As technology advances, so does the complexity of reusable medical devices. This creates greater challenges for cleaning, disinfecting, and sterilizing devices between patient uses. There is increasing concern from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the reusable device industry that inadequately reprocessed devices are contributing to infections acquired in hospitals and other heal...

Neuronal learning activity is reactivated during sleep but the dynamics of this reactivation in humans are still poorly understood. Here we use multivariate pattern classification to decode electrical brain activity during sleep and determine what type of images participants had viewed in a preceding learning session. We find significant patterns of learning-related processing during rapid eye ...

Analysis of broad-band X/γ-ray spectra of NGC 4151 shows that the data are well modelled with an intrinsic spectrum due to thermal Comptonization with temperature ∼ 50 keV and X-ray spectral index α ∼ 0.4– 0.7. The variable X-ray spectrum pivots at ∼ 100 keV, which is consistent with the observed approximatly constant γ-ray spectrum. The observed UV/X-ray correlation can be explained by two spe...

BACKGROUND Eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy is a first-line treatment for adults with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Some clinicians argue that with refugees, directly targeting traumatic memories through EMDR may be harmful or ineffective. AIMS To determine the safety and efficacy of EMDR in adult refugees with PTSD (trial registration: ISRCTN20310201). ...

This article gives an overview on the principles of reprocessing of rigid and flexible endoscopes used in ENT units including structural and spatial requirements based on general and ENT-specific risks of infection associated with diagnostic and therapeutic endoscopy. The underlying legal principles as well as recommendations from scientific societies will be exemplified in order to give a prac...

Related to the recent issues on the environmental sustainability, the attention and importance of Reusable Medical Equipment (RME) has increased rapidly. As a part of System Redesign Project funded by Veterans Engineering Resource Center (VERC), “Design Evaluation for Reusable Medical Equipment” project has been conducted. This research project aims to develop new RME design assessment and eval...

One major cause that dramatically impacts patient safety is the use of unclean reusable medical equipment (RME), delivered from a sterile processing department (SPD). Unfortunately, current reprocessing practice is mostly driven by human labor and control, which is error-prone and inefficient. In this paper, business process management is proposed to support modeling, automating, monitoring, an...

We demonstrate correlated rapid variability between the optical/UV and X-ray emission for the first time in a soft X-ray transient, GRO J1655–40: HST light curves show similar features to those seen by RXTE, but with mean delay of 10–20 s. We interpret the correlations as due to reprocessing of X-rays into optical and UV emission, with a delay due to finite light travel time, and thus perform e...

Aiming at bridge gap between maximum likelihood decoding (MLD) and belief propagation (BP) decoding for short or medium LDPC codes, we present one modified ordered statistics decoding (OSD) reprocessing method, which is serially concatenated with standard BP. Meanwhile, two novel points in implementation are addressed. For one thing, the new definition of bit reliability proposed enhances error...

Gastrointestinal endoscopy is gaining popularity for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. However, concerns over endoscope-related nosocomial infections are increasing, together with interest by the general public in safe and efficient endoscopy. For this reason, reprocessing the gastrointestinal endoscope is an important step for effective performance of endoscopy. Disinfectants are essential ...