Search

Abstract The study was to explore the efficacy and safety of sivelestat (SV) in the treatment of severe acute pancreatitis (SAP) with systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS). A total of 102 SAP patients diagnosed and treated in the Emergency Intensive Care Unit of the First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University from January 2021 to August 2024 were selected. The changes of disease outcome, hospital stays and mortality were compared between the two groups. A total of 102 patients were recruited to control group (n = 56) or SV group (n = 46) according to whether SV was applied or not. There was no significant difference in baseline data at admission between the two groups. After 1 week of treatment, all the indexes in both groups improved. The duration of ventilator use (p = 0.0400) and ICU stays (p = 0.0495) in SV group was shorter than that in control group, but there was no significant difference in mortality between the two groups. Although SV did not reduce the mortality of patients with SAP, it reduced the length of ventilator use and ICU stay.

Approximate arithmetic-based homomorphic encryption (HE) scheme CKKS [CKKS17] is arguably the most suitable one for real-world data-privacy applications due to its wider computation range than other HE schemes such as BGV [BGV14], FV and BFV [Bra12, FV12]. However, the most crucial homomorphic operation of CKKS called key-switching induces a great amount of computational burden in actual deployment situations, and creates scalability challenges for hardware acceleration. In this paper, we present a novel Compact And Scalable Accelerator (CASA) for CKKS on the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) platform. The proposed CASA addresses the aforementioned computational and scalability challenges in homomorphic operations, including key-exchange, homomorphic multiplication, homomorphic addition, and rescaling. On the architecture layer, we propose a new design methodology for efficient acceleration of CKKS. We design this novel hardware architecture by carefully studying the homomorphic operation patterns and data dependency amongst the primitive oracles. The homomorphic operations are efficiently mapped into an accelerator with simple control and smooth operation, which brings benefits for scalable implementation and enhanced pipeline and parallel processing (even with the potential for further improvement). On the component layer, we carry out a detailed and extensive study and present novel micro-architectures for primitive function modules, including memory bank, number theoretic transform (NTT) module, modulus switching bank, and dyadic multiplication and accumulation. On the arithmetic layer, we develop a new partially reduction-free modular arithmetic technique to eliminate part of the reduction cost over different prime moduli within the moduli chain of the Residue Number System (RNS). The proposed structure can support arbitrary numbers of security primes of CKKS during key exchange, which offers better security options for adopting the scalable design methodology. As a proof-of-concept, we implement CASA on the FPGA platform and compare it with state-of-the-art designs. The implementation results showcase the superior performance of the proposed CASA in many aspects such as compact area, scalable architecture, and overall better area-time complexities. In particular, we successfully implement CASA on a mainstream resource-constrained Artix-7 FPGA. To the authors’ best knowledge, this is the first compact CKKS accelerator implemented on an Artix-7 device, e.g., CASA achieves a 10.8x speedup compared with the state-of-the-art CPU implementations (with power consumption of only 5.8%). Considering the power-delay product metric, CASA also achieves 138x and 105x improvement compared with the recent GPU implementation.

Due to rapid development in secured technological devices, the efficient implementation of a large field-size elliptic curve cryptosystem (ECC) is becoming demanding in many critical applications. Therefore, this paper presents a new Montgomery point multiplication (PM) algorithm to optimize and balance the signal flow and resource utilization efficiency. Thereafter, we have presented an efficient ECC processor architecture over $GF(2^{m})$ with m = 409 and 571 for the proposed Montgomery PM algorithm. Finally, we have given a detailed comparison and performance analysis (in terms of area-delay product) to show that the proposed cryptographic processor has superior performance as compared to the competing designs. The implementation results after place & route on Xilinx Virtex 7 and Kintex Ultrascale+ are provided. The achieved results reveal that the proposed large field-size ECC processor (and the proposed design strategy) can be extended and applied in many security-demanding applications.

A 56-year-old woman with a history of diabetes mellitus presented with high fever but no abdominal pain. An abdominal computed tomography scan showed a large liver abscess. Hypervirulent, string test-positive, rmpA / ampA2 -, and iutA -positive Klebsiella pneumoniae was rapidly identified from drainage fluid of the liver abscess using metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS). After intravenous antibiotic therapy and drainage of the abscess, the patient’s condition resolved. This case report highlights the value of mNGS in rapidly and accurately identifying a pathogenic microorganism, which helps reduce the incidence of antimicrobial resistance and enables the targeted use of antibiotics.

Three-operation multiplication (TOM) over binary extension field is frequently encountered in cryptosystems such as elliptic curve cryptography. Though digit-serial polynomial basis multipliers are usually preferred for the realization of TOM due to their efficient tradeoff in implementation complexity, the Karatsuba algorithm (KA)-based strategy is rarely employed to reduce the complexity further. Based on this reason, in this paper, we derive a novel low-complexity implementation of TOM based on a new KA-based digit-serial multiplier. The proposed TOM is obtained through two novel coherent interdependent efforts: 1) mapping an efficient KA-based algorithm into a novel digit-serial multiplier and 2) obtaining a new TOM structure through the novel derivation of the TOM algorithm. From the estimated results, it is shown that the proposed structure has significant lower area-time-complexities when compared with the existing competing TOMs. The proposed TOM is highly regular with low-complexity, and hence can be employed in many cryptographic applications.

Because of the efficient tradeoff in area⁻time complexities, digit-serial systolic multiplier over G F ( 2 m ) has gained substantial attention in the research community for possible application in current/emerging cryptosystems. In general, this type of multiplier is designed to be applicable to one certain field-size, which in fact determines the actual security level of the cryptosystem and thus limits the flexibility of the operation of cryptographic applications. Based on this consideration, in this paper, we propose a novel hybrid-size digit-serial systolic multiplier which not only offers flexibility to operate in either pentanomial- or trinomial-based multiplications, but also has low-complexity implementation performance. Overall, we have made two interdependent efforts to carry out the proposed work. First, a novel algorithm is derived to formulate the mathematical idea of the hybrid-size realization. Then, a novel digit-serial structure is obtained after efficient mapping from the proposed algorithm. Finally, the complexity analysis and comparison are given to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed multiplier, e.g., the proposed one has less area-delay product (ADP) than the best existing trinomial-based design. The proposed multiplier can be used as a standard intellectual property (IP) core in many cryptographic applications for flexible operation.