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- Ademuyiwa, Adesoji O., et al.
(author)
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Determinants of morbidity and mortality following emergency abdominal surgery in children in low-income and middle-income countries
- 2016
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In: BMJ Global Health. - : BMJ Publishing Group Ltd. - 2059-7908. ; 1:4
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Background: Child health is a key priority on the global health agenda, yet the provision of essential and emergency surgery in children is patchy in resource-poor regions. This study was aimed to determine the mortality risk for emergency abdominal paediatric surgery in low-income countries globally.Methods: Multicentre, international, prospective, cohort study. Self-selected surgical units performing emergency abdominal surgery submitted prespecified data for consecutive children aged <16 years during a 2-week period between July and December 2014. The United Nation's Human Development Index (HDI) was used to stratify countries. The main outcome measure was 30-day postoperative mortality, analysed by multilevel logistic regression.Results: This study included 1409 patients from 253 centres in 43 countries; 282 children were under 2 years of age. Among them, 265 (18.8%) were from low-HDI, 450 (31.9%) from middle-HDI and 694 (49.3%) from high-HDI countries. The most common operations performed were appendectomy, small bowel resection, pyloromyotomy and correction of intussusception. After adjustment for patient and hospital risk factors, child mortality at 30 days was significantly higher in low-HDI (adjusted OR 7.14 (95% CI 2.52 to 20.23), p<0.001) and middle-HDI (4.42 (1.44 to 13.56), p=0.009) countries compared with high-HDI countries, translating to 40 excess deaths per 1000 procedures performed.Conclusions: Adjusted mortality in children following emergency abdominal surgery may be as high as 7 times greater in low-HDI and middle-HDI countries compared with high-HDI countries. Effective provision of emergency essential surgery should be a key priority for global child health agendas.
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- Thomas, HS, et al.
(author)
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- 2019
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swepub:Mat__t
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- Tinetti, Giovanna, et al.
(author)
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The EChO science case
- 2015
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In: Experimental astronomy. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0922-6435 .- 1572-9508. ; 40:2-3, s. 329-391
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The discovery of almost two thousand exoplanets has revealed an unexpectedly diverse planet population. We see gas giants in few-day orbits, whole multi-planet systems within the orbit of Mercury, and new populations of planets with masses between that of the Earth and Neptune-all unknown in the Solar System. Observations to date have shown that our Solar System is certainly not representative of the general population of planets in our Milky Way. The key science questions that urgently need addressing are therefore: What are exoplanets made of? Why are planets as they are? How do planetary systems work and what causes the exceptional diversity observed as compared to the Solar System? The EChO (Exoplanet Characterisation Observatory) space mission was conceived to take up the challenge to explain this diversity in terms of formation, evolution, internal structure and planet and atmospheric composition. This requires in-depth spectroscopic knowledge of the atmospheres of a large and well-defined planet sample for which precise physical, chemical and dynamical information can be obtained. In order to fulfil this ambitious scientific program, EChO was designed as a dedicated survey mission for transit and eclipse spectroscopy capable of observing a large, diverse and well-defined planet sample within its 4-year mission lifetime. The transit and eclipse spectroscopy method, whereby the signal from the star and planet are differentiated using knowledge of the planetary ephemerides, allows us to measure atmospheric signals from the planet at levels of at least 10(-4) relative to the star. This can only be achieved in conjunction with a carefully designed stable payload and satellite platform. It is also necessary to provide broad instantaneous wavelength coverage to detect as many molecular species as possible, to probe the thermal structure of the planetary atmospheres and to correct for the contaminating effects of the stellar photosphere. This requires wavelength coverage of at least 0.55 to 11 mu m with a goal of covering from 0.4 to 16 mu m. Only modest spectral resolving power is needed, with R similar to 300 for wavelengths less than 5 mu m and R similar to 30 for wavelengths greater than this. The transit spectroscopy technique means that no spatial resolution is required. A telescope collecting area of about 1 m(2) is sufficiently large to achieve the necessary spectro-photometric precision: for the Phase A study a 1.13 m(2) telescope, diffraction limited at 3 mu m has been adopted. Placing the satellite at L2 provides a cold and stable thermal environment as well as a large field of regard to allow efficient time-critical observation of targets randomly distributed over the sky. EChO has been conceived to achieve a single goal: exoplanet spectroscopy. The spectral coverage and signal-to-noise to be achieved by EChO, thanks to its high stability and dedicated design, would be a game changer by allowing atmospheric composition to be measured with unparalleled exactness: at least a factor 10 more precise and a factor 10 to 1000 more accurate than current observations. This would enable the detection of molecular abundances three orders of magnitude lower than currently possible and a fourfold increase from the handful of molecules detected to date. Combining these data with estimates of planetary bulk compositions from accurate measurements of their radii and masses would allow degeneracies associated with planetary interior modelling to be broken, giving unique insight into the interior structure and elemental abundances of these alien worlds. EChO would allow scientists to study exoplanets both as a population and as individuals. The mission can target super-Earths, Neptune-like, and Jupiter-like planets, in the very hot to temperate zones (planet temperatures of 300-3000 K) of F to M-type host stars. The EChO core science would be delivered by a three-tier survey. The EChO Chemical Census: This is a broad survey of a few-hundred exoplanets, which allows us to explore the spectroscopic and chemical diversity of the exoplanet population as a whole. The EChO Origin: This is a deep survey of a subsample of tens of exoplanets for which significantly higher signal to noise and spectral resolution spectra can be obtained to explain the origin of the exoplanet diversity (such as formation mechanisms, chemical processes, atmospheric escape). The EChO Rosetta Stones: This is an ultra-high accuracy survey targeting a subsample of select exoplanets. These will be the bright "benchmark" cases for which a large number of measurements would be taken to explore temporal variations, and to obtain two and three dimensional spatial information on the atmospheric conditions through eclipse-mapping techniques. If EChO were launched today, the exoplanets currently observed are sufficient to provide a large and diverse sample. The Chemical Census survey would consist of > 160 exoplanets with a range of planetary sizes, temperatures, orbital parameters and stellar host properties. Additionally, over the next 10 years, several new ground- and space-based transit photometric surveys and missions will come on-line (e.g. NGTS, CHEOPS, TESS, PLATO), which will specifically focus on finding bright, nearby systems. The current rapid rate of discovery would allow the target list to be further optimised in the years prior to EChO's launch and enable the atmospheric characterisation of hundreds of planets.
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- Abazajian, Kevork, et al.
(author)
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CMB-S4 : Forecasting Constraints on Primordial Gravitational Waves
- 2022
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In: Astrophysical Journal. - : American Astronomical Society. - 0004-637X .- 1538-4357. ; 926:1
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- CMB-S4—the next-generation ground-based cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiment—is set to significantly advance the sensitivity of CMB measurements and enhance our understanding of the origin and evolution of the universe. Among the science cases pursued with CMB-S4, the quest for detecting primordial gravitational waves is a central driver of the experimental design. This work details the development of a forecasting framework that includes a power-spectrum-based semianalytic projection tool, targeted explicitly toward optimizing constraints on the tensor-to-scalar ratio, r, in the presence of Galactic foregrounds and gravitational lensing of the CMB. This framework is unique in its direct use of information from the achieved performance of current Stage 2–3 CMB experiments to robustly forecast the science reach of upcoming CMB-polarization endeavors. The methodology allows for rapid iteration over experimental configurations and offers a flexible way to optimize the design of future experiments, given a desired scientific goal. To form a closed-loop process, we couple this semianalytic tool with map-based validation studies, which allow for the injection of additional complexity and verification of our forecasts with several independent analysis methods. We document multiple rounds of forecasts for CMB-S4 using this process and the resulting establishment of the current reference design of the primordial gravitational-wave component of the Stage-4 experiment, optimized to achieve our science goals of detecting primordial gravitational waves for r > 0.003 at greater than 5σ, or in the absence of a detection, of reaching an upper limit of r < 0.001 at 95% CL.
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- Ade, P. A. R., et al.
(author)
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A Constraint on Primordial B-modes from the First Flight of the Spider Balloon-borne Telescope
- 2022
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In: Astrophysical Journal. - : American Astronomical Society. - 0004-637X .- 1538-4357. ; 927:2
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- We present the first linear polarization measurements from the 2015 long-duration balloon flight of SPIDER, which is an experiment that is designed to map the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) on degree angular scales. The results from these measurements include maps and angular power spectra from observations of 4.8% of the sky at 95 and 150 GHz, along with the results of internal consistency tests on these data. While the polarized CMB anisotropy from primordial density perturbations is the dominant signal in this region of sky, Galactic dust emission is also detected with high significance. Galactic synchrotron emission is found to be negligible in the SPIDER bands. We employ two independent foreground-removal techniques to explore the sensitivity of the cosmological result to the assumptions made by each. The primary method uses a dust template derived from Planck data to subtract the Galactic dust signal. A second approach, which constitutes a joint analysis of SPIDER and Planck data in the harmonic domain, assumes a modified-blackbody model for the spectral energy distribution of the dust with no constraint on its spatial morphology. Using a likelihood that jointly samples the template amplitude and r parameter space, we derive 95% upper limits on the primordial tensor-to-scalar ratio from Feldman-Cousins and Bayesian constructions, finding r < 0.11 and r < 0.19, respectively. Roughly half the uncertainty in r derives from noise associated with the template subtraction. New data at 280 GHz from SPIDER´s second flight will complement the Planck polarization maps, providing powerful measurements of the polarized Galactic dust emission.
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- Bergman, A. S., et al.
(author)
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280 GHz Focal Plane Unit Design and Characterization for the SPIDER-2 Suborbital Polarimeter
- 2018
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In: Journal of Low Temperature Physics. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0022-2291 .- 1573-7357. ; 193:5-6, s. 1075-1084
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- We describe the construction and characterization of the 280 GHz bolometric focal plane units (FPUs) to be deployed on the second flight of the balloon-borne SPIDER instrument. These FPUs are vital to SPIDER's primary science goal of detecting or placing an upper limit on the amplitude of the primordial gravitational wave signature in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) by constraining the B-mode contamination in the CMB from Galactic dust emission. Each 280 GHz focal plane contains a 16 x 16 grid of corrugated silicon feedhorns coupled to an array of aluminum-manganese transition-edge sensor (TES) bolometers fabricated on 150 mm diameter substrates. In total, the three 280 GHz FPUs contain 1530 polarization-sensitive bolometers (765 spatial pixels) optimized for the low loading environment in flight and read out by time-division SQUID multiplexing. In this paper, we describe the mechanical, thermal, and magnetic shielding architecture of the focal planes and present cryogenic measurements which characterize yield and the uniformity of several bolometer parameters. The assembled FPUs have high yields, with one array as high as 95% including defects from wiring and readout. We demonstrate high uniformity in device parameters, finding the median saturation power for each TES array to be similar to 3 pW at 300 mK with a less than 6% variation across each array at 1 sigma. These focal planes will be deployed alongside the 95 and 150 GHz telescopes in the SPIDER-2 instrument, slated to fly from McMurdo Station in Antarctica in December 2018.
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- Bowden, John A., et al.
(author)
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Harmonizing lipidomics : NIST interlaboratory comparison exercise for lipidomics using SRM 1950-Metabolites in Frozen Human Plasma
- 2017
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In: Journal of Lipid Research. - 0022-2275 .- 1539-7262. ; 58:12, s. 2275-2288
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- As the lipidomics field continues to advance, self-evaluation within the community is critical. Here, we performed an interlaboratory comparison exercise for lipidomics using Standard Reference Material (SRM) 1950-Metabolites in Frozen Human Plasma, a commercially available reference material. The interlaboratory study comprised 31 diverse laboratories, with each laboratory using a different lipidomics workflow. A total of 1,527 unique lipids were measured across all laboratories and consensus location estimates and associated uncertainties were determined for 339 of these lipids measured at the sum composition level by five or more participating laboratories. These evaluated lipids detected in SRM 1950 serve as community-wide benchmarks for intra-and interlaboratory quality control and method validation. These analyses were performed using nonstandardized laboratory-independent workflows. The consensus locations were also compared with a previous examination of SRM 1950 by the LIPID MAPS consortium.jlr While the central theme of the interlaboratory study was to provide values to help harmonize lipids, lipid mediators, and precursor measurements across the community, it was also initiated to stimulate a discussion regarding areas in need of improvement.
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