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Global warming and continuous fossil fuel depletion are worldwide phenomena that pose challenges such as the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and the further exploitation of renewable energy sources. Nevertheless, the transition from fossil fuels to a renewable-energy-based economy demands more innovative solutions and developments such as the Power-to-Gas-to-Power (PtoGtoP) idea. Hydrogen is considered one of the clean energy carriers in the concept of PtoGtoP. However, this strategy still suffers from several challenges, like intermittent inflows of energy, high costs, and rather low energy efficiency due to the losses during conversion and storage. The goal of the Digi-HyPro (Digitalized Hydrogen Process Chain for the Energy Transition) project is to develop an efficient and modular PtoGtoP system. The concept of this modular system, called Smart-Energy-Transform-Unit (SET-Unit), aims to design a decentralized and scalable system for clean energy demands spreading across different locations. The SET-Unit serves to optimize the connections between renewable sources and the current power and gas grid demand. Applying this concept, hydrogen generated by an electrolyzer can be stored compactly and safely in a metal hydride storage system or fed into the natural gas grid. On-demand, hydrogen can also be taken from the intermediate storage facility or the gas grid by applying gas separation techniques and can be delivered (i) to an integrated fuel cell to produce power or (ii) to a metal hydride compressor to provide hydrogen for the mobility sector (trucks, cars, trains, etc.). Component and system level simulations are performed to design, develop and optimize the individual and overall integrated system. These digital models draw critical data from experiments and are validated using prototype setups. For this purpose, experimental setups on a laboratory scale of 10 kWel, and an intermediate scale of 50 kWel are part of the Digi-HyPro project’s plan. This multidisciplinary investigation involves the optimization of the digital SET-Unit system with experimental demonstrations in kWel ranges. Final scalability studies in the industrially relevant MWel range can pave the way to an efficiently networked green energy system.

Background In critically ill patients, auscultation might be challenging as dorsal lung fields are difficult to reach in supine-positioned patients, and the environment is often noisy. In recent years, clinicians have started to consider lung ultrasound as a useful diagnostic tool for a variety of pulmonary pathologies, including pulmonary edema. The aim of this study was to compare lung ultrasound and pulmonary auscultation for detecting pulmonary edema in critically ill patients. Methods This study was a planned sub-study of the Simple Intensive Care Studies-I, a single-center, prospective observational study. All acutely admitted patients who were 18 years and older with an expected ICU stay of at least 24 h were eligible for inclusion. All patients underwent clinical examination combined with lung ultrasound, conducted by researchers not involved in patient care. Clinical examination included auscultation of the bilateral regions for crepitations and rhonchi. Lung ultrasound was conducted according to the Bedside Lung Ultrasound in Emergency protocol. Pulmonary edema was defined as three or more B lines in at least two (bilateral) scan sites. An agreement was described by using the Cohen κ coefficient, sensitivity, specificity, negative predictive value, positive predictive value, and overall accuracy. Subgroup analysis were performed in patients who were not mechanically ventilated. Results The Simple Intensive Care Studies-I cohort included 1075 patients, of whom 926 (86%) were eligible for inclusion in this analysis. Three hundred seven of the 926 patients (33%) fulfilled the criteria for pulmonary edema on lung ultrasound. In 156 (51%) of these patients, auscultation was normal. A total of 302 patients (32%) had audible crepitations or rhonchi upon auscultation. From 130 patients with crepitations, 86 patients (66%) had pulmonary edema on lung ultrasound, and from 209 patients with rhonchi, 96 patients (46%) had pulmonary edema on lung ultrasound. The agreement between auscultation findings and lung ultrasound diagnosis was poor (κ statistic 0.25). Subgroup analysis showed that the diagnostic accuracy of auscultation was better in non-ventilated than in ventilated patients. Conclusion The agreement between lung ultrasound and auscultation is poor. Trial registration NCT02912624. Registered on September 23, 2016.

Common risk factors for psychiatric and other brain disorders are likely to converge on biological pathways influencing the development and maintenance of brain structure and function across life. Using structural MRI data from 45,615 individuals aged 3–96 years, we demonstrate distinct patterns of apparent brain aging in several brain disorders and reveal genetic pleiotropy between apparent brain aging in healthy individuals and common brain disorders. The author list between I.A. and M.Z. is in alphabetic order. The authors were funded by the Research Council of Norway (276082 LifespanHealth (T.K.), 213837 (O.A.A), 223273 NORMENT (O.A.A.), 204966 (L.T.W.), 229129 (O.A.A.), 249795 (L.T.W.), 273345 (L.T.W.) and 283798 SYNSCHIZ (O.A.A.)), the South-Eastern Norway Regional Health Authority (2013-123 (O.A.A.), 2014-097 (L.T.W.), 2015-073 (L.T.W.) and 2016083 (L.T.W.)), Stiftelsen Kristian Gerhard Jebsen (SKGJ-MED-008), the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (ERC Starting Grant, Grant agreement No. 802998 BRAINMINT (L.T.W.)), NVIDIA Corporation GPU Grant (T.K.), and the European Commission 7th Framework Programme (602450, IMAGEMEND (A.M.-L.)).

OBJECTIVE: We wished to explore the use, diagnostic capability and outcomes of bronchoscopy added to noninvasive testing in immunocompromised patients. In this setting, an inability to identify the cause of acute hypoxaemic respiratory failure is associated with worse outcome. Every effort should be made to obtain a diagnosis, either with noninvasive testing alone or combined with bronchoscopy. However, our understanding of the risks and benefits of bronchoscopy remains uncertain. PATIENTS AND METHODS: This was a pre-planned secondary analysis of Efraim, a prospective, multinational, observational study of 1611 immunocompromised patients with acute respiratory failure admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU). We compared patients with noninvasive testing only to those who had also received bronchoscopy by bivariate analysis and after propensity score matching. RESULTS: Bronchoscopy was performed in 618 (39%) patients who were more likely to have haematological malignancy and a higher severity of illness score. Bronchoscopy alone achieved a diagnosis in 165 patients (27% adjusted diagnostic yield). Bronchoscopy resulted in a management change in 236 patients (38% therapeutic yield). Bronchoscopy was associated with worsening of respiratory status in 69 (11%) patients. Bronchoscopy was associated with higher ICU (40% versus 28%; p, SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Contains fulltext : 202693.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder characterized by numerous subtle changes in brain structure and function. Machine learning allows exploring the utility of combining structural and functional brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) measures for diagnostic application, but this approach has been hampered by sample size limitations and lack of differential diagnostic data. Here, we performed a multi-site machine learning analysis to explore brain structural patterns of T1 MRI data in 2668 individuals with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder, and healthy controls. We found reproducible changes of structural parameters in schizophrenia that yielded a classification accuracy of up to 76% and provided discrimination from ADHD, through it lacked specificity against bipolar disorder. The observed changes largely indexed distributed grey matter alterations that could be represented through a combination of several global brain-structural parameters. This multi-site machine learning study identified a brain-structural signature that could reproducibly differentiate schizophrenia patients from controls, but lacked specificity against bipolar disorder. While this currently limits the clinical utility of the identified signature, the present study highlights that the underlying alterations index substantial global grey matter changes in psychotic disorders, reflecting the biological similarity of these conditions, and provide a roadmap for future exploration of brain structural alterations in psychiatric patients.

This document collects the proceedings of the "Parton Radiation and Fragmentation from LHC to FCC-ee" workshop (http://indico.cern.ch/e/ee\_jets16) held at CERN in Nov. 2016. The writeup reviews the latest theoretical and experimental developments on parton radiation and parton-hadron fragmentation studies --including analyses of LEP, B-factories, and LHC data-- with a focus on the future perspectives reacheable in $e^+e^-$ measurements at the Future Circular Collider (FCC-ee), with multi-ab$^{-1}$ integrated luminosities yielding 10$^{12}$ and 10$^{8}$ jets from Z and W bosons decays as well as 10$^5$ gluon jets from Higgs boson decays. The main topics discussed are: (i) parton radiation and parton-to-hadron fragmentation functions (splitting functions at NNLO, small-$z$ NNLL resummations, global FF fits including Monte Carlo (MC) and neural-network analyses of the latest Belle/BaBar high-precision data, parton shower MC generators), (ii) jet properties (quark-gluon discrimination, $e^+e^-$ event shapes and multi-jet rates at NNLO+N$^{n}$LL, jet broadening and angularities, jet substructure at small-radius, jet charge determination, $e^+e^-$ jet reconstruction algorithms), (iii) heavy-quark jets (dead cone effect, charm-bottom separation, gluon-to-$b\bar{b}$ splitting), and (iv) non-perturbative QCD phenomena (colour reconnection, baryon and strangeness production, Bose-Einstein and Fermi-Dirac final-state correlations, colour string dynamics: spin effects, helix hadronization)., Comment: 181 pages, 120 figures. Proceedings "Parton Radiation and Fragmentation from LHC to FCC-ee" Workshop (CERN, Nov. 2016), David d'Enterria, Peter Z. Skands (eds.)