Attention, the intersection of cost and quality in health care

A method for assessing health care technology that models the demand on the clinician's attention exerted by patients' data (diagnostic and therapeutic) can provide a means for simultaneously reducing the cost and improving the quality of health care. The attentional demand exerted by patients' data can be measured by the amount of uncertainty in the data. Uncertainty can be expressed mathematically by the concept of entropy in information theory.     

Study of 18-cm long single-sided AC-coupled silicon microstripdetectors

The SSC GEM silicon Central Tracker design incorporated 18-cm long single-sided AC-coupled silicon microstrip ladders. Compared to the 12-cm long ladders considered in the preliminary stages of the tracker design, the 18-cm long ladders have the advantage of reduced cost, channel count and overall power consumption, and led to a simplified tracker assembly. However, such long ships also present the challenge of maintaining satisfactory performance. The increased capacitance and series resistance contribute to lower signal-to-noise ratios, longer time walk, higher power consumption per channel and increased probability of crosstalk to neighboring channels. In this paper, an accurate method to calculate the geometric capacitance of the AC-coupled microstrips is presented and the calculated results are compared with measurements, SPICE simulations are performed to predict the noise, the extent of interstrip capacitive coupling and the dispersion of the detector signal due to the finite series resistance of the metal strips and the long length of the detector. The influence of the preamplifier current and the shaping time on the signal and noise levels is also presented. The study concludes that the 18-cm long ladders can successfully satisfy the performance goals of the GEM silicon Central Tracker     

Early detection and trellis splicing: reduced-complexity iterativedecoding

The bit-error rate (BER) performance of new iterative decoding algorithms (e,g,, turbodecoding) is achieved at the expense of a computationally burdensome decoding procedure. We present a method called early detection that can be used to reduce the computational complexity of a variety of iterative decoders. Using a confidence criterion, some information symbols, state variables, and codeword symbols are detected early on during decoding. In this way, the computational complexity of further processing is reduced with a controllable increase in the BER. We present an easily implemented instance of this algorithm, called trellis splicing, that can be used with turbodecoding. For a simulated system of this type, we obtain a reduction in the computational complexity of up to a factor of four, relative to a turbodecoder that obtains the same increase in the BER by performing fewer iterations     

Experimental study of fluxon dynamics in a potential well

Dynamics of a single fluxon in an annular Josephson junction is studied in the presence of an externally applied magnetic field H. Due to the interaction of the fluxon with the radial field component, the fluxon moves in a potential well which height is proportional to H. Several spectacular features of fluxon dynamics analogous to the motion of a particle in a washboard potential are clearly observed experimentally. Periodic revolutions of the fluxon in the junction lead to a potential induced emission of plasma waves. These waves are indicated by a resonance at a certain fluxon velocity which depends on the junction length. Good agreement between experiment, theoretical model and numerical simulations is found.