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Introduction: The introduction of drug-eluting coronary stents (DES) into clinical practice in 2002 represented a major milestone in the treatment of obstructive coronary artery disease. Over the years, significant advances in polymer coating and in antiproliferative agent technology have further improved the safety and clinical performance of newer-generation DES. Areas covered: Development of platinum chromium (PtCr) alloys with high radial strength and high radiopacity have enabled the design of new, thin-strut, flexible, and highly trackable stent platforms, while simultaneously improving stent visibility. These advances have facilitated complex percutaneous treatment of a diverse population of patients in clinical practice. This review will provide an overview of the evolution in PtCr everolimus-eluting stents from PROMUS Element™ to SYNERGY™ to the recently introduced SYNERGY MEGATRON™. The clinical data will be summarized and put into perspective, especially focusing on the role of the SYNERGY™ and MEGATRON™ platforms in the treatment of complex coronary artery disease and high-risk patients. Expert opinion: The SYNERGY™ stent demonstrates favorable clinical efficacy and safety outcome data, and whilst the clinical data on MEGATRON™ are sparse, early experience is promising. The specific overexpansion capabilities, visibility, and radial strength of the MEGATRON™ are attractive features for complex coronary interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Activation checkpointing is a widely-used technique to reduce GPU memory consumption during model training. While it helps to conserve memory, it introduces additional computational load. Existing solutions such as selective activation checkpointing (SAC) and microbatch-based selective recomputation (MSC) are not always available and effective at improving training efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel method called microbatch-based selective activation checkpointing with recomputation hidden (MSCH). MSCH provides a more flexible and effective utilization of the remaining GPU memory after deployment of all activation checkpointing. This minimizes the need to recalculate activations from a microbatch perspective. In addition, we first discovered the challenging “bottleneck” effect and “misalignment” phenomenon in pipeline parallelism scheduling. To address this, we designed a novel multi-stage micro-batch recalculation schedule that hiding activation recalculation at each stage by the “bottleneck” stage thereby effectively improves model training efficiency. Our code is available by https://github.com/CSlearnerZM/MSCH-DeepSpeed.

This chapter covers the various methods of mechanical cell disruption and tissue homogenization that are currently commercially available for processing small samples s < 1 mL) to larger multikilogram production quantities. These mechanical methods of lysing do not introduce chemicals or enzymes to the system. However, the energies required when using these "harsh," high mechanical energy methods can be enough to damage the very components being sought.The destruction of cell membranes and walls is effected by subjecting the cells (a) to shearing by liquid flow, (b) to exploding by pressure differences between inside and outside of cell, (c) to collision forces by impact of beads or paddles, or (d) a combination of these forces.Practical suggestions to optimize each method, where to acquire such equipment, and links to reference sources are included. Several novel technologies are presented.