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Background Tissue oxygen saturation (StO2) decrease could appear earlier than lactate alteration. However, the correlation between StO2 and lactate clearance was unknown. Methods This was a prospective observational study. All consecutive patients with circulatory shock and lactate over 3 mmol/L were included. Based on the rule of nines, a BSA (body surface area) weighted StO2 was calculated from four sites of StO2 (masseter, deltoid, thenar and knee). The formulation was as follows: masseter StO2 × 9% + (deltoid StO2 + thenar StO2) × (18% + 27%)/ 2 + knee StO2 × 46%. Vital signs, blood lactate, arterial and central venous blood gas were measured simultaneously within 48 h of ICU admission. The predictive value of BSA-weighted StO2 on 6-hour lactate clearance > 10% since StO2 initially monitored was assessed. Results A total of 34 patients were included, of whom 19 (55.9%) had a lactate clearance higher than 10%. The mean SOFA score was lower in cLac ≥ 10% group compared with cLac 2 in deltoid, thenar and knee were significantly higher in clearance group. The area under the receiver operating curves (AUROC) of BSA-weighted StO2 for prediction of lactate clearance (0.92, 95% CI [Confidence Interval] 0.82-1.00) was significantly higher than StO2 of masseter (0.65, 95% CI 0.45–0.84; p 2 (0.85, 0.73–0.98; p = 0.09). Additionally, BSA-weighted StO2 model had continuous net reclassification improvement (NRI) over the knee StO2 and mean StO2 model (continuous NRI 48.1% and 90.2%, respectively). The AUROC of BSA-weighted StO2 was 0.91(95% CI 0.75-1.0) adjusted by mean arterial pressure and norepinephrine dose. Conclusions Our results suggested that BSA-weighted StO2 was a strong predictor of 6-hour lactate clearance in patients with shock.

Minimizing the loss of raw materials is an important issue in the construction industry. The construction material often encounters two-dimensional cutting problems such as steel plates and wooden plates. Reducing material waste by using building information modeling (BIM) and artificial intelligence methods has received considerable attention. Thus, this study focused on two-dimensional cutting stock problems (2D-CSP), and employed the auto-tuning Symbiotic Organisms Search algorithm (SOS) to establish residual material optimization model. The results considering the placement strategy with the rotation of the cutting plates, showed that, compared to other heuristic algorithms such as Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), the SOS algorithm obtained superior solutions to the two-dimensional cutting operation. Therefore, the proposed model possesses a certain application value for solving the optimization problem in the construction industry, and helps reducing the material waste and budget cost.

A population-level description and analysis of sepsis-related mortality in China is key to the planning and assessment of interventional strategies. Retrospective analysis of multiple cause of death (MCOD) recorded in the population-based national mortality surveillance system (NMSS) of China. All sepsis-related deaths occurring in 605 disease surveillance points (DSPs) covering 323.8 million population across China were included in our study. Age-standardized mortality and national estimate of sepsis-related deaths were estimated using the census population in 2010 and 2015, respectively. In 2015, a total of 1,937,299 deaths occurring in any of the 605 DSPs and standardized sepsis-related mortality rate was 66.7 (95% confidence interval [CI] 66.4–67.0) deaths per 100,000 population. This produced a national estimate of 1,025,997 sepsis-related deaths. Sepsis-related mortality rates exhibited significant geographic variation. In multilevel analysis, male sex (rate ratio [RR] 1.582, 95% CI 1.570–1.595), increasing age (RR 1.914 for 5-year group, 95% CI 1.910–1.917), and presence of comorbidity (RR 2.316, 95% CI 2.298–2.335) were independently associated with increased sepsis-related mortality. Higher disposable income (RR 0.717 for the fourth interquartile range vs. the first interquartile range, 95% CI 0.515–0.978) and mean years of education (RR 0.808 for the fourth interquartile range vs. the first interquartile range, 95% CI 0.684–0.955) were negatively associated with sepsis-related mortality. However, population-based hospital doctors were not significantly associated with sepsis-related mortality. The standardized sepsis-related mortality rate in China was high and varied according to socioeconomic indices, even though some uncertainty remained.

The technology of mathematical expression identification and recognition extracts mathematical expressions in document images, and it has been studied for over a decade. Based on previous works, we develop an automatic recognition tool, named EqnEye, which leverages the OpenCV library to perform image processing and Tesseract tool to recognize mathematical symbols. We also apply correction methods before the recognition stage to improve the recognition accuracy. To improve the efficiency for processing images of high resolution, the parallel implementation of thresholding method on GPU is integrated into this work. Experimental results exhibit the success of our correction methods to enhance the accuracy and the slight improvement to the performance. In addition, porting the recognition tool to handy devices can produce more value-added applications.

Many bridges located in seismic hazard regions suffer from serious foundation exposure caused by riverbed scour. Loss of surrounding soil significantly reduces the lateral strength of pile foundations. When the scour depth exceeds a critical level, the strength of the foundation is insufficient to withstand the imposed seismic demand, which induces the potential for unacceptable damage to the piles during an earthquake. This paper presents an analytical approach to assess the earthquake damage potential of bridges with foundation exposure and identify the critical scour depth that causes the seismic performance of a bridge to differ from the original design. The approach employs the well-accepted response spectrum analysis method to determine the maximum seismic response of a bridge. The damage potential of a bridge is assessed by comparing the imposed seismic demand with the strengths of the column and the foundation. The versatility of the analytical approach is illustrated with a numerical example and verified by the nonlinear finite element analysis. The analytical approach is also demonstrated to successfully determine the critical scour depth. Results highlight that relatively shallow scour depths can cause foundation damage during an earthquake, even for bridges designed to provide satisfactory seismic performance.