Search

Numerous investigations on procalcitonin (PCT) have been carried out, although few with large sample size. To deal with the complexity of sepsis, an understanding of PCT in heterogeneous clinical conditions is required.Hospitalized patients aged 10-79 years were included in this retrospective and cross-sectional study. PCT tests were assayed within 2 days of blood culture.A total of 2952 cases (from 2538 patients) were enrolled in this study, including 440 cases in the 'positive BC' group, 123 cases in the 'positive body fluid culture' group, and 2389 cases in the 'negative all culture' group. Median PCT values were 4.53 ng/ml, 2.95 ng/ml, and 0.49 ng/ml, respectively. Median PCT values in the gram-negative BC group and gram-positive BC group, respectively, were 6.99 ng/ml and 2.96 ng/ml. Median PCT values in the 'positive hydrothorax culture' group, 'positive ascites culture' group, 'positive bile culture' group, and 'positive cerebrospinal fluid culture' group, respectively, were 1.39 ng/ml, 8.32 ng/ml, 5.98 ng/ml, and 0.46 ng/ml. In all, 357 cases were classified into the 'sepsis' group, 150 of them were classified into the 'severe sepsis' group. Median PCT values were 5.63 ng/ml and 11.06 ng/ml, respectively.PCT could be used in clinical algorithms to diagnose positive infections and sepsis. Different PCT levels could be related to different kinds of microbemia, different infection sites, and differing severity of sepsis.

In this study, a kind of uncertain network design problem, network design problem under uncertain construction cost, is researched.The discrete network design problem under uncertain construction costs deals with the selection of links to be added to the existing network, so as to minimize the total travel costs in the network. It is assumed that the value of the demand between each pair of origin and destination is a constant and the construction costs of each potential link addition follow a certain stochastic distribution. In this paper, a bi-level and stochastic programming model for the discrete network design problem is proposed. The construction costs of potential links are assumed as random variables and mutually independent with each other in this model. The upper-level model is a chance constrain model with the objective function of minimizing the total travel costs in the network, and the lower-level model is a user equilibrium model. The stochastic model is then transformed into a deterministic one. A branch-and-bound solution algorithm is designed to solve the deterministic model in an efficient way. At last, a computational experiment is conducted to illustrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the approach proposed in this paper. The results show that the stochastic model is more flexible and practical compared with the deterministic one.

The berth and quay crane in port are scarce resources. The scheduling optimization of them affects the ship's operating costs directly. In this paper we build an integration optimization model of berth allocation and quay crane scheduling to minimize the operating costs of quay crane and operating costs of the ships. A new genetic and ant colony algorithm is designed to solve this model.