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Background Although various studies have been conducted to demonstrate the possibility of Raman spectroscopy (RS) as a diagnostic tool for prostate cancer (PC), it is difficult to use it in the real clinical area because of imitations in various research processes. Therefore, we did a systematic review and meta-analysis about the accuracy in diagnostic use of RS for PC. Methods A literature search was done using PubMed, Embase, and Cochrane library databases in March 2019 to analyze the accuracy of RS for diagnosis of PC. The accuracy of RS for diagnosis of PC was evaluated by means of pooled sensitivity, specificity, positive likelihood ratio (PLR), negative likelihood ratio (NLR), diagnostic odds ratio (DOR), and summary receiver operating characteristic (SROC). Results Five studies were included for qualitative analysis by screening the remaining articles according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria by means of a systematic review. The pooled sensitivity and specificity of RS were 0.89 (95% CI: 0.87-0.91) and 0.91 (95% CI: 0.89-0.93), respectively. The overall PLR and NLR were 9.12 (95% CI: 4.15-20.08) and 0.14 (95% CI: 0.07-0.29), respectively. The DOR of RS demonstrated high accuracy (73.32; 95% CI: 18.43-291.73). The area under the curves (AUCs) of SROC curves was 0.93. Conclusions RS is an optical diagnostic method with high potential for diagnosis and grading of PC and has advantages of real-time and convenient use. In order to consider real-time use of RS in an actual clinical setting, more studies for standardization and generalization of RS performance and analytical method must be conducted.

SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) engines are an essential part of the processors in various computing markets, from servers to the embedded domain. Although SIMD-enabled architectures have the capability of boosting the performance of many application domains by exploiting data-level parallelism, it is very challenging for compilers and also programmers to identify and transform parts of a program that will benefit from a particular SIMD engine. The focus of this paper is on the problem of SIMDization for the growing application domain of streaming. Streaming applications are an ideal solution for targeting multi-core architectures, such as shared/distributed memory systems, tiled architectures, and single-core systems. Since these architectures, in most cases, provide SIMD acceleration units as well, it is highly beneficial to generate SIMD code from streaming programs. Specifically, we introduce MacroSS, which is capable of performing macro-SIMDization on high-level streaming graphs. Macro-SIMDization uses high-level information such as execution rates of actors and communication patterns between them to transform the graph structure, vectorize actors of a streaming program, and generate intermediate code. We also propose low-overhead architectural modifications that accelerate shuffling of data elements between the scalar and vectorized parts of a streaming program. Our experiments show that MacroSS is capable of generating code that, on average, outperforms scalar code compiled with the current state-of-art auto-vectorizing compilers by 54%. Using the low-overhead data shuffling hardware, performance is improved by an additional 8% with less than 1% area overhead.

In this paper, we address the DRAM storage assignment problems of variables with an objective of maximizing the number of page/burst mode accesses. Specifically, (1) we solve the problem of variable alignment to memory for maximizing the use of page accesses by proposing a technique, called zone_alignment, which is based on the combination of an efficient 0-1 ILP (integer linear programming) formulation and the utilization of temporal locality of variables' accesses in code and (2) the approach used in (1) is then applied to solve the problem of variable alignment for maximizing the use of burst accesses. Surprisingly, the execution of the ILP formulation used in (2) is relatively much faster than that used in (1) and nevertheless, the (optimal) formulation in (2) produces much better results than that by the existing techniques whereas the (optimal) formulation in (1) produces almost the same or slightly improved results, indicating that the problem with page accesses and the problem with burst accesses must be treated completely separately. (3) Finally, by utilizing the techniques in (1) and (2), we propose solutions to two extended DRAM architectures: (a) DRAMs with the capability of both of page and burst access modes and (b) DRAMs with multiple banks. We provide a set of experimental data to show the effectiveness of the proposed techniques.