Association between long boarding time in the emergency department and hospital mortality: a single-center propensity score-based analysis.

Once diagnostic work-up and first therapy are completed in patients visiting the emergency department (ED), boarding them within the ED until an in-hospital bed became available is a common practice in busy hospitals. Whether this practice may harm the patients remains a debate. We sought to determine whether an ED boarding time longer than 4 h places the patients at increased risk of in-hospital death.

Impact of a qSOFA-based triage procedure on antibiotic timing in ED patients with sepsis: A prospective interventional study.

Background: It has not been investigated whether the quick sepsis-related organ failure assessment score (qSOFA), a new bedside tool for early sepsis detection, may help accelerating antibiotic initiation in ED patients with sepsis.

Methods: In this prospective pre/post quasi-experimental single-ED study, patients admitted with a suspected bacterial infection were managed using standard triage procedures only (baseline) or in association with qSOFA (intervention, with prioritization of patients with a qSOFA ≥ 2).

Results: A total of 151/328 (46.

Simultaneous identification of elastic properties, thickness, and diameter of arteries excited with ultrasound radiation force.

The elastic and geometric properties of arteries have been long recognized as important predictors of cardiovascular disease. This work presents a robust technique for the noninvasive characterization of anisotropic elastic properties as well as thickness and diameter in arterial vessels. In our approach, guided waves are excited along arteries using the radiation force of ultrasound.

Stochastic and deterministic motion of a laminar-turbulent front in a spanwisely extended Couette flow.

We investigate numerically the dynamics of a laminar-turbulent interface in a spanwisely extended and streamwisely minimal plane Couette flow. The chosen geometry allows one to suppress the large-scale secondary flow and to focus on the nucleation of streaks near the interface. It is shown that the resulting spanwise motion of the interface is essentially stochastic and can be modeled as a continuous-time random walk.