Introduction Evaluation of cirrhosis appears to be easily overlooked in the clinic for the HBsAg-negative (hepatitis B surface antigen-negative) and HBcAb-positive (hepatitis B core antibody-positive) population. Herein, we determine the prevalence of cirrhosis/advanced fibrosis among HBsAg-negative/HBcAb-positive US adults. Methods Data came from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2001–2018. A total of 3115 HBsAg-negative/HBcAb-positive US adults were enrolled in this study. We assessed cirrhosis by using the Fibrosis-4 (FIB-4) and aspartate aminotransferase to platelet ratio index (APRI) score. Results Out of 50,201 NHANES adults, 45,087 were tested for HBcAb/HBsAg, of whom 3115 met the inclusion criteria (HBsAg-negative/HBcAb-positive with available data for FIB-4/APRI). The weighted proportion of HBsAg-negative/HBcAb-positive among US adults was 4.46% (95% CI 4.17–4.75%), affecting 9.87 million US adults. According to the results of the FIB-4, the weighted prevalence of cirrhosis/advanced fibrosis among HBsAg-negative/HBcAb-positive US adults was 3.76% (95% CI 2.80–4.72%), which corresponds to 371,112 (95% CI 276,360–465,864) HBsAg-negative/HBcAb-positive American adults who had already developed cirrhosis. Among those, cirrhosis/advanced fibrosis in the HBsAb-negative (hepatitis B surface antibody) group (6.28%, 95% CI 4.10–8.45%) was significantly higher than in the HBsAb-positive group (3.08%, 95% CI 2.07–4.08%). Results were similar when APRI was used. Conclusion According to the FIB-4, 3.76% of HBsAg-negative and HBcAb-positive US adults had cirrhosis/advanced fibrosis, much higher than in the general population of the USA. Our data highlight the importance of cirrhosis screening in the HBsAg-negative/HBcAb-positive population to prevent advanced liver disease, especially in those who are HBsAb-negative. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40121-022-00680-2.

Die face design of automotive panel is a tedious repeated process and depends heavily on experience of engineers, which leads to increase of lead time and production costs. An intelligent template based die face design method is presented for process reuse of automotive panel. In this method, the new part is extracted as feature parameters to match the existing process in the template library automatically and the similar process model is applied to the new part adaptively. Finally, a process reuse system for die face is developed and a typical automotive panel is employed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results show a favourable effectiveness and practicability in reducing design period and reliance on experience.

Orthogonal time-frequency space (OTFS) modulation outperforms orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing in high-mobility scenarios through better channel estimation. Current superimposed pilot (SP)-based channel estimation improves the spectral efficiency (SE) when compared to that of the traditional embedded pilot (EP) method. However, it requires an additional non-superimposed EP delay-Doppler frame to estimate the delay-Doppler taps for the following SP-aided frames. To handle this problem, we propose a channel estimation method with high SE, which superimposes the perfect binary array (PBA) on data symbols as the pilot. Utilizing the perfect autocorrelation of PBA, channel estimation is performed based on a linear search to find the correlation peaks, which include both delay-Doppler tap information and complex channel gain in the same superimposed PBA frame. Furthermore, the optimal power ratio of the PBA is then derived by maximizing the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) to optimize the SE of the proposed system. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve a similar channel estimation performance to the existing EP method while significantly improving the SE.