Towards a European health research and innovation cloud (HRIC).

The European Union (EU) initiative on the Digital Transformation of Health and Care (Digicare) aims to provide the conditions necessary for building a secure, flexible, and decentralized digital health infrastructure. Creating a European Health Research and Innovation Cloud (HRIC) within this environment should enable data sharing and analysis for health research across the EU, in compliance with data protection legislation while preserving the full trust of the participants. Such a HRIC should learn from and build on existing data infrastructures, integrate best practices, and focus on the concrete needs of the community in terms of technologies, governance, management, regulation, and ethics requirements. Here, we describe the vision and expected benefits of digital data sharing in health research activities and present a roadmap that fosters the opportunities while answering the challenges of implementing a HRIC. For this, we put forward five specific recommendations and action points to ensure that a European HRIC: i) is built on established standards and guidelines, providing cloud technologies through an open and decentralized infrastructure; ii) is developed and certified to the highest standards of interoperability and data security that can be trusted by all stakeholders; iii) is supported by a robust ethical and legal framework that is compliant with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR); iv) establishes a proper environment for the training of new generations of data and medical scientists; and v) stimulates research and innovation in transnational collaborations through public and private initiatives and partnerships funded by the EU through Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe.

Influence of framework design, contraction mismatch, and thermal history on porcelain checking in fixed partial dentures.

The objective of this study was to characterize the relative influence of contraction mismatch, framework design, furnace type, cooling rate, and multiple firings on immediate or delayed checking in fixed partial dentures. Frameworks for 60 anterior bridges (three-unit fixed partial dentures) were cast from a low-expansion Au-Pd alloy (O) and a high-expansion Pd-Ag alloy (J). A high-expansion porcelain (B) was applied to each of three framework designs. Firing was performed at heating rates of 56 degrees C/min and 180 degrees C/min. Specimens were cooled at two rates after each of five glazing cycles. For O-B specimens which exhibited a negative thermal contraction mismatch between 600 degrees C and 25 degrees C, 60% of the bridge specimens failed when they were subjected to slow cooling preceded by either fast or slow heating. When J-B specimens (which exhibited a smaller negative contraction mismatch) were heated and cooled rapidly, no failures occurred through all of the firing cycles. However, cracks were observed in 13.3% of the J-B bridges which were slowly heated and rapidly cooled. Delayed cracks (after the fifth glaze cycle) developed over periods of up to two years only in bridges which were slowly cooled in the furnace chamber. The results of this study suggest that checking in conventional feldspathic porcelains can be promoted by slow cooling rates and an excessive number of firing cycles.

A new ab initio ground-state dipole moment surface for the water molecule.

A valence-only (V) dipole moment surface (DMS) has been computed for water at the internally contracted multireference configuration interaction level using the extended atom-centered correlation-consistent Gaussian basis set aug-cc-pV6Z. Small corrections to these dipole values, resulting from core correlation (C) and relativistic (R) effects, have also been computed and added to the V surface. The resulting DMS surface is hence called CVR. Interestingly, the C and R corrections cancel out each other almost completely over the whole grid of points investigated. The ground-state CVR dipole of H(2) (16)O is 1.8676 D. This value compares well with the best ab initio one determined in this study, 1.8539+/-0.0013 D, which in turn agrees well with the measured ground-state dipole moment of water, 1.8546(6) D. Line intensities computed with the help of the CVR DMS shows that the present DMS is highly similar to though slightly more accurate than the best previous DMS of water determined by Schwenke and Partridge [J. Chem. Phys. 113, 16 (2000)]. The influence of the precision of the rovibrational wave functions computed using different potential energy surfaces (PESs) has been investigated and proved to be small, due mostly to the small discrepancies between the best ab initio and empirical PESs of water. Several different measures to test the DMS of water are advanced. The seemingly most sensitive measure is the comparison between the ab initio line intensities and those measured by ultralong pathlength methods which are sensitive to very weak transitions.

Tempering as a means to strengthen porcelain-fused-to-metal restorations.

Structural failures of porcelain-fused-to-metal (PFM) dental restorations still occur despite the known success of specific products and reliable techniques. The possible causes of these failures are varied but the actual fractures usually originate at a surface flaw. Although it is difficult to produce a porcelain that is free of surface flaws, it is possible to inhibit the growth of these flaws by inducing compressive stresses in the surface of the porcelain by a tempering process. The objectives of the present study were: 1) to develop an analytical model to calculate incompatibility stresses in metal-porcelain discs due to thermal contraction mismatch between metal and porcelain, and 2) to determine whether tempering stresses can retard the growth of induced cracks in the porcelain surface of metal-porcelain discs. Ni-Cr-Be alloy discs, 16mm in diameter and 0.3mm thick, were prepared with a 0.5mm thick layer of opaque porcelain and a 1.5mm-thick layer of body porcelain. The materials were selected to provide a range of thermal contraction mismatches. The discs were fired to the maturing temperature of body porcelain (982 degrees C) and then were subjected to three cooling procedures: slow cooling in a furnace (SC), fast cooling in air (FC) and tempering (T) by blasting the surface of the body porcelain with compressed air. The lengths of cracks induced in the surface of the body porcelain by a microhardness indenter were measured immediately after indentation at 30 points along diametral lines.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)