Electrocaloric cooling technologies, enabled by the discovery of the giant electrocaloric effect in dielectrics more than a decade ago, represents a zero-globalwarming-potential, environment-benign cooling alternative. Benefited from its nature as an electricity-driven capacitor, the electrocaloric working body renders the great advantages in the energy efficiency and the device integration. The decade-long efforts on advancing the technology revealed many promising material candidates with matured manufacturing protocols, as well as intriguing device prototypes for applications beyond the traditional vapor compression based cooling. This article presents the recent advances in electrocaloric cooling technologies, from material improvements to device demonstrations. The environmental impact and the energy efficiency of the technology were evaluated by the total effective warming impact and the material COP, respectively. In addition to the current progresses achieved by the decade-long research effort, the existing challenges and potential opportunities brought by the electrocaloric refrigeration will be discussed.

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Purpose Indeterminate pulmonary nodules (IPNs) lack clinical or radiographic features of benign etiologies and often undergo invasive procedures unnecessarily, suggesting potential roles for diagnostic adjuncts using molecular biomarkers. The primary objective was to validate a multivariate classifier that identifies likely benign lung nodules by assaying plasma protein expression levels, yielding a range of probability estimates based on high negative predictive values (NPVs) for patients with 8 to 30 mm IPNs. Methods A retrospective, multi-center, case-control study was performed using multiple reaction monitoring mass spectrometry, a classifier comprising 5 diagnostic and 6 normalization proteins, and blinded analysis of an independent validation set of plasma samples. Results The classifier achieved validation on 141 lung nodule-associated plasma samples based on predefined statistical goals to optimize sensitivity. Using a population based NSCLC prevalence estimate of 23% for 8 to 30 mm IPNs, the classifier identified likely benign lung nodules with 90% NPV and 26% PPV, as shown in our prior work, at 92% sensitivity and 20% specificity, with the lower bound of the classifier’s performance at 70% sensitivity and 48% specificity. Classifier scores for the overall cohort were statistically independent of patient age, tobacco use, nodule size and COPD diagnosis. The classifier also demonstrated incremental diagnostic performance in combination with a four-parameter clinical model. Conclusions This proteomic classifier provides a range of probability estimates for the likelihood of a benign etiology that may serve as a non-invasive, diagnostic adjunct for clinical assessments of patients with IPNs.