Sporotrichosis is a chronic fungal infection with a global distribution; both sporadically occurring infections and outbreaks of cases are not uncommon. Sporothrix schenckii, as the causative agent, can be isolated from soil, wood, land, and even marine animals. We present the clinical and histopathological presentations of sporotrichosis collected in our department for about 40 years. A series of interesting pictures illustrating asteroid bodies and organism materials, which are rarely seen, are also showed. Asteroid body is characterized by the presence of radiating star-like asteroid or club-shaped eosinophilic material around spores, and 5 types of asteroid body collected in our department are presented.
Reliability evaluation based on degradation data has received significant attentions in recent years. However, existing works often assume that the degradation evolution over time is governed by a single stochastic process, which may not be realistic if change points exist. Here, for cases of degradation with change points, this paper attempts to capture the degradation process with a multi-phase degradation model and find the method to evaluate the real-time reliability of the product being monitored. Once new degradation information becomes available, the evaluation results are adaptively updated through the Bayesian method. In particular, for a two-stage degradation process of liquid coupling devices (LCDs), a model named as change-point gamma and Wiener process is developed, after which issues of real-time reliability evaluation and parameters' estimation are addressed in detail. Finally, the proposed method is illustrated by a case study of LCDs, and the corresponding results indicate that trustful evaluation results depend on the fitting accuracy in cases of multi-phase degradation process.Without loss of generality, in the proposed model, we make following assumptions.
Assumption 1Let X(t) denote the degradation value of a corresponding quality characteristic at time t. If the degradation value exceeds a prespecified degradation threshold value z, namely, X(t) > z, the product is announced to have failed. X. WANG ET AL.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.