8 research outputs found
Caricatures and Humoristic Illustrations by Hugo Boettinger between 1918 and 1934
No full textCaricature and Humoristic Illustrations by Hugo Boettinger between 1918 and 1934 Abstract This bachelor's thesis deals with caricatures and humoristic drawings by Hugo Boettinger from 1918 to 1934. The author first introduces the sources, the role and the nature of caricatures and humorous illustrations in the first Czechoslovak republic. The author gives some insight into the life story of Hugo Boettinger, his art conception of caricatures and humoristic drawings and topics that interest Boettinger. The main part focuses on the uncovering the meaning and historical context of his drawings. Boettinger paid attention to politics and to the situation of the Catholic Church in the newly established Czechoslovak Republic. In his paintings he dealt with social issues, technological advances, snobbery and small town inclination and in generally with changes in attitudes and values in life of society. He reflected the perception of fashion trends in relation to the changing social status of women. As an artist he watched the events on the art scene and parodied particularly avant-garde art. In the last section the author offers a comparison of drawings by Hugo Boettinger with other contemporary caricaturists and draftsmen. Keywords Hugo Boettinger - Dr. Desiderius - Caricature - Humoristic illustration - Drawing -..
Economic impact of clinical decision support interventions based on electronic health records
No full textBackground!#!Unnecessary healthcare utilization, non-adherence to current clinical guidelines, or insufficient personalized care are perpetual challenges and remain potential major cost-drivers for healthcare systems around the world. Implementing decision support systems into clinical care is promised to improve quality of care and thereby yield substantial effects on reducing healthcare expenditure. In this article, we evaluate the economic impact of clinical decision support (CDS) interventions based on electronic health records (EHR).!##!Methods!#!We searched for studies published after 2014 using MEDLINE, CENTRAL, WEB OF SCIENCE, EBSCO, and TUFTS CEA registry databases that encompass an economic evaluation or consider cost outcome measures of EHR based CDS interventions. Thereupon, we identified best practice application areas and categorized the investigated interventions according to an existing taxonomy of front-end CDS tools.!##!Results and discussion!#!Twenty-seven studies are investigated in this review. Of those, twenty-two studies indicate a reduction of healthcare expenditure after implementing an EHR based CDS system, especially towards prevalent application areas, such as unnecessary laboratory testing, duplicate order entry, efficient transfusion practice, or reduction of antibiotic prescriptions. On the contrary, order facilitators and undiscovered malfunctions revealed to be threats and could lead to new cost drivers in healthcare. While high upfront and maintenance costs of CDS systems are a worldwide implementation barrier, most studies do not consider implementation cost. Finally, four included economic evaluation studies report mixed monetary outcome results and thus highlight the importance of further high-quality economic evaluations for these CDS systems.!##!Conclusion!#!Current research studies lack consideration of comparative cost-outcome metrics as well as detailed cost components in their analyses. Nonetheless, the positive economic impact of EHR based CDS interventions is highly promising, especially with regard to reducing waste in healthcare
Domain-Specific Event Abstraction
No full textProcess mining aims at deriving process knowledge from event logs, which contain data recorded during process executions. Typically, event logs need to be generated from process execution data, stored in different kinds of information systems. In complex domains like healthcare, data is available only at different levels of granularity. Event abstraction techniques allow the transformation of events to a common level of granularity, which enables effective process mining. Existing event abstraction techniques do not sufficiently take into account domain knowledge and, as a result, fail to deliver suitable event logs in complex application domains.This paper presents an event abstraction method based on domain ontologies. We show that the method introduced generates semantically meaningful high-level events, suitable for process mining; it is evaluated on real-world patient treatment data of a large U.S. health system
A Simulation Method for Design and Development of Magnetic Shape Memory Actuators
No full textThe systems/products and their design processes have become more and more complicated due to the fact that their requirements in terms of function, durability, reliability and energy efficiency have been increased significantly and that their leading time has to be short and their materials cost has to be low. To meet these requirements, individual parts and subsystems have to offer increased functionality and efficiency themselves. It has been found that smart materials, such as piezo ceramics or various shape memory alloys as well as less known dielectric elastomers or magnetic shape memory alloys, offer ideal preconditions to fulfil such requirements. Among the various shape memory alloys, the Magnetic Shape Memory (MSM) alloy is a kind of smart material that can elongate and contract in a magnetic field. Based on the MSM alloy a new type of smart electromagnetic actuators have been designed and developed. This kind of actuator exhibits the features above. Typically, the MSM material is a monocrystalline Ni-Mn-Ga alloy, which has the ability to change its size or shape very fast and many million times repeatedly. State-of-the-art alloys are able to achieve a magnetic field induced strain of up to 12%. The magneto-mechanical characteristic of MSM alloys is being constantly improved. However, as far as the author is aware, there are no efficient and commercially available tools for engineers to design MSM-based actuators. To achieve this, simulation tools for design are indispensable. This thesis is dedicated to this task.
In this PhD thesis, new design and simulation techniques for MSM-based actuators have been studied. In particular, three simulation methods have been proposed. These three methods extend standard magneto-static FEM simulation techniques by taking into account the magneto-mechanical coupling and the magnetic anisotropy of the MSM materials. They differ in terms of the necessary a priori alloy characterisation (i.e., measurement effort), computational complexity and consequent computing time. The magneto-mechanical characteristics of the MSM material are a necessary and fundamental ingredient for this type of simulation. However, the characterisation of the MSM materials is a very challenging task and requires specific modifications to standard measurement approaches. So, in this thesis, some specific measurement methods of the magneto-mechanical characteristics of the MSM materials have been proposed, designed and developed. It is described how existing measurement instruments can be modified to measure the unique magneto-mechanical characteristics of MSM, so they are applicable and with practical values. Various tests have been carried out to validate the new methods and the necessary characterisations of the properties of MSM materials have been performed, such as the measurement of the permeability of MSM under a defined stress during elongation. The new measurement results have been analysed and the findings have been used to design and develop the simulation methods. The three simulation methods can be used to predict and optimise the current-elongation behaviour of an MSM element under the load of a mechanical stress while excited by a magnetic field. Extensive experiments have been carried out to validate these three simulation methods. The results show that the three methods are relatively simple but, at the same time, very effective means to model, predict and optimise the properties of an MSM actuator using finite element tools. In addition, the experiment results have also shown that the simulation methods can be used to gain some deep insights into the magneto-mechanical interaction between the MSM element and the electromagnetic actuator. In this thesis an evolutionary algorithm which works together with the simulation methods has been developed to achieve individual optimised solutions in very short times.
In summary, from the experiment results, it has been found that the measurements and simulation methods proposed and developed in this thesis; enable designers to perform simulations for a high-quality actuator design based on the magneto-mechanical properties of MSM alloys. This is the first time that a MSM can be characterised for simulation purposes in a fast and precise way to predict MSM and electromagnetic actuator interactions and identify and optimise the design parameters of such actuators.
However, these simulation methods are strongly dependent on the measurement of the magneto-mechanical characteristics of magnetic shape memory alloys, whose precision can be further improved. To reach commercial success as well higher precision in the simulation prediction, further achievements in the field of material science (e.g. smoothness of mechanical curves) are also necessary
Cardiometabolic effects of genetic upregulation of the interleukin 1 receptor antagonist: a Mendelian randomisation analysis
No full textCardiometabolic effects of genetic upregulation of the interleukin 1 receptor antagonist : a Mendelian randomisation analysis
No full textFunded by: UK Medical Research Council, British Heart Foundation, UK National Institute for Health Research, National Institute for Health Research Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre, European Research Council, and European Commission Framework Programme 7.To investigate potential cardiovascular and other effects of long-term pharmacological interleukin 1 (IL-1) inhibition, we studied genetic variants that produce inhibition of IL-1, a master regulator of inflammation. Methods: We created a genetic score combining the effects of alleles of two common variants (rs6743376 and rs1542176) that are located upstream of IL1RN, the gene encoding the IL-1 receptor antagonist (IL-1Ra; an endogenous inhibitor of both IL-1α and IL-1β); both alleles increase soluble IL-1Ra protein concentration. We compared effects on inflammation biomarkers of this genetic score with those of anakinra, the recombinant form of IL-1Ra, which has previously been studied in randomised trials of rheumatoid arthritis and other inflammatory disorders. In primary analyses, we investigated the score in relation to rheumatoid arthritis and four cardiometabolic diseases (type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, ischaemic stroke, and abdominal aortic aneurysm; 453 411 total participants). In exploratory analyses, we studied the relation of the score to many disease traits and to 24 other disorders of proposed relevance to IL-1 signalling (746 171 total participants). Findings: For each IL1RN minor allele inherited, serum concentrations of IL-1Ra increased by 0·22 SD (95% CI 0·18-0·25; 12·5%; p=9·3 × 10), concentrations of interleukin 6 decreased by 0·02 SD (-0·04 to -0·01; -1·7%; p=3·5 × 10), and concentrations of C-reactive protein decreased by 0·03 SD (-0·04 to -0·02; -3·4%; p=7·7 × 10). We noted the effects of the genetic score on these inflammation biomarkers to be directionally concordant with those of anakinra. The allele count of the genetic score had roughly log-linear, dose-dependent associations with both IL-1Ra concentration and risk of coronary heart disease. For people who carried four IL-1Ra-raising alleles, the odds ratio for coronary heart disease was 1·15 (1·08-1·22; p=1·8 × 10) compared with people who carried no IL-1Ra-raising alleles; the per-allele odds ratio for coronary heart disease was 1·03 (1·02-1·04; p=3·9 × 10). Per-allele odds ratios were 0·97 (0·95-0·99; p=9·9 × 10) for rheumatoid arthritis, 0·99 (0·97-1·01; p=0·47) for type 2 diabetes, 1·00 (0·98-1·02; p=0·92) for ischaemic stroke, and 1·08 (1·04-1·12; p=1·8 × 10) for abdominal aortic aneurysm. In exploratory analyses, we observed per-allele increases in concentrations of proatherogenic lipids, including LDL-cholesterol, but no clear evidence of association for blood pressure, glycaemic traits, or any of the 24 other disorders studied. Modelling suggested that the observed increase in LDL-cholesterol could account for about a third of the association observed between the genetic score and increased coronary risk. Interpretation: Human genetic data suggest that long-term dual IL-1α/β inhibition could increase cardiovascular risk and, conversely, reduce the risk of development of rheumatoid arthritis. The cardiovascular risk might, in part, be mediated through an increase in proatherogenic lipid concentrations.Peer reviewe
