arrhythmias and conduction system disease may lead to a change in diagnosis, clinical management and patient outcomes. Standard 12-lead electrocardiogram (ECG), Holter monitors and event recorders have served as useful diagnostic tools over the last few decades. However, their shortcomings are only recently being addressed by emerging technologies. With advances in device miniaturization and wireless technologies, and changing consumer expectations, wearable “on-body” ECG patch devices have evolved to meet contemporary needs. These devices are unobtrusive and easy to use, leading to increased device wear time and diagnostic yield. While becoming the standard for detecting arrhythmias and conduction system disorders in the outpatient setting where continuous ECG monitoring in the short to medium term (days to weeks) is indicated, these cardiac devices and related digital mobile health technologies are reshaping the clinician-patient interface with important implications for future healthcare delivery
Locality in Theory Space
Locality is a guiding principle for constructing realistic quantum field
theories. Compactified theories offer an interesting context in which to think
about locality, since interactions can be nonlocal in the compact directions
while still being local in the extended ones. In this paper, we study locality
in "theory space", four-dimensional Lagrangians which are dimensional
deconstructions of five-dimensional Yang-Mills. In explicit ultraviolet (UV)
completions, one can understand the origin of theory space locality by the
irrelevance of nonlocal operators. From an infrared (IR) point of view, though,
theory space locality does not appear to be a special property, since the
lowest-lying Kaluza-Klein (KK) modes are simply described by a gauged nonlinear
sigma model, and locality imposes seemingly arbitrary constraints on the KK
spectrum and interactions. We argue that these constraints are nevertheless
important from an IR perspective, since they affect the four-dimensional cutoff
of the theory where high energy scattering hits strong coupling. Intriguingly,
we find that maximizing this cutoff scale implies five-dimensional locality. In
this way, theory space locality is correlated with weak coupling in the IR,
independent of UV considerations. We briefly comment on other scenarios where
maximizing the cutoff scale yields interesting physics, including theory space
descriptions of QCD and deconstructions of anti-de Sitter space.Comment: 40 pages, 11 figures; v2: references and clarifications added; v3:
version accepted by JHE
Sharp Global Bounds for the Hessian on Pseudo-Hermitian Manifolds
We find sharp bounds for the norm inequality on a Pseudo-hermitian manifold,
where the L^2 norm of all second derivatives of the function involving
horizontal derivatives is controlled by the L^2 norm of the sub-Laplacian.
Perturbation allows us to get a-priori bounds for solutions to sub-elliptic PDE
in non-divergence form with bounded measurable coefficients. The method of
proof is through a Bochner technique. The Heisenberg group is seen to be en
extremal manifold for our inequality in the class of manifolds whose Ricci
curvature is non-negative.Comment: 13 page
On the Alexandrov Topology of sub-Lorentzian Manifolds
It is commonly known that in Riemannian and sub-Riemannian Geometry, the
metric tensor on a manifold defines a distance function. In Lorentzian
Geometry, instead of a distance function it provides causal relations and the
Lorentzian time-separation function. Both lead to the definition of the
Alexandrov topology, which is linked to the property of strong causality of a
space-time. We studied three possible ways to define the Alexandrov topology on
sub-Lorentzian manifolds, which usually give different topologies, but agree in
the Lorentzian case. We investigated their relationships to each other and the
manifold's original topology and their link to causality.Comment: 20 page
Cough quality in children: a comparison of subjective vs. bronchoscopic findings
BACKGROUND: Cough is the most common symptom presenting to doctors. The quality of cough (productive or wet vs dry) is used clinically as well as in epidemiology and clinical research. There is however no data on the validity of cough quality descriptors. The study aims were to compare (1) cough quality (wet/dry and brassy/non-brassy) to bronchoscopic findings of secretions and tracheomalacia respectively and, (2) parent's vs clinician's evaluation of the cough quality (wet/dry). METHODS: Cough quality of children (without a known underlying respiratory disease) undergoing elective bronchoscopy was independently evaluated by clinicians and parents. A 'blinded' clinician scored the secretions seen at bronchoscopy on pre-determined criteria and graded (1 to 6). Kappa (K) statistics was used for agreement, and inter-rater and intra-rater agreement examined on digitally recorded cough. A receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was used to determine if cough quality related to amount of airway secretions present at bronchoscopy. RESULTS: Median age of the 106 children (62 boys, 44 girls) enrolled was 2.6 years (IQR 5.7). Parent's assessment of cough quality (wet/dry) agreed with clinicians' (K = 0.75, 95%CI 0.58–0.93). When compared to bronchoscopy (bronchoscopic secretion grade 4), clinicians' cough assessment had the highest sensitivity (0.75) and specificity (0.79) and were marginally better than parent(s). The area under the ROC curve was 0.85 (95%CI 0.77–0.92). Intra-observer (K = 1.0) and inter-clinician agreement for wet/dry cough (K = 0.88, 95%CI 0.82–0.94) was very good. Weighted K for inter-rater agreement for bronchoscopic secretion grades was 0.95 (95%CI 0.87–1). Sensitivity and specificity for brassy cough (for tracheomalacia) were 0.57 and 0.81 respectively. K for both intra and inter-observer clinician agreement for brassy cough was 0.79 (95%CI 0.73–0.86). CONCLUSIONS: Dry and wet cough in children, as determined by clinicians and parents has good clinical validity. Clinicians should however be cognisant that children with dry cough may have minimal to mild airway secretions. Brassy cough determined by respiratory physicians is highly specific for tracheomalacia
Discrete Particle Swarm Optimization for the minimum labelling Steiner tree problem
Particle Swarm Optimization is an evolutionary method inspired by the
social behaviour of individuals inside swarms in nature. Solutions of the problem are
modelled as members of the swarm which fly in the solution space. The evolution is
obtained from the continuous movement of the particles that constitute the swarm
submitted to the effect of the inertia and the attraction of the members who lead the
swarm. This work focuses on a recent Discrete Particle Swarm Optimization for combinatorial optimization, called Jumping Particle Swarm Optimization. Its effectiveness is
illustrated on the minimum labelling Steiner tree problem: given an undirected labelled
connected graph, the aim is to find a spanning tree covering a given subset of nodes,
whose edges have the smallest number of distinct labels
The Dark Side of the Electroweak Phase Transition
Recent data from cosmic ray experiments may be explained by a new GeV scale
of physics. In addition the fine-tuning of supersymmetric models may be
alleviated by new O(GeV) states into which the Higgs boson could decay. The
presence of these new, light states can affect early universe cosmology. We
explore the consequences of a light (~ GeV) scalar on the electroweak phase
transition. We find that trilinear interactions between the light state and the
Higgs can allow a first order electroweak phase transition and a Higgs mass
consistent with experimental bounds, which may allow electroweak baryogenesis
to explain the cosmological baryon asymmetry. We show, within the context of a
specific supersymmetric model, how the physics responsible for the first order
phase transition may also be responsible for the recent cosmic ray excesses of
PAMELA, FERMI etc. We consider the production of gravity waves from this
transition and the possible detectability at LISA and BBO
Wavelet-Based Detection of Outliers in Poisson INAR(1) Time Series
The presence of outliers or discrepant observations has a negative impact
in time series modelling. This paper considers the problem of detecting outliers,
additive or innovational, single, multiple or in patches, in count time series modelled by first-order Poisson integer-valued autoregressive, PoINAR(1), models. To
address this problem, two wavelet-based approaches that allow the identification of
the time points of outlier occurrence are proposed. The effectiveness of the proposed
methods is illustrated with synthetic as well as with an observed dataset
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