Search

Research demonstrates that technological progress in additive manufacturing is mature to ensure high-quality and reliable devices. This emerging interdisciplinary engineering science is becoming commercial and very well documented while opening to new opportunities in several fields. However, it is currently unknown how this additive manufacturing technique might work when applied to frontier technologies such as particle physics detectors as a whole. We hypothesize that a fully automated 3D stack printing of a detector would be ideal to drastically reduce: 1) detector construction time 2) the number of runtime construction errors 3) the probability of mistakes during construction. The initial hypothesis is that 3D printing, applied to instrumentation for physics, will enhance detector performance and capabilities, cutting construction costs and improving standardization over large scale productions. By fully optimizing the entire design and by implementing the construction via additive manufacturing, the expectation is to achieve a standardized RPC detector, mechanically more resistant/resilient and electrically more stable if compared to the state-of-the-art. The successful implementation of this project has the long-term objective to impact not only the physics domain but also the security (cargo imaging and general- purpose scanners) and healthcare (tomography machines) domains, where particle detectors are widely adopted.

This retrospective study examines treatment outcomes associated with atypical antipsychotic medications in areas of 1) treatment response; 2) employment; 3) living arrangements; and 4) hospitalization rates. The study included a random sample of adults with serious mental illness, who participated in treatment for at least 36 months. Study results suggest that the utilization of these medications, despite higher costs, promote cost savings of public dollars through reduced hospitalization and enhanced functioning/outcomes. The study results proved to be very vital to the Virginia State Legislature and key system policy makers and funding authorities, as important actions were taken to enhance consumer access to these important medications and essential services.

The cost-effectiveness of using the atypical antipsychotic medication clozapine for severe psychosis was examined in a rural public-sector community mental health setting in Virginia. Based on a sample of 20 patients, use of clozapine resulted in estimated cost savings of between $3,000 and $9,000 per patient per year, including the costs of dropouts from treatment. Savings were mainly due to a decline in hospitalization from 47.7+/-59.8 days per patient in the year before clozapine treatment to 4.6+/-11.3 days in the year after. Although this study had methodological limitations, the results suggest that clozapine may be cost-effective in this setting.

An instrument for the rapid routine counting of tritium is described. It utilizes a liquid scintillator with coincidence circuitry, and incorporates a new fixed-cell design. An introductory analysis of the geometry of the system is made. The optimum counting efficiency of the counter for tritium in 25 ml of toluene-based scintillator is 25% with a background of 180 c.p.m. The use of the counter with tritiated water samples and with 14C/3H mixtures is described.

A Machine has been built in the Hammersmith Hospital Physics Department to relieve the tedium of routine isotope scanning by hand. An automatic scanner was needed which had to be cheap, within the capabilities of our limited work-shop, and using as much standard equipment as possible. It was felt that it would be desirable for the machine to give not only the pictorial distribution of radioactivity localised in part of the body, but also the same information as a hand-operated scan, i.e. the count-rate at any point and lines of equal count-rate or isocount lines. The principle of the so-called “scintiscanner” is familiar (e.g. Bolliger and Poretti, 1956); a pictorial distribution is built up from a series of black marks on paper—a single mark being made for a selected total number of pulses received. At higher count-rates the dots are closer together than at lower count-rates and the eye is capable of picking out the areas of higher count-rate as areas of greater density of dots (Fig. 8). In order to obta...