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Aim: To assess the strength of associations between interrelated perinatal risk factors and mortality in very preterm infants. Methods: Information on all live‐born infants delivered in Sweden at 22–31 weeks of gestational age (GA) from 2011 to 2019 was gathered from the Swedish Neonatal Quality Register, excluding infants with major malformations or not resuscitated because of anticipated poor prognosis. Twenty‐seven perinatal risk factors available at birth were exposures and in‐hospital mortality outcome. Orthogonal partial least squares discriminant analysis was applied to assess proximity between individual risk factors and mortality, and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were used to estimate discriminant ability. Results: In total, 638 of 8,396 (7.6%) infants died. Thirteen risk factors discriminated reduced mortality; the most important were higher Apgar scores at 5 and 10 min, GA and birthweight. Restricting the analysis to preterm infants <28 weeks' GA (n = 2939, 16.9% mortality) added antenatal corticosteroid therapy as significantly associated with lower mortality. The area under the ROC curve (the C‐statistic) using all risk factors was 0.86, as determined after both internal and external validation. Conclusion: Apgar scores, gestational age and birthweight show stronger associations with mortality in very preterm infants than several other perinatal risk factors available at birth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills (Ofsted) is responsible for inspecting services that care for children and young people in England and Wales. This paper presents findings from an independent study of Ofsted inspections into children's social care in England, covering reports under three inspection frameworks during the period 2009 to 2016. The research aimed to identify the main themes of recommendations made in Ofsted reports and to explore similarities and differences between frameworks and between local authorities. The methodological approach was document analysis. A stratified sample of 60 reports was prepared on the basis of inspection framework and local authority characteristics such as local deprivation, Ofsted rating, and urban/rural category. A thematic analysis was conducted of the recommendations in each report, with emerging themes subjected to an iterative process of coding and categorization. The findings identified nine categories of themes, the most common of which were performance management, casework, oversight of practice, and multiagency working. Overall, the recommendations were strongly oriented towards process issues and compliance with standards. Recommendations were found to differ somewhat between inspection frameworks but remained largely consistent between local authorities with different characteristics. The paper concludes by examining the implications of findings for the current regulatory framework in children's social care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Survival for high-grade gliomas is poor, at least partly explained by intratumoral heterogeneity contributing to treatment resistance. Radiological evaluation of treatment response is in most cases limited to assessment of tumor size months after the initiation of therapy. Diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and its estimate of the apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) has been widely investigated, as it reflects tumor cellularity and proliferation. The aim of this study was to investigate texture analysis of ADC images in conjunction with multivariate image analysis as a means for identification of pretreatment imaging biomarkers. Methods: Twenty-three consecutive high-grade glioma patients were treated with radiotherapy (2 Gy/60 Gy) with concomitant and adjuvant temozolomide. ADC maps and T1-weighted anatomical images with and without contrast enhancement were collected prior to treatment, and (residual) tumor contrast enhancement was delineated. A gray-level co-occurrence matrix analysis was performed on the ADC maps in a cuboid encapsulating the tumor in coronal, sagittal, and transversal planes, giving a total of 60 textural descriptors for each tumor. In addition, similar examinations and analyses were performed at day 1, week 2, and week 6 into treatment. Principal component analysis (PCA) was applied to reduce dimensionality of the data, and the five largest components (scores) were used in subsequent analyses. MRI assessment three months after completion of radiochemotherapy was used for classifying tumor progression or regression. Results: The score scatter plots revealed that the first, third, and fifth components of the pretreatment examinations exhibited a pattern that strongly correlated to survival. Two groups could be identified: one with a median survival after diagnosis of 1099 days and one with 345 days, p = 0.0001. Conclusions: By combining PCA and texture analysis, ADC texture characteristics were identified, which seems to hold pretreatment prognostic information, independent of known prognostic factors such as age, stage, and surgical procedure. These findings encourage further studies with a larger patient cohort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Low weight, small footprint, and high performances are essential requisites for the implementation of energy storage devices within consumer electronics. One way to achieve these goals is to increase the thickness of the active material layer. In this work, carbonized and graphitized rayon felt, a cellulose‐derived material, is used as a three‐dimensional current collector scaffold to enable the incorporation of large amount of active energy storage materials and ionic liquid‐based gel electrolyte in the supercapacitor devices. PEDOT:PSS, alone or in combination with active carbon, has been used as the active material. Three‐dimensional supercapacitors with high per unit area capacitance (more than 1.1 F/cm2) have been achieved owing to the loading of large amount of active material in the felt matrix. Areal energy density of more than 101 μWh/cm2 and areal power density of more than 5.9 mW/cm2 have been achieved for 0.8 V operating voltage at a current density of 1 mA/cm2. A nanographite material was found to be beneficial in reducing the internal serial resistance of the supercapacitor to lower than 1.7 Ω. Furthermore, it was shown that even after 2000 times cycling test, the devices could still retain its performance with at least 88% coulombic efficiency for all the devices. All the materials are readily available commercially, environmentally sustainable and the process can potentially be upscaled with industrial process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spatial control of cell detachment is potentially of great interest when selecting cells for clonal expansion and in order to obtain a homogeneous starting population of cells aimed for tissue engineering purposes. Here, selective detachment and cell sorting of human primary keratinocytes and fibroblasts is achieved using thin films of a conjugated polymer. Upon electrochemical oxidation, the polymer film swells, cracks, and finally detaches taking cells cultured on top along with it. The polymer can be patterned using standard photolithography to fabricate a cross-point matrix with polymer pixels that can be individually addressed and thus detached. Detachment occurs above a well-defined threshold of +0.7 V versus Ag/AgCl, allowing the use of a relatively simple and easily manufactured passive matrix-addressing configuration, based on a resistor network, to control the cell-sorting device. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding and making the most of complex data collected from multiple sources is a challenging task. Data integration is the procedure of describing the main features in multiple data blocks, and several methods for multiblock analysis have been previously developed, including OnPLS and JIVE. One of the main challenges is how to visualize and interpret the results of multiblock analyses because of the increased model complexity and sheer size of data. In this paper, we present novel visualization tools that simplify interpretation and overview of multiblock analysis. We introduce a correlation matrix plot that provides an overview of the relationships between blocks found by multiblock models. We also present a multiblock scatter plot, a metadata correlation plot, and a variation distribution plot, that simplify the interpretation of multiblock models. We demonstrate our visualizations on an industrial case study in vibration spectroscopy (NIR, UV, and Raman datasets) as well as a multiomics integration study (transcript, metabolite, and protein datasets). We conclude that our visualizations provide useful tools to harness the complexity of multiblock analysis and enable better understanding of the investigated system. In this paper, we present novel visualization tools that simplify interpretation and overview of multiblock analysis. We demonstrate our visualizations on an industrial case study in vibration spectroscopy as well as a multiomics integration study. We conclude that our visualizations provide useful tools to harness the complexity of multiblock analysis and enable better understanding of the investigated system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]