Effectiveness of hierarchical medical system and economic growth: based on China's urban vs. rural health perspectives.

Background: The hierarchical medical system is an important measure to promote equitable healthcare and sustain economic development. As the population's consumption level rises, the demand for healthcare services also increases. Based on urban and rural perspectives in China, this study aims to investigate the effectiveness of the hierarchical medical system and its relationship with economic development in China. Materials and methods: The study analyses panel data collected from Chinese government authorities, covering the period from 2009 to 2022. According to China's regional development policy, China is divided into the following regions: Eastern, Middle, Western, and Northeastern. Urban and rural component factors were downscaled using principal component analysis (PCA). The factor score formula combined with Urban-rural disparity rate (ΔD) were utilized to construct models for evaluating the effectiveness of the hierarchical medical system from an urban-rural perspective. A Vector Autoregression model is then constructed to analyze the dynamic relationship between the effects of the hierarchical medical system and economic growth, and to predict potential future changes. Results: Three principal factors were extracted. The contributions of the three principal factors were 38.132, 27.662, and 23.028%. In 2021, the hierarchical medical systems worked well in Henan (F = 47245.887), Shandong (F = 45999.640), and Guangdong (F = 42856.163). The Northeast (ΔDmax = 18.77%) and Eastern region (ΔDmax = 26.04%) had smaller disparities than the Middle (ΔDmax = 49.25%) and Western region (ΔDmax = 56.70%). Vector autoregression model reveals a long-term cointegration relationship between economic development and the healthcare burden for both urban and rural residents (ßurban = 3.09, ßrural = 3.66), as well as the number of individuals receiving health education (ß = -0.3492). Both the Granger causality test and impulse response analysis validate the existence of a substantial time lag between the impact of the hierarchical medical system and economic growth. Conclusion: Residents in urban areas are more affected by economic factors, while those in rural areas are more influenced by time considerations. The urban rural disparity in the hierarchical medical system is associated with the level of economic development of the region. When formulating policies for economically relevant hierarchical medical systems, it is important to consider the impact of longer lags.

n-Type doping of BiVO4 with different F-doped concentrations for improving the electronic character of BiVO4 as a photoanode nanomaterial for solar water splitting: a first-principles study.

Atom doping has been realized as an effective way to improve the photocatalytic performance of the most promising photoanode material, BiVO4, but the effects of doping mass concentration still need to be explored. In this work, the effects of F-doping with different doping mass concentrations (1%, 2%, 5%, 10%, 15%, and 20%) on the electronic character of BiVO4 were examined theoretically using density functional theory (DFT) calculations. The thermal stability of BiVO4 with different F-doped mass concentrations was confirmed using formation energy (Ef) calculations though F-doped BiVO4 becomes harder as the mass concentration of induced dopants increases. n-Type doping effects on the electronic character of BiVO4 were observed upon F-doping, leading to the energy level of CBM shifting far away from the Fermi level and giving F-doped BiVO4 metallic character. Moreover, a linear relationship between the frontier energy level shifts and the total charge transfer amounts from doped F atoms to other atoms involved in F-doped BiVO4 was observed, which means the oxidizing capacity of the VBM is increased and the reducing capacity of the CBM is decreased upon increased F-doped mass concentration. Moreover, the recombination of photogenerated electron-hole pairs is suppressed by F-doping strategies, which will not change a lot with the increased F-doped mass concentration. This means atom doping is an effective strategy to improve the photocatalytic efficiency of the BiVO4, but the number of atoms introduced into BiVO4 should be appropriate.

Congenital candidiasis in a full-term infant: A case report.

Congenital systemic candidiasis is a rare disease observed in both full-term and preterm infants. It can occur with or without congenital cutaneous candidiasis (CCC) and to date, only a few cases have been reported in the literature. We report here, a case of a full-term newborn who presented with diffuse skin eruptions at birth. Blood, urine, and skin scraping cultures were positive and the aetiological agent was Candida albicans. After six weeks of anti-fungal treatment with fluconazole, the newborn was cured. Early diagnosis is crucial in preventing complications caused by candidiasis in newborns.

Molecular modification effects on the electrochromic and photochromic properties of diarylethene with intramolecular isomerization behavior.

Diarylethene (DAE) is one of the most widely used functional units for electrochromic or photochromic materials. To better understand the molecular modification effects on the electrochromic and photochromic properties of DAE, two modification strategies, substitution with functional groups or heteroatoms, were investigated theoretically by density functional theory calculations. It is found that red-shifted absorption spectra caused by a decreased highest occupied molecular orbital-lowest unoccupied molecular orbital energy gap and S0 → S1 transition energy during the ring-closing reaction become more significant by adding different functional substituents. In addition, for two isomers, the energy gap and S0 → S1 transition energy decreased by heteroatom substitution of S atoms with O or NH, while they increased by replacing two S atoms with CH2. For intramolecular isomerization, one-electron excitation is the most effective way to trigger the closed-ring (O → C) reaction, while the open-ring (C → O) reaction occurs most readily in the presence of one-electron reduction. Moreover, it is confirmed that substitution with strong electron donating groups (-OCH3/-NH2) or with one O/two CH2 heteroatoms leads to a more favorable closed-ring (O → C) reaction. Functionalized with strong electron-withdrawing groups (-NO2 and -COOH) or one/two NH heteroatom substitutions, the open-ring (C → O) reaction is easier. Our results confirmed that the photochromic and electrochromic properties of DAE can be tuned effectively by molecular modifications, which provides theoretical guidance for the design of new DAE-based photochromic/electrochromic materials.

Dummy-template Pickering emulsion imprinted microspheres online pretreatment and analysis for the estrogens in cosmetics.

Estrogens are a class of steroid hormone with strong physiological activity. Due to the pronounced beauty effect, such drugs are highly susceptible to illegal addition and cause other adverse effects. To avoid template leakage and the negative impacts on the environment caused by the estrogens, diosgenin was selected as the dummy template due to its similar skeleton structure. The Pickering emulsion polymerization was used to obtain the dummy-template molecularly imprinted polymers (dt-MIPs). Scanning electron microscopy, optical microscopy, specific surface area testing, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and adsorption experiments were used to characterize the apparent morphology and the recognition performance of the microspheres. Then, the prepared microspheres and commercial fillers were used to construct an on-line solid phase extraction (on-line SPE) analytical system coupled with HPLC via a two-position switching valve. On-line solid phase extraction-HPLC analytical methods were established and verified, for the simultaneous determination of four estrogens in cosmetic samples. The accuracy and precision RSDs for the established methods using the imprinted sorbents were 92.00-104.02% and less than 9.12%, respectively. All four estrogens exhibited good linearity in the range of 0.05 to 5 µg/mL with a coefficient of determination R2 greater than 0.9810. The method comparison results suggest that the established analytical method is simple in pre-treatment, easy to automate, and has excellent sensitivity to meet the analytical requirements of complex samples.

A Maximum Divergence Approach to Optimal Policy in Deep Reinforcement Learning.

Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms based on entropy regularized have achieved good performance in control tasks. Those algorithms consider using the entropy-regularized term for the policy to learn a stochastic policy. This work provides a new perspective that aims to explicitly learn a representation of intrinsic information in state transition to obtain a multimodal stochastic policy, for dealing with the tradeoff between exploration and exploitation. We study a class of Markov decision processes (MDPs) with divergence maximization, called divergence MDPs. The goal of the divergence MDPs is to find an optimal stochastic policy that maximizes the sum of both the expected discounted total rewards and a divergence term, where the divergence function learns the implicit information of state transition. Thus, it can provide better-off stochastic policies to improve both in robustness and performance in a high-dimension continuous setting. Under this framework, the optimality equations can be obtained, and then a divergence actor-critic algorithm is developed based on the divergence policy iteration method to address large-scale continuous problems. The experimental results, compared to other methods, show that our approach achieved better performance and robustness in the complex environment particularly. The code of DivAC can be found in https://github.com/yzyvl/DivAC.

Thermosensitive molecularly imprinted polymer coupled with HPLC for selective enrichment and determination of matrine in traditional Chinese medicine.

In this study, a temperature-sensitive molecularly imprinted polymer was prepared by using the bifunctional monomer with the critical phase transition characteristics. Infrared spectrometry, scanning electron microscopy, and specific surface area testing were used to characterize the polymers. Then, the recognizing properties of the polymers were studied. Based on the prepared smart polymers, an SPE-HPLC analytical method for the determination of quinolizidine alkaloids in the extracts of Sophora flavescens was established and verified. Finally, the smart polymers were applied to the enrichment of quinolizidine alkaloids in plant extracts. By changing the temperature and solvents of the solid phase extraction conditions, the extraction process can increase the concentration of quinolizidine alkaloids by 4.3 to 5.2 folds. The extraction process has mild conditions and less time consumption, avoiding the use of a large number of toxic reagents, which indicate that the extraction process are more efficient and environmentally friendly.