Use of Claims to Assess Outcomes and Treatment Effects in the Evolut Low Risk Trial.

Background: Food and Drug Administration-mandated postmarket studies for transcatheter aortic valve replacement in low-risk populations plan to use passively collected registry data linked to claims for long-term follow-up out to 10 years. Therefore, it is critically important to understand the validity of these claims-based end points. We sought to evaluate the ability of administrative claims with () codes to identify trial-adjudicated end points and reproduce treatment comparisons of aortic valve replacement in the Evolut Low Risk Trial.

Experimental investigations on an FSO-fiber converged communication system under fog and turbulence.

This paper presents experimental results for a free-space optical-fiber converged (FSO-FC) communication system under varying turbulence and foggy conditions. Based on the experimental measurements, we statistically characterize the FSO channel under different levels of turbulence and fog in terms of their respective probability density functions (PDFs). Our experimental PDFs fit well with the theoretical PDFs proposed in the literature.