Search

Aim: This research aimed to evaluate the effect of gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) on pulmonary volumes, airflows, and airway resistance in the patients without respiratory symptoms and compare them with the healthy subjects. Background: GERD is the return of gastric content into the esophagus and beyond. GERD may play an essential role in the extraesophageal diseases, including chest pain, asthma, laryngitis, chronic cough, and sinusitis. The relation between GERD and airway involvement in asthma and also bronchoconstrictor effects of GERD are well recognized, but its impact on lung parameters in the patients with GERD without respiratory symptoms is unclear. Methods: In a case-control study, 78 GERD patients without pulmonary symptoms and 93 healthy subjects as control group were enrolled. The impulse oscillometry examined airway resistance. The body plethysmograph measured the pulmonary volumes and airflows. Results: The mean age of GERD patients and the healthy subjects were 37.30±9.76 and 34.74±11.10, respectively. A total of 53.8% of patients and 67.7% of healthy subjects were male. The lung volumes measured by the body plethysmography were normal in both patients and healthy subjects. However, there was a significant difference between the groups in forced expiratory volume in 1 second (FEV1)/forced vital capacity (FVC) (P=0.01) and maximal mid expiratory flow (MMEF) (P=0.008). Airway resistance at R5Hz was significantly higher in the case group than the control group (P=0.001). Conclusion: The results of the current study demonstrated that GERD patients have small airway disease even in the absence of respiratory symptoms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents a description of an efficient hardware implementation of an elliptic curve cryptography processor (ECP) for modern security applications. A high‐performance elliptic curve scalar multiplication (ECSM), which is the key operation of an ECP, is developed both in affine and Jacobian coordinates over a prime field of size p using the National Institute of Standards and Technology standard. A novel combined point doubling and point addition architecture is proposed using efficient modular arithmetic to achieve high speed and low hardware utilisation of the ECP in Jacobian coordinates. This new architecture has been synthesised both in application‐specific integrated circuit (ASIC) and field‐programmable gate array (FPGA). A 65 nm CMOS ASIC implementation of the proposed ECP in Jacobian coordinates takes between 0.56 and 0.73 ms for 224‐bit and 256‐bit elliptic curve cryptography, respectively. The ECSM is also implemented in an FPGA and provides a better delay performance than previous designs. The implemented design is area‐efficient and this means that it requires not many resources, without any digital signal processing (DSP) slices, on an FPGA. Moreover, the area–delay product of this design is very low compared with similar designs. To the best of the authors' knowledge, the ECP proposed in this study over Fp performs better than available hardware in terms of area and timing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A correction to the article "The Effect of Quench-Induced Residual Stresses on the Distortion of Machined Thin-Walled Parts" that was published in the 2015 issue is presented.