Revolutionizing X-ray Imaging: A Leap toward Ultra-Low-Dose Detection with a Cascade-Engineered Approach.

X-ray detection technology is essential in various fields, including medical imaging and security checks. However, exposure to large doses of X-rays poses considerable health risks. Therefore, it is crucial to reduce the radiation dosage without compromising detection efficiency.

Utilization of social franchising in family planning services: a Pakistan perspective.

Introduction: Pakistan's private sector caters to around 65% of family planning users. Private sector family planning was promoted in the Delivering Accelerated Family Planning in Pakistan (DAFPAK) program by UK's Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) in 2019. We use data from DAFPAK to analyze the clientele and products distributed by two major NGOs, Marie Stopes Society (MSS) and DKT Pakistan, that support private providers in Pakistan.

Optimizing immunization services: A Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) of child immunization facilities in Pakistan.

Introduction: Child immunization, though cost-beneficial, experiences varying costs influenced by individual facility-level factors. A real-time solution is to optimize resources and enhance vaccination services through proper method to measure immunization facility efficiency using existing data. Additionally, examine the impact of COVID-19 on facility efficiency, with the primary goal of comprehensively assessing child immunization facility efficiency in Pakistan.

COVID-19 in Pakistan: A national analysis of five pandemic waves.

Objectives: The COVID-19 pandemic showed distinct waves where cases ebbed and flowed. While each country had slight, nuanced differences, lessons from each wave with country-specific details provides important lessons for prevention, understanding medical outcomes and the role of vaccines. This paper compares key characteristics from the five different COVID-19 waves in Pakistan.

Retarding Ion Migration for Stable Blade-Coated Inverted Perovskite Solar Cells.

The fabrication of perovskite solar cells (PSCs) through blade coating is seen as one of the most viable paths toward commercialization. However, relative to the less scalable spin coating method, the blade coating process often results in more defective perovskite films with lower grain uniformity. Ion migration, facilitated by those elevated defect levels, is one of the main triggers of phase segregation and device instability.

Radioluminescent Cu-Au Metal Nanoclusters: Synthesis and Self-Assembly for Efficient X-ray Scintillation and Imaging.

Zero-dimensional (0D) scintillation materials have drawn tremendous attention due to their inherent advantages in the fabrication of flexible high-energy radiation scintillation screens by solution processes. Although considerable progress has been made in the development of 0D scintillators, such as the current leading lead-halide perovskite nanocrystals and quantum dots, challenges still persist, including potential issues with self-absorption, air stability, and eco-friendliness. Here, we present a strategy to overcome those limitations by synthesis and self-assembly of a new class of scintillators based on metal nanoclusters.

Impact of school closures and reopening on COVID-19 caseload in 6 cities of Pakistan: An Interrupted Time Series Analysis.

Schools were closed all over Pakistan on November 26, 2020 to reduce community transmission of COVID-19 and reopened between January 18 and February 1, 2021. However, these closures were associated with significant economic and social costs, prompting a review of effectiveness of school closures to reduce the spread of COVID-19 infections in a developing country like Pakistan. A single-group interrupted time series analysis (ITSA) was used to measure the impact of school closures, as well as reopening schools, on daily new COVID-19 cases in 6 major cities across Pakistan: Lahore, Karachi, Islamabad, Quetta, Peshawar, and Muzaffarabad.

Community-Driven Family Planning in Urban Slums: Results from Rawalpindi, Pakistan.

Background: Pakistan's contraceptive prevalence rate (CPR) has remained static (less than 1% annual increase since 2006) due to several demand and supply issues. The Akhter Hameed Khan Foundation implemented a community-driven, demand-generation intervention with complementary supply side family planning (FP) services in a large urban informal settlement in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.

Methods: The intervention recruited local women as outreach workers called Aapis (sisters), who conducted household outreach and provided counseling, contraceptives, and referrals.

Community engagement to increase vaccine uptake: Quasi-experimental evidence from Islamabad and Rawalpindi, Pakistan.

Developing countries have been facing difficulties in reaching out to low-income and underserved communities for COVID-19 vaccination coverage. The rapidity of vaccine development caused a mistrust among certain subgroups of the population, and hence innovative approaches were taken to reach out to such populations. Using a sample of 1760 respondents in five low-income, informal localities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi, Pakistan, we evaluated a set of interventions involving community engagement by addressing demand and access barriers.

Designing New Indene-Fullerene Derivatives as Electron-Transporting Materials for Flexible Perovskite Solar Cells.

The synthesis and characterization of a family of indene-C adducts obtained Diels-Alder cycloaddition [4 + 2] are reported. The new C derivatives include indenes with a variety of functional groups. These adducts show lowest unoccupied molecular orbital energy levels to be at the right position to consider these compounds as electron-transporting materials for planar heterojunction perovskite solar cells.