Practitioner evaluation of a novel online integrated oral health and risk assessment tool: a practice pilot.

Aim: To report the development and evaluation of an evidence-based, online, patient assessment tool, capable of measuring oral health status, future disease risk and capitation fee guidance.

Methods: An online integrated oral health and risk assessment tool called DEPPA was developed, incorporating 1) PreViser(™) risk scores for periodontal disease, caries, non-carious tooth surface loss and oral cancer, 2) revised versions of Denplan Excel's Oral Health Score and 3) capitation fee guidance score. DEPPA was piloted by 25 dentists who provided quantitative and qualitative feedback.

Thermally assisted quantum annealing of a 16-qubit problem.

Efforts to develop useful quantum computers have been blocked primarily by environmental noise. Quantum annealing is a scheme of quantum computation that is predicted to be more robust against noise, because despite the thermal environment mixing the system's state in the energy basis, the system partially retains coherence in the computational basis, and hence is able to establish well-defined eigenstates. Here we examine the environment's effect on quantum annealing using 16 qubits of a superconducting quantum processor.

Quantum annealing with manufactured spins.

Many interesting but practically intractable problems can be reduced to that of finding the ground state of a system of interacting spins; however, finding such a ground state remains computationally difficult. It is believed that the ground state of some naturally occurring spin systems can be effectively attained through a process called quantum annealing. If it could be harnessed, quantum annealing might improve on known methods for solving certain types of problem.