Who approves/pays for additional monitoring?

Major considerations in the provision of healthcare are availability, affordability, accessibility, and appropriateness, especially in the setting of heart failure where disease burden is growing, developments have been rapid and newer biomarkers, diagnostic and imaging techniques, monitoring systems, devices, procedures, and drugs have all been developed in a relatively short period of time. Many monitoring and diagnostic systems have been developed but the disproportionate cost of conducting trials of their effectiveness has limited their uptake. There are added complexities, in that the utilization of doctors for the supervision of the monitoring results may be optimal in one setting and not in another because of differences in the characteristics of organization of healthcare provision, making even interpretation of the trials we have had, still difficult to interpret. New technologies are continuously changing the approach to healthcare and will reshape the structure of the healthcare systems in the future. Mobile technologies can empower patients and carers by giving them more control over their health and social care needs and reducing their dependence on healthcare professionals for monitoring their health, but a significant problem is the integration of the multitude of monitored parameters with clinical data and the recognition of intervention thresholds. Digital technology can help, but we need to prove its cost/efficacy and how it will be paid for. Governments in many European countries and worldwide are trying to establish frameworks that promote the convergence of standards and regulations for telemedicine solutions and yet simultaneously health authorities are closely scrutinizing healthcare spending, with the objective of reducing and optimizing expenditure in the provision of health services. There are multiple factors to be considered for the reimbursement models associated with the implementation of physiological monitoring yet it remains a challenge in cash-strapped health systems

Utilizing blockchain technology for supply chain transparency: A resource orchestration perspective

Driven by pressures from multiple stakeholders, supply chain transparency (SCT) has emerged as a phenomenon of increased interest. To address concerns about practices and processes at point of origin locations for raw materials in global supply chains, blockchain technology (BCT) has the potential to enhance SCT. Supply chain research has started to advance the field's understanding of SCT, but many questions remain, including how SCT should be conceptualized, how firms can effectively facilitate it, and the benefits of providing it, especially when BCT is utilized. The gaps suggest the need for fundamental theoretical development about the resources and capabilities underlying the development, application, and derived value of SCT. This research designed a case study around a BCT implementation project between a small artisan coffee producer and a startup BCT service provider. Using the resource orchestration perspective, the findings result in theoretical insights about how the mechanisms in structuring, bundling, and leveraging processes operate to offer SCT to stakeholders, and the value creation derived as a result

Dark Matter Annihilation in The Galactic Center As Seen by the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope

We analyze the first two years of data from the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope from the direction of the inner 10 degrees around the Galactic Center with the intention of constraining, or finding evidence of, annihilating dark matter. We find that the morphology and spectrum of the emission between 1.25 degrees and 10 degrees from the Galactic Center is well described by a the processes of decaying pions produced in cosmic ray collisions with gas, and the inverse Compton scattering of cosmic ray electrons in both the disk and bulge of the Inner Galaxy, along with gamma rays from known points sources in the region. The observed spectrum and morphology of the emission within approximately 1.25 degrees (~175 parsecs) of the Galactic Center, in contrast, departs from the expectations for by these processes. Instead, we find an additional component of gamma ray emission that is highly concentrated around the Galactic Center. The observed morphology of this component is consistent with that predicted from annihilating dark matter with a cusped (and possibly adiabatically contracted) halo distribution (density proportional to r^{-gamma}, with gamma=1.18 to 1.33). The observed spectrum of this component, which peaks at energies between 1-4 GeV (in E^2 units), can be well fit by a 7-10 GeV dark matter particle annihilating primarily to tau leptons with a cross section in the range of 4.6 x 10^-27 to 5.3 x 10^-26 cm^3/s, depending on how the dark matter distribution is normalized. We also discuss other sources for this emission, including the possibility that much of it originates from the Milky Way's supermassive black hole.Comment: 23 pages, 16 figure

First bounds on the high-energy emission from isolated Wolf-Rayet binary systems

High-energy gamma-ray emission is theoretically expected to arise in tight binary star systems (with high mass loss and high velocity winds), although the evidence of this relationship has proven to be elusive so far. Here we present the first bounds on this putative emission from isolated Wolf-Rayet (WR) star binaries, WR 147 and WR 146, obtained from observations with the MAGIC telescope.Comment: (Authors are the MAGIC Collaboration.) Manuscript in press at The Astrophysical Journal Letter

Implementation of the Random Forest Method for the Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescope MAGIC

The paper describes an application of the tree classification method Random Forest (RF), as used in the analysis of data from the ground-based gamma telescope MAGIC. In such telescopes, cosmic gamma-rays are observed and have to be discriminated against a dominating background of hadronic cosmic-ray particles. We describe the application of RF for this gamma/hadron separation. The RF method often shows superior performance in comparison with traditional semi-empirical techniques. Critical issues of the method and its implementation are discussed. An application of the RF method for estimation of a continuous parameter from related variables, rather than discrete classes, is also discussed.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figure

Constraining Dark Matter Properties with Gamma-Rays from the Galactic Center with Fermi-LAT

We study the capabilities of the Fermi-LAT instrument on board of the Fermi mission to constrain particle dark matter properties, as annihilation cross section, mass and branching ratio into dominant annihilation channels, with gamma-ray observations from the galactic center. Besides the prompt gamma-ray flux, we also take into account the contribution from the electrons/positrons produced in dark matter annihilations to the gamma-ray signal via inverse Compton scattering off the interstellar photon background, which turns out to be crucial in the case of dark matter annihilations into mu+mu- and e+e- pairs. We study the signal dependence on different parameters like the region of observation, the density profile, the assumptions for the dark matter model and the uncertainties in the propagation model. We also show the effect of the inclusion of a 20% systematic uncertainty in the gamma-ray background. If Fermi-LAT is able to distinguish a possible dark matter signal from the large gamma-ray background, we show that for dark matter masses below ~200 GeV, Fermi-LAT will likely be able to determine dark matter properties with good accuracy.Comment: 38 pages, 13 figures, 4 tables; to match published versio

Cosmic Explorer: The U.S. Contribution to Gravitational-Wave Astronomy beyond LIGO

This white paper describes the research and development needed over the next decade to realize "Cosmic Explorer," the U.S. node of a future third-generation detector network that will be capable of observing and characterizing compact gravitational-wave sources to cosmological redshifts

Probing quantum gravity using photons from a flare of the active galactic nucleus Markarian 501 observed by the MAGIC telescope

We analyze the timing of photons observed by the MAGIC telescope during a flare of the active galactic nucleus Mkn 501 for a possible correlation with energy, as suggested by some models of quantum gravity (QG), which predict a vacuum refractive index \simeq 1 + (E/M_{QGn})^n, n = 1,2. Parametrizing the delay between gamma-rays of different energies as \Delta t =\pm\tau_l E or \Delta t =\pm\tau_q E^2, we find \tau_l=(0.030\pm0.012) s/GeV at the 2.5-sigma level, and \tau_q=(3.71\pm2.57)x10^{-6} s/GeV^2, respectively. We use these results to establish lower limits M_{QG1} > 0.21x10^{18} GeV and M_{QG2} > 0.26x10^{11} GeV at the 95% C.L. Monte Carlo studies confirm the MAGIC sensitivity to propagation effects at these levels. Thermal plasma effects in the source are negligible, but we cannot exclude the importance of some other source effect.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, Phys. Lett. B, reflects published versio

Unfolding of differential energy spectra in the MAGIC experiment

The paper describes the different methods, used in the MAGIC experiment, to unfold experimental energy distributions of cosmic ray particles (gamma-rays). Questions and problems related to the unfolding are discussed. Various procedures are proposed which can help to make the unfolding robust and reliable. The different methods and procedures are implemented in the MAGIC software and are used in most of the analyses.Comment: Submitted to NIM