Correlation coefficients between longitudinally measured markers in pediatric liver transplant candidates with biliary atresia

Biliary atresia (BA) is the most common pediatric liver disease leading to liver transplantation during childhood, with very poor prognosis if untreated. In this study, we aimed to apply a linear mixed effect (LME) model to estimate the correlation coefficients among longitudinally measured total serum bilirubin, international normalized ratio (INR) for prothrombin time, and serum albumin, the three important prognosis predictors of pretransplant mortality. The dataset was obtained from the Standard Transplant Analysis and Research (STAR) of the United Network of Organ Sharing (UNOS). The primary analysis cohort consists of 1,700 pediatric liver transplant candidates who started their liver transplant waiting list between February 27, 2002 and June 24, 2010 with at least one follow-up measurement and had primary diagnosis of biliary atresia at the time of listing. In applying the LME model, we estimated the longitudinally measured markers via two different correlation structures: autoregressive of order one (AR1) and compound symmetry (CS) in rearranged data by a 7-day equally spaced repeated measures interval. Under the AR(1) structure, the estimated total correlation coefficients between total bilirubin and INR, total bilirubin and albumin, and INR and albumin were 0.4151, -0.2404, and -0.206, respectively, whereas the partial correlation coefficients (within-subject correlation) were 0.0656, 0.0916, and -0.0451, respectively. Under the CS structure, the estimated total correlation coefficients were 0.4307, -0.2432, and -0.1912, respectively and the partial correlation coefficients were 0.1742, -0.0678, and -0.0509, respectively for the above analysis. AR(1) structure had a better fit based on the Akaike information criterion (AIC) and the Bayesian information criterion (BIC). Several sensitivity analyses were conducted to understand the stability of the estimated overall correlation. The magnitudes of the estimates obtained from different sensitivity methods do not differ substantially. Public health significance: For two repeatedly measured markers, the total correlation, the between-subject correlation with time-averaged values, and partial correlation for within-subject measurements will provide a more complete picture of the correlations for these markers. Correlation by stacking all measurements of a subject together or between-subject correlation with time-averaged values is a measurement ignoring time effects and could either over or under estimate the total correlation coefficients. The estimated correlations between any two markers measured repeatedly for patients awaiting liver transplantation will give physicians a tool to analyze the relationship between two markers for patients during the waitlist period and may further help physicians understand disease progression and refine treatment strategy for candidates prior to receiving a transplant

How do occupants perceive thermal comfort in a hybrid office space? A case study of a co-working space in London

The work pattern has been reshaped towards a hybrid style since the lockdown in the pandemic, while the office design needs to be evolved with the change in working mode. It is important to understand how to design the workspace to meet the new demand. This study investigates the environmental performance of a flexible co-working space in London by a longitudinal field study, with a specific focus on thermal comfort and lighting sensations and preferences. The field study is composed of a questionnaire survey about occupants’ thermal comfort sensations and environmental preferences and a concurrent measurement of indoor environmental data (temperature, relative humidity, air velocity and illumination level). This paper presents a preliminary analysis of the data collected in spring 2022. A total of 79 responses are recorded over three months. The findings in this study are expected to provide new insight into environmental design solutions for the hybrid and flexible work setting

Circuit-level fault tolerance of cat codes

Bosonic codes offer the possibility of storing quantum information in a single infinite-dimensional physical system endowed with the capability to correct errors, thereby reducing the number of physical components needed to protect against noise. Much of the current efforts in bosonic codes are on correcting only loss errors, while deferring the correction of phase errors -- perhaps actively suppressed -- to subsequent layers of encoding with standard qubit codes. Rotationally symmetric bosonic codes, which include the well-known cat and binomial codes, are capable of simultaneous correction of both loss and phase errors, offer an alternate route that deals with arbitrary errors already at the base layer. Grimsmo et al. [PRX 10, 011058 (2020)] analyzed the family of such codes and proposed general error-correction circuits to correct both loss and phase errors, reporting high noise thresholds in the presence of loss and phase errors on the input, while the error-correction circuits remain noiseless. A proper assessment, however, requires consideration of circuit-level noise, where the individual circuit components can themselves be faulty and introduce errors on the encoded information. Here, we carry out such a circuit-level analysis, and assess the performance of the error-correction circuits for the storage of information encoded with cat codes. While the circuits of Grimsmo et al.~are formally fault tolerant even under circuit-level noise, the thresholds are significantly worse. We show how, through waiting-time optimization and the use of squeezing, we can restore the noise requirements to ones plausibly achievable with near-term quantum hardware. Our circuit-level analysis also reveals important features of the error-correction circuits not visible in the earlier ideal-circuit perspective

Optimal control for Hamiltonian parameter estimation in non-commuting and bipartite quantum dynamics

The ability to characterise a Hamiltonian with high precision is crucial for the implementation of quantum technologies. In addition to the well-developed approaches utilising optimal probe states and optimal measurements, the method of optimal control can be used to identify time-dependent pulses applied to the system to achieve higher precision in the estimation of Hamiltonian parameters, especially in the presence of noise. Here, we extend optimally controlled estimation schemes for single qubits to non-commuting dynamics as well as two interacting qubits, demonstrating improvements in terms of maximal precision, time-stability, as well as robustness over uncontrolled protocols.Comment: Submission to SciPost Physics; 18 pages, 13 figure

RefGPT: Reference -> Truthful & Customized Dialogues Generation by GPTs and for GPTs

General chat models, like ChatGPT, have attained impressive capability to resolve a wide range of NLP tasks by tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) with high-quality instruction data. However, collecting human-written high-quality data, especially multi-turn dialogues, is expensive and unattainable for most people. Though previous studies have used powerful LLMs to generate the dialogues automatically, but they all suffer from generating untruthful dialogues because of the LLMs hallucination. Therefore, we propose a method called RefGPT to generate enormous truthful and customized dialogues without worrying about factual errors caused by the model hallucination. RefGPT solves the model hallucination in dialogue generation by restricting the LLMs to leverage the given reference instead of reciting their own knowledge to generate dialogues. Additionally, RefGPT adds detailed controls on every utterances to enable highly customization capability, which previous studies have ignored. On the basis of RefGPT, we also propose two high-quality dialogue datasets generated by GPT-4, namely RefGPT-Fact and RefGPT-Code. RefGPT-Fact is 100k multi-turn dialogue datasets based on factual knowledge and RefGPT-Code is 76k multi-turn dialogue dataset covering a wide range of coding scenarios. Our code and datasets are released in https://github.com/ziliwangnlp/RefGP

Potential of household environmental resources and practices in eliminating residual malaria transmission: a case study of Tanzania, Burundi, Malawi and Liberia

Background: The increasing protection gaps of insecticide-treated nets and indoor-residual spraying methods against malaria have led to an emergence of residual transmission in sub-Saharan Africa and thus, supplementary strategies to control mosquitoes are urgently required. Objective: To assess household environmental resources and practices that increase or reduce malaria risk among children under-five years of age in order to identify those aspects that can be adopted to control residual transmission. Methods: Household environmental resources, practices and malaria test results were extracted from Malaria Indicators Survey datasets for Tanzania, Burundi, Malawi and Liberia with 16,747 children from 11,469 households utilised in the analysis. Logistic regressions were performed to quantify the contribution of each factor to malaria occurrence. Results: Cattle rearing reduced malaria risk between 26%-49% while rearing goats increased the risk between 26%-32%. All piped-water systems reduced malaria risk between 30%-87% (Tanzania), 48%-95% (Burundi), 67%-77% (Malawi) and 58%- 73 (Liberia). Flush toilets reduced malaria risk between 47%-96%. Protected-wells increased malaria risk between 19%-44%. Interestingly, boreholes increased malaria risk between 19%-75%. Charcoal use reduced malaria risk between 11%-49%. Conclusion: Vector control options for tackling mosquitoes were revealed based on their risk levels. These included cattle rearing, installation of piped-water systems and flush toilets as well as use of smokeless fuels

Dominating Role of Ionic Strength in the Sedimentation of Nano-TiO 2

Various factors affect the sedimentation behavior of nanotitanium dioxide (n-TiO2) in water. Accordingly, this study aimed to select the dominating factor. An index of sedimentation efficiency related to n-TiO2 concentration was applied to precisely describe the n-TiO2 sedimentation behavior. Ionic strength (IS), natural organic matter (NOM) content, and pH were evaluated in sedimentation experiments. An orthogonal experimental design was used to sequence the affecting ability of these factors. Furthermore, simulative sedimentation experiments were performed. The n-TiO2 sedimentation behavior was only affected by pH and NOM content at low levels of IS. Moreover, divalent cations can efficiently influence the n-TiO2 sedimentation behavior compared with monovalent cations at fixed IS. Seven different environmental water samples were also used to investigate the n-TiO2 sedimentation behavior in aquatic environments. Results confirmed that IS, in which divalent cations may play an important role, was the dominating factor influencing the n-TiO2 sedimentation behavior in aquatic environments