Acute lung injury (ALI) is an infrequently recognized complication of transfusion therapy. Although the role of passive transfer of leukoagglutinating antibodies has been acknowledged, there is little documentation of the relationship of these antibodies in transfused blood to the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) phenotype of the recipient. Recently, we observed 5 cases of transfusion-related ALI, and in all cases leukoagglutinating and lymphocytotoxic antibodies were found in serums of the transfused blood products. In 3 cases, the antibodies corresponded to the HLA antigens of the recipient. Multiparous blood donors whose plasma contains these antibodies represent a potential transfusion hazard. It is recommended that blood component usage from donors implicated in these reactions be restricted to frozen or washed red blood cells. The incidence of leukoagglutinin-associated ALI may be more frequent than previously appreciated. Current concepts of the mechanism of microvascular pulmonary injury are discussed in relation to these cases.

Summary:Umbilical cord blood (CB) is a useful stem cell source for patients without matched family donors. CB banking is expensive, however, because only a small percentage of the cord units stored are used for transplantation. In this study, we determined whether maternal factors, such as race, age, and smoking status have an effect on laboratory parameters of hematopoietic potential, such as viability, cell counts, CD34+ cell counts, and CFU-GM. We studied the effect of neonatal characteristics such as birth order, birth weight, gestational age, and sex of the baby on the same laboratory parameters. Race and maternal age had no effect on these laboratory parameters. In multivariate analysis, babies of longer gestational age had higher cell counts, but lower CD34 + cell counts and CFU-GM. Bigger babies had higher cell counts, more CD34 + cells, and more CFU-GM. Women with fewer previous live births also produced cord units with higher cell counts, CFU-GM, and CD34 + cell counts. Specifically, each 500 g increase in birth weight contributed to a 28% increase in CD34 + cell counts, each week of gestation contributed to a 9% decrease in CD34 + cell counts, and each previous birth contributed to a 17% decrease in CD34+ cell counts (all P Ͻ 0.05). These data may be used to select the optimal cord blood donors and allow CB banks efficient resource allocation. Bone Marrow Transplantation (2001) 27, 7-14.

We investigated the effect of pump wavelength on the modal instabilities (MI) in high-power linearly polarized Yb-doped fiber amplifiers. We built a novel semi-analytical model to determine the frequency coupling characteristics and power threshold of MI, which indicates promising MI suppression through pumping at an appropriate wavelength. By pumping at 915 nm, the threshold can be enhanced by a factor of 2.1 as compared to that pumped at 976 nm. Based on a high-power linearly polarized fiber amplifier platform, we studied the influence of pump wavelength experimentally. A maximal enhancement factor of 1.9 has been achieved when pumped at 915 nm, which agrees with the theoretical calculation and verified our theoretical model. Furthermore, we show that MI suppression by detuning the pump wavelength is weakened for fiber with a large core-to-cladding ratio.

Suppressing mode instabilities (MI) by optimizing the fiber coiling methods has been studied numerically. By employing our semi-analytical model, the MI threshold of two typical high power fibers in various coiling methods has been calculated. It reveals that fiber laser systems with gain fibers being coiled in cylinder shape has higher MI threshold than those with gain fibers being coiled in spiral shape, and MI-free output power of fiber lasers can be scaled up to above 3 kW even with the typical commercial fibers in the co-pumped configurations.

In this manuscript, we demonstrate high power, all-fiberized and polarization-maintained amplifiers with narrow linewidth and near-diffraction-limited beam quality by simultaneously suppressing detrimental stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) and mode instability (MI) effects. Compared with strictly single frequency amplification, the SBS threshold is scaled up to 12 dB, 15.4 dB, and higher than 18 dB by subsequently using three-stage cascaded phase modulation systems. Output powers of 477 W, 1040 W, and 1890 W are achieved with full widths at half maximums (FWHMs) of within 6 GHz, ~18.5 GHz, and ~45 GHz, respectively. The MI threshold is increased from ~738 W to 1890 W by coiling the active fiber in the main amplifier. Both the polarization extinction ratio (PER) and beam quality (M2 factor) are maintained well during the power scaling process. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of all-fiberized amplifiers with narrow linewidth, near linear polarization, and near-diffraction-limited beam quality at 2 kW power-level.

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Influence of pump power distribution on modal instabilities (MI) is studied numerically, which reveals that the MI threshold is dependent on the pump power distribution in fiber amplifiers and can be increased by optimizing the pump power distribution without any adjustment of other amplifier parameters. It shows that amplifiers with backward or bi-direction pump schemes have a higher threshold than those employing forward pump schemes. For backward pumped amplifiers employing fiber with core/clad diameter being 20/400 µm, the MI threshold yields a 42% increase compared to the forward pumped ones. For bi-direction pumped amplifiers, there exists an optimal power ratio between forward and backward pump power, which results in the highest threshold power. When amplifiers with core/clad diameter being 20/400 µm employ a bi-direction pump scheme at the optimal backward pump power fraction, the threshold can be increased by a factor of approximately 60% with respect to the forward pump configuration. The threshold increment factor reduces as the gain saturation effect weakens. It also shows that the MI threshold can be increased by employing multi-point side pump schemes.

We demonstrate an experimental study on scaling mode instability (MI) threshold in fiber amplifiers based on fiber coiling. The experimental results show that coiling the active fiber in the cylindrical spiral shape is superior to the coiling in the plane spiral shape. When the polarization maintained Yb-doped fiber (PM YDF: with a core/inner-cladding diameter of 20/400 µm) is coiled on an aluminous plate with a bend diameter of 9-16 cm, the MI threshold is ~1.55 kW. When such a PM YDF is coiled on an aluminous cylinder with diameter of 9 cm, no MI is observed at the output power of 2.43 kW, which is limited by the available pump power. The spectral width and polarization extinction ratio is 0.255 nm and 18.3 dB, respectively, at 2.43 kW. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest output power from a linear polarized narrow linewidth all-fiberized amplifier. By using a theoretical model, the potential MI-free scaling capability in such an amplifier is estimated to be 3.5 kW.