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Acknowledgements: We would like to thank Polygeia, a student-led global health think tank, for its support in organising the project. Specifically, we would like to thank Haowen Kwan (Polygeia) and Ananya Manchanda (University of Cambridge). We would also like to thank Elizabeth Evans (Costello Medical, UK) and Dr Simran Chana (NHS) for their advice during the project and for reviewing the manuscript., Healthcare as an industry is recognised as one of the most innovative. Despite heavy regulation, there is substantial scope for new technologies and care models to not only boost patient outcomes but to do so at reduced cost to healthcare systems and consumers. Promoting innovation within national health systems such as the National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom (UK) has been set as a key target for health care professionals and policy makers. However, while the UK has a world-class biomedical research industry, several reports in the last twenty years have highlighted the difficulties faced by the NHS in encouraging and adopting innovations, with the journey from idea to implementation of health technology often taking years and being very expensive, with a high failure rate. This has led to the establishment of several innovation pathways within and around the NHS, to encourage the invention, development and implementation of cost-effective technologies that improve health care delivery. These pathways span local, regional and national health infrastructure. They operate at different stages of the innovation pipeline, with their scope and work defined by location, technology area or industry sector, based on the specific problem identified when they were set up. In this introductory review, we outline each of the major innovation pathways operating at local, regional and national levels across the NHS, including their history, governance, operating procedures and areas of expertise. The extent to which innovation pathways address current challenges faced by innovators is discussed, as well as areas for improvement and future study.

Summary Perinatal outcome and infant development in 73 preterm breech deliveries is described in relation to mode of deliver-. 32 such cases were delivered b- caesarean section and 41 b- the vaginal route between April 1982 and December 1983 at the 5 major government deliver- units in Singapore - all with comparable neonatal services. Vaginal deliver- was associated with a higher intrapartum and neonatal mortalit- and morbidit- when compared with infants delivered b- caesarean section (mortalit- rate in vaginal deliver- group = 17.1% compared with 6.3% in caesarean section group). Furthermore, amongst the 25 children assessed at 12 months of age, there was a tendenc- to better performance in gross motor function and language abilit- in those delivered abdominall-. The present results suggest that the preterm breech might benefit from caesarean section even if variables other than the mode of deliver- influence the outcome. These findings are consistent with previous reports which have also been briefl- reviewed. However, the higher maternal morbidit- associated with caesarean deliver- and the risk for unnecessar- surgical intervention (eg in cases of malformed fetuses) make a careful preoperative assessment imperative.

The continued development of femtosecond mid-infrared (IR) sources with ultrabroad spectral width is critical for probing and controlling complex molecular structural dynamics on an ultrafast timescale. We report on a sub-20 fs, coherent mid-IR source with an octave-spanning spectral bandwidth (>2000 cm−1) tunable from 2–8 micrometers (37.5–150 THz), with energy >0.4 μJ/pulse at 1 kHz. The mid-IR pulses are generated by four-wave mixing during the filamentation of intense 800 nm and 400 nm pulses in various gas media. Spectral tunability is achieved by the choice of gas, pressure and input 800 nm pulse energy.

Since tree-structured data such as XML files are widely used for data representation and exchange on the Internet, discovering frequent tree patterns over tree-structured data streams becomes an interesting issue. In this paper, we propose an online algorithm to continuously discover the current set of frequent tree patterns from the data stream. A novel and efficient technique is introduced to incrementally generate all candidate tree patterns without duplicates. Moreover, a framework for counting the approximate frequencies of the candidate tree patterns is presented. Combining these techniques, the proposed approach is able to compute frequent tree patterns with guarantees of completeness and accuracy.