Point-of-care testing for emergency assessment of coagulation in patients treated with direct oral anticoagulants including edoxaban.

Background: Direct oral anticoagulants (DOAC) including edoxaban are increasingly used for stroke prevention in atrial fibrillation. Despite treatment, annual stroke rate in these patients remains 1-2%. Rapid assessment of coagulation would be useful to guide thrombolysis or reversal therapy in this growing population of DOAC/edoxaban-treated stroke patients.

Point-of-care testing of coagulation in patients treated with edoxaban.

Edoxaban, alongside other direct oral anticoagulants (DOAC), is increasingly used for prevention of thromboembolism, including stroke. Despite DOAC therapy, however, annual stroke rate in patients with atrial fibrillation remains 1-2%. Rapid exclusion of relevant anticoagulation is necessary to guide thrombolysis or reversal therapy but, so far, no data exists on the effect of edoxaban on available point-of-care test systems (POCT).

Will a Decaying Atom Feel a Friction Force?

We show how a simple calculation leads to the surprising result that an excited two-level atom moving through a vacuum sees a tiny friction force of first order in v/c. At first sight this seems to be in obvious contradiction to other calculations showing that the interaction with the vacuum does not change the velocity of an atom. It is even more surprising that this change in the atom's momentum turns out to be a necessary result of energy and momentum conservation in special relativity.

Image reconstruction from photon sparse data.

We report an algorithm for reconstructing images when the average number of photons recorded per pixel is of order unity, i.e. photon-sparse data.