基于熵权TOPSIS法的区域医院科技影响力评价研究

目的:开展区域医院科技影响力评价研究,助力我国区域医院科技创新体系建设。方法:以中国医院科技影响力评价体系为基础,通过专家咨询和访谈,形成更符合区域特色的区域科技影响力评价体系。采用熵权法并依赖数据本身的离散性得到指标权重,采集并处理深圳市50家医院科技影响力的评价指标数据,利用TOPSIS法计算得出其综合科技影响力。结果:确定了区域医院科技影响力评价指标体系,包括科技产出、学术影响和科技条件3个维度,共21个三级指标。不同医院的科技影响力明显不同,参评医院的国家级重点科研项目数量较少,国家级科研平台数量较少。结论:建议深圳市加强政府统一筹划,增加医院科技投入;促进高水平综合医院的全面发展,突出专科医院的特色;加强科研平台建设,为医院的科技发展奠定基础;建设富有创新意识和创新能力的科技队伍,优化利用区域医院科技资源,培育及提高区域科技竞争优势。     

Health Risks Associated with Crude Oil Spill Exposure

Background

Human exposure to crude oil spills is associated with multiple adverse health effects including hematopoietic, hepatic, renal, and pulmonary abnormalities. The purpose of this study was to assess the hematological and liver function indices among the subjects participating in the Gulf oil spill cleanup operations in comparison with the standardized normal range reference values.

Methods

Using medical charts, clinical data (including white blood cell [WBC] count, platelet count, hemoglobin, hematocrit, blood urea nitrogen [BUN] creatinine, alkaline phosphatase [ALP], aspartate amino transferase [AST], alanine amino transferase [ALT], and urinary phenol) were gathered for the subjects who were exposed to the Gulf oil spill and analyzed.

Results

A total of 117 subjects exposed to the oil spill were included. Over 77% of subjects had WBC counts in the mid range (6-10 × 10³ per μL), while none of the subjects had the upper limit of the normal range (11 × 10³ per μL). A similar pattern was seen in the platelet counts and BUN levels among the oil spill-exposed subjects. Conversely, over 70% of the subjects had creatinine levels toward the upper limit of the normal range and 23% of subjects had creatinine levels above the upper limit of the normal range (>1.3 mg per dL). Similarly, hemoglobin and hematocrit levels were toward the upper limit of normal in more than two thirds of the subjects. AST and ALT levels above the upper limit of normal range (>40 IU per L) were seen in 15% and 31% of subjects, respectively. Over 80% of subjects had urinary phenol levels higher than detectable levels (2 mg per L).

Conclusion

The results of this study support our earlier study findings in which we found that people who participated in oil spill cleanup activities are at risk of developing alterations in hematological profile and liver function.     

Collective credit allocation in science

Collaboration among researchers is an essential component of the modern scientific enterprise, playing a particularly important role in multidisciplinary research. However, we continue to wrestle with allocating credit to the coauthors of publications with multiple authors, because the relative contribution of each author is difficult to determine. At the same time, the scientific community runs an informal field-dependent credit allocation process that assigns credit in a collective fashion to each work. Here we develop a credit allocation algorithm that captures the coauthors’ contribution to a publication as perceived by the scientific community, reproducing the informal collective credit allocation of science. We validate the method by identifying the authors of Nobel-winning papers that are credited for the discovery, independent of their positions in the author list. The method can also compare the relative impact of researchers working in the same field, even if they did not publish together. The ability to accurately measure the relative credit of researchers could affect many aspects of credit allocation in science, potentially impacting hiring, funding, and promotion decisions.Reflecting the increasing complexity of modern research, in the last decades, collaboration among researchers became a standard path to discovery (1). Collaboration plays a particularly important role in multidisciplinary research that requires expertise from different scientific fields (2). As the number of coauthors of each publication increases, science’s credit system is under pressure to evolve (3–5). For single-author papers, which were the norm decades ago, credit allocation is simple: the sole author gets all of the credit. This rule, accepted since the birth of science, fails for multiauthor papers (6). The lack of a robust credit allocation system that can account for the discrepancy between researchers’ contribution to a particular body of work and the credit they obtain, has prompted some to state that “multiple authorship endangers the author credit system” (7). This situation is particularly acute in multidisciplinary research (8, 9), when communities with different credit allocation traditions collaborate (10). Furthermore, a detailed understanding of the rules underlying credit allocation is crucial for an accurate assessment of each researcher’s scientific impact, affecting hiring, funding, and promotion decisions.Current approaches to allocating scientific credit fall in three main categories. The first views each author of a multiauthor publication as the sole author (11, 12), resulting in inflated scientific impact for publications with multiple authors. This system is biased toward researchers with multiple collaborations or large teams, customary in experimental particle physics or genomics. The second assumes that all coauthors contribute equally to a publication, allocating fractional credit evenly among them (13, 14). This approach ignores the fact that authors’ contributions are never equal and hence dilutes the credit of the intellectual leader. The third allocates scientific credit according to the order or the role of coauthors, interpreting a message agreed on within the respective discipline (15–17). For example, in biology, typically the first and the last author(s) get the lion’s share of the credit, and in some areas of physical sciences, the author list reflects a decreasing degree of contribution. An extreme case is offered by experimental particle physics, where the author list is alphabetic, making it impossible to interpret the author contributions without exogenous information. Finally, there is an increasing trend to allocate credit based on the specific contribution of each author (18, 19), specified in the contribution declaration required by some journals (20, 21). However, each of these approaches ignores the most important aspect of credit allocation: notwithstanding the agreed on order, credit allocation is a collective process (22–24), which is determined by the scientific community rather than the coauthors or the order of the authors in a paper. This phenomena is clearly illustrated by the 2012 Nobel prize in physics that was awarded based on discoveries reported in publications whose last authors were the laureates (25, 26), whereas the 2007 Nobel prize in physics was awarded to the third author of a nine-author paper (27) and the first author of a five-author publication (28). Clearly the scientific community operates an informal credit allocation system that may not be obvious to those outside of the particular discipline.The leading hypothesis of this work is that the information about the informal credit allocation within science is encoded in the detailed citation pattern of the respective paper and other papers published by the same authors on the same subject. Indeed, each citing paper expresses its perception of the scientific impact of a paper’s coauthors by citing other contributions by them, conveying implicit information about the perceived contribution of each author. Our goal is to design an algorithm that can capture in a discipline-independent fashion the way this informal collective credit allocation mechanism develops.     

Spatiotemporally controlled single cell sonoporation

This paper presents unique approaches to enable control and quantification of ultrasound-mediated cell membrane disruption, or sonoporation, at the single-cell level. Ultrasound excitation of microbubbles that were targeted to the plasma membrane of HEK-293 cells generated spatially and temporally controlled membrane disruption with high repeatability. Using whole-cell patch clamp recording combined with fluorescence microscopy, we obtained time-resolved measurements of single-cell sonoporation and quantified the size and resealing rate of pores. We measured the intracellular diffusion coefficient of cytoplasmic RNA/DNA from sonoporation-induced transport of an intercalating fluorescent dye into and within single cells. We achieved spatiotemporally controlled delivery with subcellular precision and calcium signaling in targeted cells by selective excitation of microbubbles. Finally, we utilized sonoporation to deliver calcein, a membrane-impermeant substrate of multidrug resistance protein-1 (MRP1), into HEK-MRP1 cells, which overexpress MRP1, and monitored the calcein efflux by MRP1. This approach made it possible to measure the efflux rate in individual cells and to compare it directly to the efflux rate in parental control cells that do not express MRP1.     

Impact of social support on participation after stroke in Nigeria

Background: Participation which entails involvement in life situations and represents a higher level of functioning can be severely restricted after a stroke. This study investigated the impact of social support on participation of stroke survivors in Nigeria.

Methods: Ninety-six community-residing stroke survivors were recruited from physiotherapy outpatient departments of two tertiary care hospitals in Northern Nigeria. Socio-demographic, clinical, participation (London Handicap Scale), and social support (Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support) data were obtained. The impact of social support on global and domain-specific participation was examined using bivariate analyses and multiple regression analyses.

Results: Mean (SD) age of the stroke survivors was 56.6 (12.0) years. Social support was a significant (β = 0.41, p < 0.0001) and independent determinant of the economic self-sufficiency domain of participation (p < 0.0001) in a regression model that accounted for 27% of the variance in the domain (R² = 0.27). Social support, however, had no independent effect on overall participation and the other participation domains namely mobility, physical independence, occupation, social integration, and orientation.

Conclusion: The impact of social support was significant only in the economic self-sufficiency domain of participation with higher availability of social support related to better economic self-sufficiency. This finding provides additional information on the importance of social support post-stroke.