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Objective To explore the feasibility of high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) ablation for treating metastatic pelvic tumors and recurrent ovary cancer. Materials and methods Eight patients with metastatic pelvic tumors or recurrent ovary cancer were enrolled in this study. Among them, 5 patients had ovarian cancer, 1 had cervical cancer, 1 had endometrial cancer, and 1 had rectal cancer. Six of them received abdominal surgical operation for their primary cancer, no one received radiotherapy. HIFU treatment was performed under conscious sedation. Vital signs were monitored during the procedure, and adverse effects were recorded. Postoperative follow-up was performed to observe pain relief and the improvement of the patient’s quality of life. Results The median age of the patients was 54 (range: 33–76) years, with a total of 12 lesions. The average volume of the lesions was 238.0 cm3. Six patients completed 12 months follow-up. Postoperative pain relief rate was 60% (3/5), and the quality of life improved in the short term. The main adverse effect of HIFU was pain in the treated area, with the pain score lower than 4, and all of which was self-relieved within 1 day after HIFU treatment. No serious complications such as skin burn, intestinal perforation, and nerve injury occurred. Conclusion HIFU is feasible for the treatment of metastatic pelvic tumors or recurrent ovary cancer without serious complications. Therefore, HIFU seems a promising treatment for recurrent ovary cancer, metastatic pelvic tumors from cervical cancer, endometrial cancer, and rectal cancer.

Recent trends in consumer electronics have led to a proliferation of high dynamic range (HDR) video acquisition and transmission studies. High-end video capturing systems increase the bit depth of each pixel to adapt to the high-contrast ambient light. However, the extended bit depth is pathetically meager compared with the far wider dynamic range of the incident light. What’s more, incompatibility issues for the subsequent compression and transmission system may be arisen along with the increased bit depth. In this paper, we propose an auto complementary exposure (ACE) algorithm for optimal exposure parameter estimation under Siamese Trigger (ST) mode to maximize the entropy of the output HDR image. With the proposed algorithm, neither the sensor nor other related hardware needs to be modified. Only the auto-exposure algorithm in the firmware needs to be updated. In the proposed ACE algorithm, every two consecutive images are treated as Siamese twins, and the exposure parameters for the twin images are calculated simultaneously. The target of the ACE algorithm is not to maximize the entropy of each image but to maximize that of the fused image. Compared to existing auto exposure or bracketed fusing algorithms, the proposed algorithm has three significant advantages. Firstly, no extra bit-depth is needed to embrace the details of the scene. Thus the image transmission system is not affected. Secondly, only two raw images are necessary for one output fused HDR image. The computation load is relatively low. Thirdly, the proposed method can fit video recording, which has a broader application prospect than HDR image capturing. Experiment results on a self-built database and publicly accessible database demonstrate that the algorithm works well under various types of scenarios. Furthermore, the experiment results on the real-time system show that the captured video image reveals many details under high dynamic scenes.

Silicon-based organic light-emitting diode (OLED) microdisplays are widely used in the head-mounted devices. This article proposes a novel atomized scan method for the digital driving silicon-based OLED microdisplays. By eliminating the time redundancy in the digital driving, the proposed method generates the high transmission efficiency, high lighting efficiency, high grayscale efficiency, and good linearity compared with the traditional pulsewidth modulation (PWM) scan methods. Four scan characteristics of the high-efficiency scan sequence are analyzed. The high efficient atomized scan can be obtained by implanting the low grayscale scan into the high grayscale scan. A 1.6 k $\times1.6$ k full color silicon-based OLED microdisplay, together with the hardware driving platform, is designed and implemented to verify the proposed atomized scan method. By measuring the brightness values of 256 gray levels, the atomized scan method with the blank operation can achieve high scan efficiency with the low clock frequency (57.6 MHz).

Neurovascular unit (NVU) is organized multi-cellular and multi-component networks that are essential for brain health and brain homeostasis maintaining. Neurovascular unit dysfunction is the central pathogenesis process of ischemic stroke. Thus integrated protection of NVU holds great therapeutic potential for ischemic stroke. Catalpol, classified into the iridoid monosaccharide glycoside, is the main active ingredient of the radix from traditional Chinese medicine, Rehmannia glutinosa Libosch, that exhibits protective effects in several brain-related diseases. In the present study, we investigated whether catalpol exerted protective effects for NVU in ischemic stroke and the underlying mechanisms. MCAO rats were administered catalpol (2.5, 5.0, 10.0 mg·kg(−1)·d(−1), i.v.) for 14 days. We showed that catalpol treatment dose-dependently reduced the infarction volume and significantly attenuated neurological deficits score in MCAO rats. Furthermore, catalpol treatment significantly ameliorated impaired NVU in ischemic region by protecting vessel-neuron-astrocyte structures and morphology, and promoting angiogenesis and neurogenesis to replenish lost vessels and neurons. Moreover, catalpol treatment significantly increased the expression of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) through up-regulating PI3K/AKT signaling, followed by increasing FAK and Paxillin and activating PI3K/AKT and MEK1/2/ERK1/2 pathways. The protective mechanisms of catalpol were confirmed in an in vitro three-dimensional NVU model subjected to oxygen-glucose deprivation. In conclusion, catalpol protects NVU in ischemic region via activation of PI3K/AKT signaling and increased VEGF production; VEGF further enhances PI3K/AKT and MEK1/2/ERK1/2 signaling, which may trigger a partly feed-forward loop to protect NVU from ischemic stroke.

The classification of sleep stages is the process which helps to evaluate the quality of sleep and detect the sleep related disorders. Through analyzing the electroencephalography, the sleep stages can be discriminated manually by specialists. However, this can be a laboriousness work because of the huge datasets. Until now, several studies have been conducted based on the automatic analysis of electroencephalography. Still, as the development of wearable technology, there is a need for an accurate and single-channel electroencephalography based sleep stages identification system. In this paper, a state-space based sleep stages classification method is proposed using the proposed model based essence features extraction method. This method employed the state-space model to establish the intrinsic models based on the single-channel electroencephalography, from which the features used for further classification can be extracted. For 2-stage to 6-stage classification of sleep states, the verification system can achieve 98.6%, 94.9%, 93.0%, 92.3%, 91.8% accuracy on the Sleep-EDF database, and also reach 94.9%, 87.7%, 82.7%, 80.9%, 78.2% on Dreams Subjects database.

Objective To compare the therapeutic effects of ultrasound-guided and non-guided catheter-directed thrombolysis in the treatment of deep venous thrombosis of lower extremity. Methods From August 2015 to April 2016, 60 patients with lower extremity deep venous thrombosis were randomly divided into two groups ( n = 30 for each) to receive catheter-directed thrombolysis. Group A was treated under the ultrasound guidance, while Group B was treated without guidance. Results Catheter-directed thrombolysis was successfully performed by only one intubate in Group A but by 5.9 intubates in Group B. It took 15.4 ± 3.2 min in Group A, significantly less than that in Group B (30.8 ± 6.6 min, p Conclusion Ultrasound-guided catheter-directed thrombolysis has advantages, with improvement of venous patency and decrease of the incidence of PTS.

Peripheral artery disease (PAD) is a common disease affecting over 200 million people worldwide. PAD is associated with significant limb and cardiovascular morbidity and mortality which is reduced by antiplatelet and antithrombotic therapy. However, the optimal type, dose, and time of antithrombotic therapy is still uncertain.We searched 4 electronic databases from January 1, 1990, to June 1, 2020, for randomized controlled trials of patients who received oral anticoagulant and antiplatelet therapy for PAD. The primary outcome was a composite of acute limb ischemia, major amputation, myocardial infarction, ischemic stroke, death from cardiovascular events, or death from any cause. Secondary outcomes included major bleeding, fatal bleeding, and intracranial hemorrhage events.We identified 3 studies that satisfied inclusion and exclusion criteria. Compared with antiplatelet alone, oral anticoagulant plus antiplatelet therapy improved acute limb ischemia (p < 0.00001), stroke (p = 0.005), and major amputation events (p = 0.11). However, oral anticoagulant plus antiplatelet therapy was not effective for prevention of myocardial infarction (p = 0.23), death from cardiovascular events (p = 0.65), or death from any cause (p = 0.66). Additionally, a significant increase in major bleeding events was demonstrated (p < 0.00001). There was no significant difference in fatal bleeding (p = 0.16) or intracranial hemorrhage events (p = 0.43). This meta-analysis showed that oral anticoagulant plus antiplatelet therapy for PAD may improve acute limb ischemia and major amputation or stroke risk compared with antiplatelet therapy alone, but could increase the risk of major bleeding events. On the other hand, measuring myocardial infarction, death, fatal bleeding, or intracranial hemorrhage risk remains controversial.

The convolutional neural network (CNN) has made great success in many fields, and is gradually being applied in edge-computing systems. Taking the limited budget of the resources in the systems into consideration, the implementation of CNNs on embedded devices is preferred. However, accompanying the increasingly complex CNNs is the huge cost of memory, which constrains its implementation on embedded devices. In this paper, we propose an efficient, pipelined convolution module based on a Brain Floating-Point (BF16) to solve this problem, which is composed of a quantization unit, a serial-to-matrix conversion unit, and a convolution operation unit. The mean error of the convolution module based on BF16 is only 0.1538%, which hardly affects the CNN inference. Additionally, when synthesized at 400 MHz, the area of the BF16 convolution module is 21.23% and 18.54% smaller than that of the INT16 and FP16 convolution modules, respectively. Furthermore, our module using the TSMC 90 nm library can run at 1 GHz by optimizing the critical path. Finally, our module was implemented on the Xilinx PYNQ-Z2 board to evaluate the performance. The experimental results show that at the frequency of 100 MHz, our module is, separately, 783.94 times and 579.35 times faster than the Cortex-M4 with FPU and Hummingbird E203, while maintaining an extremely low error rate.

The automatic sleep stage classification technique can facilitate the diagnosis of sleep disorders and release the medical expert from labor-consumption work. In this paper, novel improved model based essence features (IMBEFs) were proposed combining locality energy (LE) and dual state space models (DSSMs) for automatic sleep stage detection on single-channel electroencephalograph (EEG) signals. Firstly, each EEG epoch is decomposed into low-level sub-bands (LSBs) and high-level sub-bands (HSBs) by wavelet packet decomposition (WPD), separately. Then, the DSSMs are estimated by the LSBs and the LE calculation is carried out on HSBs. Thirdly, the IMBEFs extracted from the DSSM and LE are fed into the appropriate classifier for sleep stage classification. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated on three public sleep databases. The experimental results show that under the Rechtschaffen&rsquo, s and Kale&rsquo, s (R&amp, K) standard, the sleep stage classification accuracies of six classes on the Sleep EDF database and the Dreams Subjects database are 92.04% and 78.92%, respectively. Under the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) standard, the classification accuracies of five classes in the Dreams Subjects database and the ISRUC database reached 79.90% and 81.65%. The proposed method can be used for reliable sleep stage classification with high accuracy compared with state-of-the-art methods.

BackgroundDeep venous thrombosis (DVT) constitutes a major global disease burden. Endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) have been described in association with recanalization of venous thrombus. Furthermore, emerging evidence suggests microRNAs are involved in this progression. The goal of this study was to investigate the influence of miR-150 on the behavior of EPCs and its potential contribution in venous thrombosis resolution.MethodsWe isolated and cultured EPCs from healthy adults. Next, early EPCs or endothelial colony-forming cells (ECFCs or late EPCs) were transfected with miR-150 agomir and antagomir. Gene expression profiles, proliferation, cytokine secretion, and angiogenic capacity of early EPCs and ECFCs were examined. The effects of miR-150 on c-Myb expression and Akt/FOXO1 signaling were also evaluated. Furthermore, a rat model of venous thrombosis was constructed to determine the in vivo function of EPCs.ResultsOur results showed that miR-150 overexpression in early EPCs significantly promoted differentiation to ECFCs and contributed to proliferation and tube formation. However, suppression of miR-150 in late EPCs inhibited proliferation and tube formation. Moreover, we identified that this progression is regulated by inhibition of c-Myb and activation of the Akt/FOXO1 pathway. Our findings also showed that miR-150 led to the enhanced resolution ability of EPCs in a rat venous thrombosis model.ConclusionsIn this study, we present a novel mechanism of miRNA-mediated regulation of EPCs and Akt activation in thrombus resolution.

Smart cities are the emerging topics in the recent decade with advancements in science and technology especially in the areas of communication technologies. Concept of smart cities depicts the inteconnectivity of physical objects to provide transparency in communication between the physical components or objects. However, implementation of a smart city using Internet of Things (IoT) which is the backbone architecture is affected by several attacks in the wireless communication domain during communication of information between the components as well as cyber-attacks which necessiate the need for the intrusion detection mechanism to prevent any illegeal loss data. This research paper addresses these security issues by implementing the IoT architecture and systematically analysing the demands in security aspects as well as justifying the results with experimentations conducted in a simulated smart city environment.

Photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting directly converts solar energy into clean and sustainable hydrogen energy, representing a promising and effective technique for solving the world's energy crisis. A hole transfer layer (HTL) plays a vital role for extracting holes from a semiconductor layer to a back electrode in PEC cells for water splitting. In this work, a TiOx/Sb2Se3/NiOx photocathode was fabricated by using p-NiOx as HTL. We show that the electrical properties of NiOx films can be well adjusted by the pulsed laser deposition technique. By systematically adjusting the electrical properties of the NiOx HTL and passivating the surface defects through coating with the TiOx layer, we achieved a high photocurrent density of up to −18.08 mA cm−2 at 0 V vs a reversible hydrogen electrode (RHE), an onset potential of 0.43 V vs RHE, and a half-cell solar to hydrogen conversion efficiency of 1.01% for the TiOx/Sb2Se3/NiOx photocathode. This work demonstrated NiOx as a potential hole transport material for a cost-effective Sb2Se3 PEC cell.

Objective This study aimed to describe treatment of serious complications after primary thoracic endovascular aortic repair (TEVAR) in type B aortic dissection. Methods From June 2008 to March 2016, serious complications occurred in 58 patients without Marfan syndrome who received TEVAR for type B aortic dissection. Results Complications included endoleak, distal true lumen collapse, retrograde dissection, stroke, stent–graft (SG) migration and mistaken deployment, lower limb ischaemia, and SG fracture. Treatment included endovascular repair, surgical procedures, or conservative medication. Forty-six patients recovered from complications. Twelve patients were not cured. The median follow-up time was 29.5 months (2–61 months). The overall 30-day mortality rate was 1.7% (1/58) and the total mortality rate following secondary complications was 8.6% (5/58). The causes of death were stroke and aortic rupture. Conclusion Some treatments need to be performed after TEVAR because of severe complications. A reduction in these complications can be achieved by optimal evaluation of patients, selection of SGs, and specialized endovascular manipulation.

The continuous warming of the virtual reality (VR) display pushes the microdisplay to the high resolution and high refresh rate. However, the limited bandwidth of the microdisplay is difficult to carry the massive image data in the virtual world. In order to reduce the time redundancy, improve the transmission efficiency and solve the problem of low linearity in the imaging process, this paper introduces a novel pseudo-random scan method which is established on the traditional fractal scan model. And a silicon-based OLED microdisplay verification platform with a resolution of 1.6K*3*1.6K is built. The pseudorandom scan method achieves 100% transmission efficiency and 94.1% linearity, which is suitable for ultra-high definition and high-resolution microdisplays.

Pedestrian detection is the key technology in Advanced Driver Assistant System (ADAS).Until recently, pedestrian detection, which is realized as the vehicle equipment, still doesn’t have the mature product. So, this thesis proposes a novel pedestrian detection system on board with the E-HOG (Histogram of Gradient) IP (intellectual property), can be used as the real time vehicle equipment. Three contributions are made in this thesis. Firstly, Sobel operator cascaded Uniform Local Binary Pattern (LBP) and E-HOG is the novel structure of pedestrian detection system. The Sobel operator gives the sliding step of Uniform LBP detection window, without using the results of LBP detection window. Through this operation, the detection speed will be improved. Second, the vehicle equipment of pedestrian detection is self-developed using FPGA as core devices. Third, E-HOG IP, which is promoted based on the HOG, can extract pedestrian or other objects feature. Without sacrifice of accuracy, this pedestrian detection on board deals with 30 fps (640x480 pixels) and can be used as the real-time detection system.

Pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) is an effective way for navigation coupled with GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) or weak GNSS signal environment like indoor scenario. However, indoor location with an accuracy of 1 to 2 meters determined by PDR based on MEMS-IMU is still very challenging. For one thing, heading estimation is an important problem in PDR because of the singularities. For another thing, walking distance estimation is also a critical problem for pedestrian walking with randomness. Based on the above two problems, this paper proposed axis-exchanged compensation and gait parameters analysis algorithm to improve the navigation accuracy. In detail, an axis-exchanged compensation factored quaternion algorithm is put forward first to overcome the singularities in heading estimation without increasing the amount of computation. Besides, real-time heading is updated by R-adaptive Kalman filter. Moreover, gait parameters analysis algorithm can be divided into two steps: cadence detection and step length estimation. Thus, a method of cadence classification and interval symmetry is proposed to detect the cadence accurately. Furthermore, a step length model adjusted by cadence is established for step length estimation. Compared to the traditional PDR navigation, experimental results showed that the error of navigation reduces 32.6%.

This work experimented on the TEOLED (Top-emitting Organic Light-Emitting Diode) using the TiN (titanium nitride) as the anode for the microdisplays based on the CMOS (Complementary Metal–Oxide–Semiconductor) integrated circuit substrate. TiN is a hard, dense, and refractory material with steady physical and chemical characteristics. It is proved in this work to be a good candidate for the anode of the TEOLED due to its good electrical and optical characteristics. A SXGA resolution OLED microdisplay is designed and developed with TiN anodes. The luminance reaches beyond 2700 cd/m2 when the operating voltage is below 5 V. The power efficiency reaches 13 lm/W at the luminance of 1000 cd/m2. As a conclusion, TiN can be used to solve the incompatibility problem between the CMOS process and the OLED process. By fabricating the top metal coated with TiN as the TEOLED anodes in the standard CMOS process, it is not necessary to build a new separate post-process line for the anodes in the mass manufacture. Hence, the process step for the CMOS-based OLED microdisplay will be simplified, huge cost will be saved and the production yield will also be improved.

Silicon-based OLED (Organic Light Emitting Display) microdisplay technology begins to attract people's attention in the emerging VR and AR devices. The high display frame refresh rate is an important solution to alleviate the dizziness in VR applications. Traditional display circuit drivers use the analog method or the digital PWM method that follow the serial scan order from the first pixel to the last pixel by using the shift registers. This paper proposes a novel atomized scan strategy based on the digital fractal scan strategy using the pseudo-random scan order. It can be used to realize the high frame refresh rate with the moderate pixel clock frequency in the high definition OLED microdisplay. The linearity of the gray level is also improved compared with the Z fractal scan strategy.

Background: Developing a new reliable prognostic marker to predict the prognosis and supply better and more suitable therapy for patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is urgent. Therefore, we performed this systematic review of the literature with meta-analysis to clarify and explore the associate expression of nm23-H1 with prognosis of NPC patients. Methods: Literature research in Cochrane Library, PubMed, and EMBASE was performed up to July 2016. Eligible case–control studies of associate expression of nm23-H1 with prognosis of NPC patients were included. Results: Nine studies met our inclusion criteria and were finally included for the analysis, involving 861 participants. Our meta-analysis revealed that the low expression of nm23-H1 in NPC was: RR = 2.13, 95% CI 1.15–3.95 and R = 2.56, 95% CI 2.03–3.22; and poorer overall survival (OS) rate was 3-year OS rate: RR: 0.55; 95% CI: 0.45–0.67 and 5-year OS rate: RR: 0.60; 95% CI: 0.52–0.69. Furthermore, the statistical significance was constant irrespective of different NPC subtypes. Conclusion: The low expression of nm23-H1 is associated with poorer prognosis in patients with NPC, suggesting that it is a prognostic factor and potential biomarker for survival in NPC.

A novel AMOLED-on-silicon microdisplay driver circuit with the digital-analog-hybrid scan strategy is designed for high resolution and high frame refresh rate display. The strategy of the digital-analog-hybrid scan is analyzed. A particularly designed multiplex column driver circuit is proposed. The column driver circuit is simulated. The experimental results show that the digital-analog-hybrid scan method can effectively reduce data flow.

In this paper, a two-stage optimal detection algorithm is presented for pedestrians in front of the vehicles. It uses the idea of combing the coarse-grain and fine-grain to effectively classify and filter. First, it uses the combination of Color Self-Similarity features based on rectangular block summing and AdaBoost classifier based on greedy strategy to coarse-grained screen the pedestrian detection window, then it uses the combination of HOG feature and libsvm classifier to fine-grained confirm the previous screened pedestrian detection window, Finally, the target windows is integrated by the greedy strategy. The AdaBoost classifier’s training time is theoretically shorten to the 1/T time of original algorithm. With the training process, The Color Self-Similarity features shorten to 250 dimensions by the feature selection. Then, the method makes full use of the image information and ensures the detection accuracy.

A novel digitally driven pixel circuit for active-matrix organic light-emitting diode (OLED) microdisplays is proposed and evaluated. This circuit supports both pulse width modulation and pulse density modulation digital drive approaches. Only three transistors and one capacitor are required per pixel for the proposed circuit. A current mirror is used to compensate for the pixel current changes that occur because of the degradation of the OLEDs over time. The compensation current depends on the potential of the common cathode, the properties of the current mirror, and the Width/Length (W/L) ratio of the drive transistor. The proposed digital pixel circuit also has advantages in circuit layout compared with analog pixel circuits.

Introduce a complete system of license plate recognition: using morphological processing and priori knowledge of license plate to discern the location of license plate, accomplishing tilt correction through Radon transform, then fulfilling character segmentation of accurate positioning license plate by projection, finishing character recognition through BP neural network which was improved by the use of adaptive learning rate and momentum factor. With the programming and verification on Matlab experimental platform, experimental results show that we can have a preferable recognition speed and accuracy.

The aim of the present study was to investigate whether chronic administration of basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF) following angioplasty in a dog model of atherosclerotic iliac stenosis may restore endothelium function and prevent restenosis (RS). In total, 40 dogs with atherosclerotic stenosis of the right iliac arteries were used in the study. A total of 20 dogs underwent histological examination of the lumen areas prior to (n=10) and immediately following angioplasty (n=10). Intravenous bFGF was administered to 10 dogs (bFGF group) and an additional 10 dogs received vehicle injection (control group). Animals in the two groups were sacrificed 42 days following surgery for in vitro analysis of vascular reactivity and morphometric assessment of the histological cross-sectional areas. The bFGF group exhibited significantly greater maximal endothelium-dependent acetylcholine-induced relaxation (Emax, 43±9%) when compared with the control group (Emax, 8±6%; P

The purpose of this study was to determine whether myeloid differentiation factor88-dependent Toll-Like Receptor-4 (TLR-4) signaling contributed to the inhibition of abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) by Tanshinone IIA (Tan IIA).Male Sprague-Dawley rats (n = 12 / group) were randomly distributed into three groups: Tan IIA, control, and sham. The rats from Tan IIA and control groups under-went intra-aortic elastase perfusion to induce AAAs, and those in the sham group were perfused with saline. Only the Tan IIA group received Tan IIA (2 mg / rat / d). Aortic tissue samples were harvested at 24 d after perfusion and evaluated using reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction, Western blot, immunohistochemistry and immunofluorescence.The over-expression of Toll-Like Receptor-4 (TLR-4), Myeloid Differentiation factor 88 (MyD88), Phosphorylated Nuclear Factor κB (pNF-κB) and Phosphorylated IκBα (pIκBα) induced by elastase perfusion were significantly decreased by Tan IIA treatment.Tan IIA attenuates elastase-induced AAA in rats possibly via the inhibition of MyD88-dependent TLR-4 signaling, which may be one potential explanation of why Tan IIA inhibits AAA development through multiple effects.Hintergrund: Das Ziel dieser Studie war es, festzustellen, ob das vom myeloischen Differenzierungsfaktor88 (MyD88)-abhängige Toll-like-Rezeptor-4 (TLR-4) Signal zur Hemmung des Bauchaortenaneurysmas (BAA) durch Tanshinone IIA (Tan IIA) beiträgt. Material und Methoden: Männliche Sprague-Dawley Ratten (n = 12 pro Gruppe) wurden zufällig in drei Gruppen aufgeteilt: Tan IIA, Kontrolle und Scheinbehandlung. Die Ratten von Tan IIA und der Kontrollgruppe wurden einer intraaortalen Elastase Perfusion unterzogen, um ein BAA zu induzieren, und in der Gruppe mit Scheinbehandlung wurde mit Kochsalzlösung perfundiert. Nur die Tan IIA Gruppe erhielt Tan IIA (2 mg / Ratte / Tag). Aortale Gewebeproben wurden 24 Tage nach Perfusion genommen und mit Reverse Transkriptase Polymerase Kettenreaktion, Western Blot, Immunhistochemie und Immunfluoreszenz ausgewertet. Ergebnisse: Die Überexpression von TLR-4, MyD88, phosphoryliertem nuclear factor kappaB (pNF-κB) und phosphoryliertem IκBα (pIκBα), welche durch Elastase Perfusion induziert waren, wurden wesentlich durch Tan IIA Behandlung verringert. Schlussfolgerungen: Tan IIA dämpft das Elastase-induzierte BAA in Ratten möglicherweise über die Hemmung der MyD88-abhängigen TLR-4-Signalisierung, was eine Erklärung dafür sein kann, warum Tan IIA die Entwicklung eines BAA durch mehrere Effekte verringert.

BACKGROUND Varicose veins (VVs) have a substantial impact on patients' quality of life. OBJECTIVE The study aimed to retrospectively compare the short-term clinical outcomes of 2 treatment methods for VVs, namely high ligation and stripping (HL/S) of the great saphenous vein combined with foam sclerotherapy (FS), and FS alone. MATERIALS AND METHODS Totally, 180 patients with VVs were included and treated with FS alone or HL/S+FS. Assessments included the first injection efficacy, postoperative status, complications, operative time, and recovery time. A follow-up duration was performed. Patient satisfaction was also recorded. RESULTS No significant differences in the complete occlusion rate of the varicose tributaries, as well as in postoperative complications, were found between the treatment groups (p > 0.05). The complete occlusion rates of the varicose tributaries in the FS and HL/S+FS groups were 90% and 90%, respectively. Although mild phlebitis and local pigmentation were found in both groups, they disappeared during the follow-up period. Operative and recovery times were higher in the HL/S+FS group than in the FS group. CONCLUSION The HL/S+FS and FS alone showed equivalent efficacy for treating patients with VVs. Considering the increased operative and recovery times, FS alone is recommended to treat VVs in clinical practice.

The authors have investigated the edge emission of microcavities which are formed by low-molecular organic light emitting diodes sandwiched between dielectric mirrors and the metal cathode. The edge emission relative to the surface emission is found to significantly depend on the layer number of alternating high and low refractive index films in dielectric mirrors. The enhancement of cavity devices can reach a factor of ~3.0 compared with noncavity devices. Spectra of organic film pumped by edge emission of microcavity devices have been observed, a mechanism of achievement of an amplified spontaneous emission has been discussed theoretically.

We report our three-year experience with the visceral hybrid procedure for patients with thoracoabdominal aortic aneurysms, dissections and Takayasu's arteritis. We also evaluate and discuss the outcomes of hybrid procedures. Hybrid procedures include debranching of the visceral or renal arteries followed by endovascular repair of the disease. The surgical strategy was designed individually to reduce trauma and minimize stent coverage area. A series of 11 patients (9 men, mean age 52 years) were treated between June 2008 and September 2011. The pathologies were aneurysmal disease (thoracoabdominal aortic aneurysms) (5, 45.5%), aortic dissection (thoracoabdominal aortic dissection) (4, 36.4%) or true/false aneurysm formation after Takayasu's arteritis (2, 18.2%). Simultaneous approach (9, 81.8%) and staged approach (2, 18.2%) were performed. The mean follow-up was 13.5 months (range 1–36). The technical success was 100%. Stent grafts were implanted in the entire or part of the thoracoabdominal aorta. The overall mortality rate was 9.1% (1/11) with no aneurysm-related death. The permanent paraplegia and bypass graft occlusion rate was 0%. The overall morbidity was 36.4% with two endoleaks (2/11, 18.2%). In conclusion, hybrid procedures can minimize surgical invasiveness in treatments of thoracoabdominal aortic pathologies, and it is a safe method with acceptable morbidity and mortality.

A new method based on neural network using stochastic computing is presented for the recognition of human gesture. In the current gesture recognition study, most of the technologies require high hardware resources and power consumption. Considering gesture recognition algorithms, the power limitations of their complex systems have encouraged designers toward searching for a reconfigurable architecture, stochastic computing. For different neural networks with complex arithmetic operations, computation on stochastic bit streams costs fewer resources and performs very efficient in operation. The experimental results demonstrate that the stochastic neural network could recognize different hand gesture effectively and take less hardware area. Even more, it has good robustness to the different environments.

This paper gives a special insight standing on an unusual computing algorithm — stochastic computing — to discuss the strategy on designing low cost and low power smart wearable devices from the system architecture view. Some new stochastic logics are introduced to approximate complex mathematic functions like the Gaussian function with simple circuits, which are used to build the low cost and low power artificial neural network for data intensive applications for the smart wearable devices. The data process kernel is distributed close to the data source. An experiment on the facial recognition shows how the system complexity, speed, cost, power, and flexibility can be improved by the stochastic logic architecture.

Pedestrian detection is a hot topic in the field of computer vision in recent year. But the current studies about pedestrian detection mainly focus on feature extraction, training and classifier model and pay little attention to non-maximum suppression (NMS). This thesis uses the information like ratio of detection scores, neighborhood window to improve NMS based on HOG-SVM algorithm, solving the problems that alone windows in detected images arise false detection rate and the suppression windows surrounded by inhibited windows arise false detection rate and missing detection rate. Experiment results on the INRIA pedestrian database show that the improved non-maxima suppression can solve the above problems, reducing the false detection rate and missing detection rate in pedestrian detection.

Accuracy and speed are the two important keys in pedestrian detection. In order to balance these two indexes well, this thesis presents a novel pedestrian detection system, ROIs cascaded Uniform LBP and improved HOG, for real-time pedestrian detection in monocular vision. Two contributions are made in this system. First contribution is that Uniform LBP (Local Binary Pattern) cascaded improved HOG (Histograms of Oriented Gradients) are the novel structure for pedestrian detection, which can improve detection speed. Second contribution is that this pedestrian detection system is evaluated by many methods and algorithms. Experiment shows that this system can deal with 31 fps, which can be used as the real time pedestrian detection system.

The paper puts forward a method on controlling the AM-OLED panel to display image with high gray scale levels. It also gives an ASIC design sample to implement this method. A twenty sub-fields scan scheme has been taken into use in the chip to display 256 gray scale levels on a QVGA resolution AM-OLED display screen. The functions of image scaling and rotating have also been implemented for multiply application. The simulation and chip test result show that the chip design has met the design requirements.

Aiming at the time redundancy in the flat panel display (FPD) imaging process, the paper studied some problems for FPD gray scale controlling based on the fractal theory, dissertates the construction of the space-time mapping topology architecture, the proposition of optimal scanning structure for FPD’s gray imaging, and the creation of the fractal theoretic model. Then the logic implementation and system application are presented based on the fractal model of the optimal scan architecture, and the application results achieved target of eliminating time redundancy and increasing the scanning availability. The novel control mode that the fractal scanning IP core described with Verilog language embedded in the FPGA hardware frame can efficiently increase the imaging gray scales and quality in the FPDs scanning controller and speed up the frame frequency of display system.

Based on the mathematical model of the optimal scan architecture of gray-scale imaging, this paper presents the design and logic implementation of a novel organic light-emitting display (OLED) gray-scale controller with the fractal scan scheme to efficiently increase the scan utilization and imaging quality. Through the exploration of the sub-space code sequences and bit code sequences for different gray levels, the authors first complete the design and implementation of the parameterized fractal scanning IP core for various gray levels, which can be used in every flat panel display controller. And then a novel OLED gray-scale controller embedded in a fractal scanning IP core is designed. It can efficiently increase the imaging gray levels and speed up frame frequency of display systems. Serial applications and tests indicate that the novel controller can obtain 100% scan utilization and a significant decrease in the system clock frequency (a multiple of 29 for 256 gray levels), compared with the traditional scan methods. With the proposed method there is no need of using high-speed IC circuits to realize the high articulation and resolution display of video images. Thus, the paper provides a new approach and an engineering way to solve one of the pressing problems of high-resolution flat panel display technology.

A high-speed dual-modulus divide-by-32/33 prescaler has been developed using 0.25 µm CMOS technology. The source-coupled logic (SCL) structure is used to reduce the switching noise and to ameliorate the power-speed tradeoff. The proposed prescaler can operate at high frequency with a low-power consumption. Based on the 2.5 V, 0.25 ; µm CMOS model, simulation results indicate that the maximum input frequency of the prescaler is up to 3.2 GHz. Running at 2.5 V, the circuit consumes only 4.6 mA at an input frequency 2.5 GHz.

To characterize type A aortic dissection (TAAD) in the Chinese population using high-resolution computed tomography (CT) and explore potential candidacy for endovascular repair of TAAD.The imaging studies and medical records of all 302 patients presenting with TAAD at two Chinese hospitals from 2010 to 2013 were reviewed. Of these, 221 patients were excluded because of missing/inadequate preoperative CT scans. The remaining 91 patients (64 men; mean age 51.1±7.5 years) had CT data adequate to assess anatomical suitability for endovascular treatment. Entry tears were identified using multiplanar reconstructions, while morphological measurements were based on a centerline of flow (CLF) technique. Suitability for endovascular treatment was based on a proximal landing zone ≥20 mm long, a true lumen aortic diameter ≤38 mm, and a total aortic diameter ≤46 mm; no coronary bypass grafts originating from the ascending aorta; no malfunctioning aortic valve; and good cerebral and cardiac perfusion.In the 91 patients, the precise location of the primary proximal entry tear could be identified in only 34 (37.4%) patients; in these patients, the identifiable intimal tears were located 36.4±41.0 mm distal to the closest coronary artery. The CLF was successfully generated in the CT scans of all patients; the mean lumen and total aortic lumen diameters at the entry tear level were 37.6±6.3 and 44.3±13.3 mm, respectively. Based on the CT measurements, stent-graft repair would have been anatomically feasible in 35 (38.5%) patients. No proximal landing zone (n=23), large aortic diameter (n=15), abnormal aortic valve (n=10), previous coronary bypass graft surgery (n=5), and poor cerebral and cardiac perfusion (n=3) were obstacles that affected the suitability for this treatment.Based on high-resolution CT scans, our pilot study suggested that 38% of Chinese patients with TAAD could potentially be treated by stent-grafting based on the anatomical characteristics of the proximal dissection.

This paper presents a buck-boost and series LC converter (BBSLCC) with synchronous phase-shift control (SPSC) for series battery equalizer. Traditionally, to equalize n series battery cells, buck-boost converter uses 2n-1 switches, but this BBSLCC can reduce half switch count. Closed-loop phase-shift controller based on a feed-forward method is extremely hard to implemented, but this proposed SPSC method is much easier to be achieved by just sensing the zero current through series LC circuit. A theoretical analysis shows that it take much shorter time to equalize batteries using this BBSLCC with SPSC compared with a single BBSLCC without SPSC. It also offers a solution to bypass the open circuit faulty cell. The simulation and experimental results verify the operating characteristics of this proposed topology and method, and show that it features straightforward and low cost implementation.

* This work is partially supported by 863 project Grant #2008AA3A336 and Shanghai Municipal Committee of Science and Technology Grant#09530708600. Abstract Fractal theory was firstly applied in gray scale control of Active Matrix/Organic Light Emitting Diode (AM-OLED) display system, which settled the problem of time redundancy of traditional scanning methods. In the experiment, a fractal scanning controller was designed and applied in a AM-OLED matrix display with 12 by 12 pixels. Timing simulation results indicate that compared with the traditional scanning methods, the novel method can improve scanning efficiency evidently, especially in the case of high gray scale and large screen. Therefore, the method provides a new way to solve the bottle problem of high articulation multimedia FPDs development. Index Terms Gray scale; time redundancy; fractal theory; AM-OLED.

In this paper, a real-time lane detection algorithm based on vision is presented. This algorithm improves the robustness and real-time of processing by combining with the dynamic region of interest (ROI) and the prior knowledge. When the lanes detected from previous frames have little changes for several frames, we recognize the lane only in dynamic ROI. We also proposed an erosion operator to refine the edge and a Hough transform with a restrict search space to detect lines with a faster rate. Experiments in structured road showed that the proposed lane detection method can work robustly in real-time, and can achieve a speed of 30ms/frame for 720×480 image size.