| 1. |
- Adcox, K, et al.
(författare)
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PHENIX detector overview
- 2003
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Ingår i: Nuclear Instruments & Methods in Physics Research. Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors, and Associated Equipment. - 0167-5087. ; 499:2-3, s. 469-479
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The PHENIX detector is designed to perform a broad study of A-A, p-A, and p-p collisions to investigate nuclear matter under extreme conditions. A wide variety of probes, sensitive to all timescales, are used to study systematic variations with species and energy as well as to measure the spin structure of the nucleon. Designing for the needs of the heavy-ion and polarized-proton programs has produced a detector with unparalleled capabilities. PHENIX measures electron and muon pairs, photons, and hadrons with excellent energy and momentum resolution. The detector consists of a large number of subsystems that are discussed in other papers in this volume. The overall design parameters of the detector are presented. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
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| 2. |
- Jimenez, J. L., et al.
(författare)
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Evolution of Organic Aerosols in the Atmosphere
- 2009
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Ingår i: Science. - : American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). - 0036-8075 .- 1095-9203. ; 326:5959, s. 1525-1529
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Organic aerosol (OA) particles affect climate forcing and human health, but their sources and evolution remain poorly characterized. We present a unifying model framework describing the atmospheric evolution of OA that is constrained by high-time-resolution measurements of its composition, volatility, and oxidation state. OA and OA precursor gases evolve by becoming increasingly oxidized, less volatile, and more hygroscopic, leading to the formation of oxygenated organic aerosol (OOA), with concentrations comparable to those of sulfate aerosol throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Our model framework captures the dynamic aging behavior observed in both the atmosphere and laboratory: It can serve as a basis for improving parameterizations in regional and global models.
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| 3. |
- Adcox, K, et al.
(författare)
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PHENIX central arm tracking detectors
- 2003
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Ingår i: Nuclear Instruments & Methods in Physics Research. Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors, and Associated Equipment. - 0167-5087. ; 499:2-3, s. 489-507
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The PHENIX tracking system consists of Drift Chambers (DC), Pad Chambers (PC) and the Time Expansion Chamber (TEC). PC1/DC and PC2/TEC/PC3 form the inner and outer tracking units, respectively. These units link the track segments that transverse the RICH and extend to the EMCal. The DC measures charged particle trajectories in the r-phi direction to determine P-T of the particles and the invariant mass of particle pairs. The PCs perform 3D spatial point measurements for pattern recognition and longitudinal momentum reconstruction and provide spatial resolution of a few mm in both r-phi and z. The TEC tracks particles passing through the region between the RICH and the EMCal. The design and operational parameters of the detectors are presented and running experience during the first year of data taking with PHENIX is discussed. The observed spatial and momentum resolution is given which imposes a limitation on the identification and characterization of charged particles in various momentum ranges. (C) 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.
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| 4. |
- Evers, AWM, et al.
(författare)
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Implications of Placebo and Nocebo Effects for Clinical Practice: Expert Consensus
- 2018
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Ingår i: Psychotherapy and psychosomatics. - : S. Karger AG. - 1423-0348 .- 0033-3190. ; 87:4, s. 204-210
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- <b><i>Background:</i></b> Placebo and nocebo effects occur in clinical or laboratory medical contexts after administration of an inert treatment or as part of active treatments and are due to psychobiological mechanisms such as expectancies of the patient. Placebo and nocebo studies have evolved from predominantly methodological research into a far-reaching interdisciplinary field that is unravelling the neurobiological, behavioural and clinical underpinnings of these phenomena in a broad variety of medical conditions. As a consequence, there is an increasing demand from health professionals to develop expert recommendations about evidence-based and ethical use of placebo and nocebo effects for clinical practice. <b><i>Methods:</i></b> A survey and interdisciplinary expert meeting by invitation was organized as part of the 1st Society for Interdisciplinary Placebo Studies (SIPS) conference in 2017. Twenty-nine internationally recognized placebo researchers participated. <b><i>Results:</i></b> There was consensus that maximizing placebo effects and minimizing nocebo effects should lead to better treatment outcomes with fewer side effects. Experts particularly agreed on the importance of informing patients about placebo and nocebo effects and training health professionals in patient-clinician communication to maximize placebo and minimize nocebo effects. <b><i>Conclusions:</i></b> The current paper forms a first step towards developing evidence-based and ethical recommendations about the implications of placebo and nocebo research for medical practice, based on the current state of evidence and the consensus of experts. Future research might focus on how to implement these recommendations, including how to optimize conditions for educating patients about placebo and nocebo effects and providing training for the implementation in clinical practice.
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| 5. |
- Dore, Vincent, et al.
(författare)
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CenTauRz : A standardized quantification of tau PET scans
- 2022
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Ingår i: Alzheimer's and Dementia. - : Wiley. - 1552-5260 .- 1552-5279. ; 18:S1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Background: Over the past decade, several PET tracers were developed to visualise and quantify tau pathology in vivo. However, all these tracers have distinct off-target binding, different dynamic ranges and likely different levels of non-specific binding resulting in large variability in semiquantification. We propose to standardise the sampling and the quantification across all available tau tracers. Method: 549 participants underwent tau scans with either 18F-FTP (Cognitively Unimpaired (CU)=54/AD=14), 18F-MK6240 (CU=186/AD=89), 18F-PI2620 (CU=17/AD=21), 18F-PM-PBB3 (CU=30/AD=28), 18F-GTP1 (CU=7/AD=38) or 18F-RO948 (CU=35/AD=30). All CU individuals were Aβ- and all AD were Aβ+. The tau scans were spatially normalized using CapAIBL and the cerebellar cortex was used as reference region. We constructed a “universal” tau mask from the intersection of all the specific tau tracer masks, after subtracting AD from CU. All tau PET studies were sampled with a Mesial Temporal (MTL) and a Meta Temporal (MetaT) composites constrained by the universal mask. For each tracer and in composite, the mean and standard deviation of the Aβ- CU SUVR for each tau tracer were used to generate z-scores (CenTauRz). Result: Using a threshold of 2 CenTauRz in the MetaT regions, all tracers highly discriminated Aβ+ AD from Aβ- CU (ACC=[0.94-1], sens=[0.84-1], spec=[0.96-1]) with mean CenTauRz for the different AD cohorts ranging from 8 to 14. Lower accuracy was observed in the MTL (ACC=[0.78-1]) due to lower sensitivity in some cohorts [0.65-1] however, the specificity was similar to that in the MetaT composite (spec=[0.94,1]). Conclusion: All tracers exhibited comparably high discriminative power to separate Aβ+ AD from Aβ- CU, where AD Aβ+ displayed a consistent range of CenTauRz across tracers. However, there were some differences between cohorts. For example, different PET scanners, with different sensitivities were used. For some cohorts, scans were selected as extreme representative cases, while for others the scans were more representative of clinical settings, with AD patients at early stages (with low or negative tau scans) or with suspected hippocampal sparing subtype that likely explains the lower accuracy in the MTL for some cohorts. Further studies with larger cohorts to validate the universal mask and CenTauRz scale are ongoing.
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| 6. |
- Harris, J. Milton, et al.
(författare)
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Tuning drug release from polyoxazoline-drug conjugates
- 2019
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Ingår i: European Polymer Journal. - : Elsevier BV. - 0014-3057. ; 120
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- Poly(2-oxazoline)-drug conjugates with drugs attached via releasable linkages are being developed for drug delivery. Such conjugates with pendent ester linkages that covalently bind drugs to the polymer backbone exhibit significantly slower hydrolytic release rates in plasma than the corresponding PEG- and dextran-drug conjugates. The slow drug release rates in-vitro of these POZ-drug conjugates contribute to extended in-vivo pharmacokinetic profiles. In some instances, the release kinetics may be relatively sustained and ideal for once-a-week subcutaneous injection, whereas the native drug by itself may only have an in-vivo half-life of a few hours. The origin of this unusual kinetic and pharmacokinetic behavior is proposed here to involve folding of the POZ conjugate such that the relatively hydrophobic drug forms a central core, and the relatively hydrophilic polymer wraps around the core and slows enzymatic attack on the drug-polymer chemical linkage. Here we present evidence supporting this hypothesis and demonstrate how the hypothesis can be used to tune hydrolytic release rates and pharmacokinetics. Evidence for the folding hypothesis is taken from hydrolysis kinetics of a range of drugs in plasma, pharmacokinetics of a range of drugs following subcutaneous injection in laboratory animals, and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) studies showing folding of the POZ-rotigotine molecule. The drugs included in this study to test the hypothesis are: rotigotine, buprenorphine, dexanabinol, cannabidiol (CBD), Delta(9)-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabigerol (CBG).
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| 7. |
- Hohenschurz-Schmidt, David, et al.
(författare)
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Recommendations for the development, implementation, and reporting of control interventions in efficacy and mechanistic trials of physical, psychological, and self-management therapies : the CoPPS Statement
- 2023
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Ingår i: BMJ. British Medical Journal. - : BMJ Publishing Group Ltd. - 0959-8146 .- 0959-535X. ; 381, s. e072108-
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Control interventions (often called "sham," "placebo," or "attention controls") are essential for studying the efficacy or mechanism of physical, psychological, and self-management interventions in clinical trials. This article presents core recommendations for designing, conducting, and reporting control interventions to establish a quality standard in non-pharmacological intervention research. A framework of additional considerations supports researchers' decision making in this context. We also provide a reporting checklist for control interventions to enhance research transparency, usefulness, and rigour.
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| 8. |
- Lehman, Joel, et al.
(författare)
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The Surprising Creativity of Digital Evolution: A Collection of Anecdotes from the Evolutionary Computation and Artificial Life Research Communities
- 2020
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Ingår i: Artificial Life. - : MIT Press - Journals. - 1530-9185 .- 1064-5462. ; 26:2, s. 274-306
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations that often surprise the scientists who discover them. However, the creativity of evolution is not limited to the natural world: Artificial organisms evolving in computational environments have also elicited surprise and wonder from the researchers studying them. The process of evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs. Indeed, many researchers in the field of digital evolution can provide examples of how their evolving algorithms and organisms have creatively subverted their expectations or intentions, exposed unrecognized bugs in their code, produced unexpectedly adaptations, or engaged in behaviors and outcomes, uncannily convergent with ones found in nature. Such stories routinely reveal surprise and creativity by evolution in these digital worlds, but they rarely fit into the standard scientific narrative. Instead they are often treated as mere obstacles to be overcome, rather than results that warrant study in their own right. Bugs are fixed, experiments are refocused, and one-off surprises are collapsed into a single data point. The stories themselves are traded among researchers through oral tradition, but that mode of information transmission is inefficient and prone to error and outright loss. Moreover, the fact that these stories tend to be shared only among practitioners means that many natural scientists do not realize how interesting and lifelike digital organisms are and how natural their evolution can be. To our knowledge, no collection of such anecdotes has been published before. This article is the crowd-sourced product of researchers in the fields of artificial life and evolutionary computation who have provided first-hand accounts of such cases. It thus serves as a written, fact-checked collection of scientifically important and even entertaining stories. In doing so we also present here substantial evidence that the existence and importance of evolutionary surprises extends beyond the natural world, and may indeed be a universal property of all complex evolving systems.
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| 9. |
- Osoegawa, Kazutoyo, et al.
(författare)
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Quality control project of NGS HLA genotyping for the 17th International HLA and Immunogenetics Workshop
- 2019
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Ingår i: Human Immunology. - : ELSEVIER SCIENCE INC. - 0198-8859 .- 1879-1166. ; 80:4, s. 228-236
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The 17th International HLA and Immunogenetics Workshop (IHIW) organizers conducted a Pilot Study (PS) in which 13 laboratories (15 groups) participated to assess the performance of the various sequencing library preparation protocols, NGS platforms and software in use prior to the workshop. The organizers sent 50 cell lines to each of the 15 groups, scored the 15 independently generated sets of NGS HLA genotyping data, and generated "consensus" HLA genotypes for each of the 50 cell lines. Proficiency Testing (PT) was subsequently organized using four sets of 24 cell lines, selected from 48 of 50 PS cell lines, to validate the quality of NGS HLA typing data from the 34 participating IHIW laboratories. Completion of the PT program with a minimum score of 95% concordance at the HLA-A, HLA-B, HLA-C, HLA-DRB1 and HLA-DQB1 loci satisfied the requirements to submit NGS HLA typing data for the 17th IHIW projects. Together, these PS and PT efforts constituted the 17th IHIW Quality Control project. Overall PT concordance rates for HLA-A, HLA-B, HLA-C, HLA-DPA1, HLA-DPB1, HLA-DQA1, HLA-DQB1, HLA-DRB1, HLA-DRB3, HLA-DRB4 and HLA-DRB5 were 98.1%, 97.0% and 98.1%, 99.0%, 98.6%, 98.8%, 97.6%, 96.0%, 99.1%, 90.0% and 91.7%, respectively. Across all loci, the majority of the discordance was due to allele dropout. The high cost of NGS HLA genotyping per experiment likely prevented the retyping of initially failed HLA loci. Despite the high HLA genotype concordance rates of the software, there remains room for improvement in the assembly of more accurate consensus DNA sequences by NGS HLA genotyping software.
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| 10. |
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