Internal Nodes Research Articles

A high-speed quadruple-node-upset-tolerant latch in 22 nm CMOS technology

With the scaling of CMOS feature size, the multi-node upset caused by radiation has become an important reliability issue of storage devices. In order to improve the robustness of the storage devices, this paper proposes a High-Speed Quadruple-Node-Upset tolerant latch (HS-QNU). The proposed HS-QNU latch consists of two single-node-upset-resilient RFCs, two single-node-upset-resilient DICEs and a clocked quadruple-input C-element. Based on the single-node-upset-resilient ability of DICE and RFC and the blocking ability of C-element, the proposed HS-QNU latch can effectively tolerate soft errors when any four internal nodes upset by transient faults at the same time. Meanwhile, the latch effectively reduces delay and power consumption by using high-speed path and clock-gating technique. Extensive SPICE simulation in 22 nm CMOS technology shows that compared with QNUTL, the proposed latch reduces delay by 30.68 %, reduces power consumption by 30.86 %, reduces power-delay-product by 52.07 %, reduces area-power-delay-product by 49.08 %, and only increases area overhead by 6.25 %. The proposed HS-QNU latch achieves good tradeoff among delay, power consumption and area. Compared with the previous hardened latches, the proposed HS-QNU latch has the best hardening ability, the highest speed and the smallest power-delay-product. The variation analysis shows that the proposed HS-QNU latch is insensitive to temperature and voltage variations.

Wide Tangent Photon Field Versus Electron Field in the Treatment of Internal Mammary Lymph Nodes in Patients With Left Breast Cancer: A Decision-Making Flowchart

This study of internal mammary lymph node chain (IMC) irradiation in patients with left breast cancer aimed at comparing the merits of using, on one hand, a dedicated direct IMC electron field versus a wide tangent photon field covering both breast and IMC on the other. The objective was to produce guidelines allowing clinicians to readily determine the preferred method for each patient. For 19 patients with cancer of the left breast/chest wall, we produced 2 treatment plans each using a different technique: the electron technique using 2 standard opposed photon tangents covering only the breast or chest wall along with a matching adjacent electron field targeting the IMC only or the wide tangent technique using 2 opposed wide tangents covering simultaneously IMC and breast or chest wall. All plans were then optimized for acceptable target coverage. For patients where the left anterior descending coronary artery (LAD) was located outside of the wide tangent fields (13 patients), the wide tangent technique resulted in lower dose to the LAD, left lung, and heart. When the LAD was inside the wide tangents (6 patients), dose was lower with the electron technique for LAD and heart. In all cases, regardless of LAD location, the wide tangent technique returned strictly superior dose homogeneity but much higher right (contralateral) breast dose. A flowchart was produced based on LAD location that allows the clinician to readily determine the preferred technique for each patient without having to perform and compare 2 treatment plans, thus saving valuable planning time.

Mode Adaptive Secure UAV Relay Transmissions

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) can enhance wireless transmission security by improving the secrecy rate through relaying the legitimate transmission and injecting artificial noise to the eavesdroppers. However, due to the inherent mechanical energy consumption and the long-range signal propagation pathloss, the traditional cruising and hovering UAV relay modes are deficient in energy utilization and secrecy rate, respectively. Modeling of the secrecy energy efficiency with respect to UAV mode adaptation is limited in the literature and deserves further investigation. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a secrecy rate-energy efficient UAV relay mode adaptation scheme for secure wireless communications scenarios where the eavesdropping locations are known, i.e., the eavesdropper is a hijacked internal legitimate node. In this secure system, the UAV cooperatively assists the legitimate transmissions and injects artificial interference to the eavesdropper. We investigate optimum UAV placement and relay period planning for the hovering and the cruising relay modes, respectively. By modeling the UAV modes transfer and maximizing the secrecy energy efficiency, the optimum mode adaptation ratios are obtained under both the secrecy rate-prioritized and the energy-saving criteria. In addition, the proposed UAV relay mode adaptation mechanism is further studied for each UAV task division, to adapt to the dynamic channel variations and enhance the security. Our theoretical analysis shows that the mode adaptation ratio is determined by the secrecy rate-energy gain between the cruising and the hovering modes, and by the energy consumption threshold of the UAV relays. Our numerical results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves higher secrecy energy efficiency than the traditional schemes.

An Efficient and Reliable Blockchain-based Trust Management Model for Electricity Trading Terminal

<p>A safe and reliable terminal environment is crucial to ensure the security of the electricity trading system. The existing terminal security system based on identity authentication and access control has internal threats that are difficult to solve. For example, multiple internal malicious nodes cause broadcast message tampering attacks and malicious packet loss, resulting in message dissemination failure. Existing blockchain-based trust management systems are good for addressing insider threats, but suffer from low efficiency. In order to solve the internal threat problem of the electric electricity trading system, from the perspective of trust evaluation and trust management of the terminal environment, an efficient and reliable blockchain-based electric trading terminal (ERBTM) trust management model is proposed. First of all, we collect a variety of trust factors to evaluate the credibility of the terminal, which solves the problem of accuracy in the process of trust assessment; secondly, we improve the speed of storing trust values on the chain and ensure the robustness of the system by improving the consensus algorithm; Finally, we designed the structure of the block that stores the trust value to ensure that the trust value is not tampered with. The experimental results show that, compared with similar methods, the ERBTM model can effectively deal with the endogenous security threats of terminals in the electricity trading environment, and has significant advantages in terms of efficiency and reliability. </p> <p> </p>

TreeTerminus —creating transcript trees using inferential replicate counts

A certain degree of uncertainty is always associated with the transcript abundance estimates. The uncertainty may make many downstream analyses, such as differential testing, difficult for certain transcripts. Conversely, gene-level analysis, though less ambiguous, is often too coarse-grained. We introduce TreeTerminus, a data-driven approach for grouping transcripts into a tree structure where leaves represent individual transcripts and internal nodes represent an aggregation of a transcript set. TreeTerminus constructs trees such that, on average, the inferential uncertainty decreases as we ascend the tree topology. The tree provides the flexibility to analyze data at nodes that are at different levels of resolution in the tree and can be tuned depending on the analysis of interest. We evaluated TreeTerminus on two simulated and two experimental datasets and observed an improved performance compared to transcripts (leaves) and other methods under several different metrics.

Virus Pop-Expanding Viral Databases by Protein Sequence Simulation.

The improvement of our knowledge of the virosphere, which includes unknown viruses, is a key area in virology. Metagenomics tools, which perform taxonomic assignation from high throughput sequencing datasets, are generally evaluated with datasets derived from biological samples or in silico spiked samples containing known viral sequences present in public databases, resulting in the inability to evaluate the capacity of these tools to detect novel or distant viruses. Simulating realistic evolutionary directions is therefore key to benchmark and improve these tools. Additionally, expanding current databases with realistic simulated sequences can improve the capacity of alignment-based searching strategies for finding distant viruses, which could lead to a better characterization of the "dark matter" of metagenomics data. Here, we present Virus Pop, a novel pipeline for simulating realistic protein sequences and adding new branches to a protein phylogenetic tree. The tool generates simulated sequences with substitution rate variations that are dependent on protein domains and inferred from the input dataset, allowing for a realistic representation of protein evolution. The pipeline also infers ancestral sequences corresponding to multiple internal nodes of the input data phylogenetic tree, enabling new sequences to be inserted at various points of interest in the group studied. We demonstrated that Virus Pop produces simulated sequences that closely match the structural and functional characteristics of real protein sequences, taking as an example the spike protein of sarbecoviruses. Virus Pop also succeeded at creating sequences that resemble real sequences not included in the databases, which facilitated the identification of a novel pathogenic human circovirus not included in the input database. In conclusion, Virus Pop is helpful for challenging taxonomic assignation tools and could help improve databases to better detect distant viruses.

Design of soft-error resilient SRAM cell with high read and write stability for robust operations

This paper proposes a highly robust 16 transistor soft-error resilient SRAM cell (SERSC-16T) to provide complete resilience to single event upsets (SEU). The proposed cell is complete resilient to SEU at any sensitive node and also shows recovery from the double-node-upset to its fixed internal node pair. Owing to its separate read path through an internal node, the proposed cell offers the highest read-stability, 6.8 times higher than the state-of-the-art cell RHD-14T. The proposed cell also shows the fastest write operation and its write access time is 1.6 times less compared to the recently proposed cell SCCS-18T. In addition, the proposed cell has 1.7-times higher write stability compared to state-of-the-art cell HP-12T. The SERSC-16T cell also shows moderate leakage power dissipation, which is 1.5 times less compared to the SCCS-18T cell. Moreover, the proposed cell shows the best figure of merit and the most negligible probability of SEU occurrence among all state of the art radiation hardened SRAM cells.

A Computationally Efficient Dynamic Grid Motion Approach for Arbitrary Lagrange–Euler Simulations

The present article addresses the topic of grid motion computation in Arbitrary Lagrange–Euler (ALE) simulations, where a fluid mesh must be updated to follow the displacements of Lagrangian boundaries. A widespread practice is to deduce the motion for the internal mesh nodes from a parabolic equation, such as the harmonic equation, introducing an extra computational cost to the fluid solver. An alternative strategy is proposed to minimize that cost by changing from the parabolic equation to a hyperbolic equation, implementing an additional time derivative term allowing an explicit solution of the grid motion problem. A fictitious dynamic problem is thus obtained for the grid, with dedicated material parameters to be carefully chosen to enhance the computational efficiency and preserve the mesh quality and the accuracy of the physical problem solution. After reminding the basics of the ALE expression of the Navier–Stokes equations and describing the proposed hyperbolic equation for the grid motion problem, the paper provides the necessary characterization of the influence of the fictitious grid parameters and the analysis of the robustness of the new approach compared to the harmonic reference equation on a significant 2D test case. A 3D test case is finally extensively studied in terms of computational performance to highlight and discuss the benefits of the hyperbolic equation for ALE grid motion.

Generalized Constituent Nodes for Simplified Successive-Cancellation Decoding of Multi-Kernel Polar Codes

The decoding latency of the successive-cancellation decoder for polar codes is of great importance in its practical applications, and it can be reduced by implementing multi-bit decision decoders in the constituent nodes of the decoding tree. In this letter, we develop a matrix analysis method to analyze the corresponding parity submatrix of the decoding tree’s internal node. Two generalized constituent nodes are presented for the fast simplified successive-cancellation (fast-SSC) decoding of linear kernels-mixed multi-kernel polar codes. Results show that the proposed method achieves latency reduction and preserves the error-correction performance.

DILI: A Distribution-Driven Learned Index

Targeting in-memory one-dimensional search keys, we propose a novel DIstribution-driven Learned Index tree ( DILI ), where a concise and computation-efficient linear regression model is used for each node. An internal node's key range is equally divided by its child nodes such that a key search enjoys perfect model prediction accuracy to find the relevant leaf node. A leaf node uses machine learning models to generate searchable data layout and thus accurately predicts the data record position for a key. To construct DILI, we first build a bottom-up tree with linear regression models according to global and local key distributions. Using the bottom-up tree, we build DILI in a top-down manner, individualizing the fanouts for internal nodes according to local distributions. DILI strikes a good balance between the number of leaf nodes and the height of the tree, two critical factors of key search time. Moreover, we design flexible algorithms for DILI to efficiently insert and delete keys and automatically adjust the tree structure when necessary. Extensive experimental results show that DILI outperforms the state-of-the-art alternatives on different kinds of workloads.

PO-2063 VMAT vs Hybrid techniques in breast irradiation with internal mammary nodes

PO-2063 VMAT vs Hybrid techniques in breast irradiation with internal mammary nodes

PD-0237 Intrafractional dose coverage of the internal mammary nodes in high-risk breast cancer patients

PD-0237 Intrafractional dose coverage of the internal mammary nodes in high-risk breast cancer patients

PO-1264 Risk stratification for internal mammary lymph node irradiation based on dynamic MRI vessel imaging

PO-1264 Risk stratification for internal mammary lymph node irradiation based on dynamic MRI vessel imaging

Internal Mammary Node Irradiation for Breast Cancer in the Era of Precision Medicine

Internal Mammary Node Irradiation for Breast Cancer in the Era of Precision Medicine

GAM: General Auxetic Metamaterial with Tunable 3D Auxetic Behavior Using the Same Unit Cell Boundary Connectivity.

Research on auxetic metamaterials is important due to their high performance against impact loadings and their usefulness in actuators, among other applications. These metamaterials offer a negative Poisson's ratio at the macro level. However, usual auxetic metamaterials face challenges in (1) grading the effect, (2) coupling and combining auxetic metamaterials with non-auxetic materials due to boundary compatibility, (3) obtaining the same auxetic behavior in all directions in the transverse plane, and (4) adapting the regular geometry to the component design boundary and shape. The goal of this paper is to present a novel, recently patented tunable 3D metamaterial created to reproduce a wide spectrum of 3D auxetic and non-auxetic Poisson's ratios and Young's moduli. This wide range is obtained using the same basic unit cell geometry and boundary connections with neighboring cells, facilitating designs using functionally graded metamaterials as only the connectivity and position of the cell's internal nodes are modified. Based on simple spatial triangularization, the metamaterial is easily scalable and better accommodates spatial curvatures or boundaries by changing the locations of nodes and lengths of bars.

Ilaser Submucous Destruction in the Treatment of Hemorrhoids

Aim: to improve the results of treatment in patients with hemorrhoids of the 2nd and 3rd stages.Materials and methods. The prospective study included 60 patients with hemorrhoids of the 2nd and 3rd stages. All patients underwent destruction of internal hemorrhoids with a fiber laser with a diode pump with a wavelength of 1940 nm. The technique is based on the effect of laser energy on the cavernous tissue of the internal hemorrhoidal node and on the terminal branches of the upper rectal artery. The efficiency of the destruction of internal hemorrhoids and the frequency of relapses of the disease were evaluated. The effectiveness of the proposed method was evaluated using anoscopy, measurement of the size of internal hemorrhoidal nodes, transrectal ultrasound with dopplerography. The analysis of the intensity of the pain syndrome, the consumption of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and the assessment of the quality of life on the SF-36 scale was carried out. Sphincterometry was performed in all patients to determine the possible effect of laser radiation on the rectal locking apparatus. To assess the possible causes of complications, a single-factor analysis of the amount of energy transferred to each hemorrhoidal node and the total amount of energy spent on the operation was conducted.Results. In all patients, by day 7 after surgery, the pain syndrome in 43 patients (75.4 %) corresponded to 0 points according to VAS. In 3 patients (5 %) intraoperative hemorrhage developed. In the early postoperative period, 5 patients (8.3 %) had 7 complications: 5 cases of thrombosis of the external hemorrhoidal node and 2 — of acute urinary retention. The conducted single-factor analysis showed the dependence of the development of complications on the energy transferred to each hemorrhoidal node and its total amount for the entire operation. In terms of up to 6 months, there were no signs of a return of the disease in any case (hemorrhoidal prolapse and blood discharge). The detected hemorrhoids before the operation, a month after the operation, were not visualized, which persisted after 6 months. The performed transrectal ultrasound examination with spectral-wave dopplerography for up to 6 months allowed to diagnose a persistent decrease in blood flow along the terminal branches of the upper rectal artery compared with preoperative values. When performed sphincterometry, there was no change in the parameters of the anal sphincter function compared to preoperative parameters.Conclusion. The proposed method applying a fiber laser with a diode pump with a wavelength of 1940 nm makes it possible to affect transdermally the internal hemorrhoidal node without damaging the mucosa of the anal canal. The absence of postoperative wounds in the anal canal leads to a decrease in pain syndrome, and by day 7 there are no clinical manifestations of hemorrhoids. The method of laser destruction of internal hemorrhoids can be used in outpatient conditions and can improve the quality of life of patients in the early postoperative period.

Coverage of Lateral Lymph Nodes in Rectal Cancer Patients with Routine Radiation Therapy Practice and Associated Locoregional Recurrence Rates

Involved internal iliac and obturator lateral lymph nodes (LLNs) are a known risk factor for the occurrence of ipsilateral local recurrences (LLR) in rectal cancer. This study examined coverage of LLNs with routine radiation therapy practice in the Netherlands and associated LLR rates. Patients with a primary tumor ≤8 cm of the anorectal junction, cT3-4 stage, and at least 1 internal iliac or obturator LLN with short axis ≥5 mm who received neoadjuvant (chemo)radiation therapy, were selected from a national, cross-sectional study of patients with rectal cancer treated in the Netherlands in 2016. Magnetic resonance images and radiation therapy treatment plans were reviewed regarding segmented LLNs as gross tumor volume (GTV), location of LLNs within clinical target volume (CTV), and received proportion of the planned radiation therapy dose. A total of 223 out of 3057 patients with at least 1 LLN ≥5 mm were selected. Of those, 180 (80.7%) LLNs were inside the CTV, of which 60 (33.3%) were segmented as GTV. Overall, 202 LLNs (90.6%) received ≥95% of the planned dose. Four-year LLR rates were not significantly higher for LLNs situated outside the CTV compared with those inside (4.0% vs 12.5%, P=.092) or when receiving <95% versus ≥95% of the planned radiation therapy dose (7.1% vs 11.3%, P=.843), respectively. Two of 7 patients who received a dose escalation of 60 Gy developed an LLR (4-year LLR rate of 28.6%). This evaluation of routine radiation therapy practice showed that adequate coverage of LLNs was still associated with considerable 4-year LLR rates. Techniques resulting in better local control for patients with involved LLNs need to be explored further.

A highly stable and low‐cost 12T radiation hardened SRAM cell design for aerospace application

SummaryIn this paper, a highly stable and low‐cost 12T (HSLC12T) radiation hardened static‐random‐access‐memories (SRAM) cell is proposed in 55 nm CMOS technology. Based on polarity reversal design and read/write separation structure, the proposed HSLC12T cell can recover from any single event upsets (SEUs) induced at all its sensitive nodes and even single event double‐node‐upsets (SEDNUs) induced at its internal storage node pair Q‐QN, while also having the maximum read static noise margin (RSNM) and lower static hold power, as well as excellent write speed and write‐ability. Though the HSLC12T cell exhibits a larger read delay, it has the best overall performance of all other cells. This is proven by having the highest electrical quality metric (EQM) value, thus making the proposed HSLC12T cell a better choice for aerospace applications.

D91. Effect of Pre-pectoral Versus Sub-pectoral Implant Placement in Breast Reconstruction on the Delivery of Post-mastectomy Radiation

PURPOSE: The placement of breast implants in a pre-pectoral compared to sub-pectoral plane has become increasingly popular in breast reconstruction, though data are limited on how this affects radiation delivery for locoregional disease control in women with breast cancer. This study aims to assess the dosimetric implications of implant location in women undergoing post-mastectomy radiation therapy (PMRT) after immediate breast reconstruction. METHODS: Patients with breast cancer treated with mastectomy, implant breast reconstruction, and PMRT between 2014-2022 at a single center were included. All patients received either intensity-modulated or 3-D conformal radiation therapy over an average of 5 weeks. Demographic, clinical and treatment data were collected through chart review. Patients were matched 1:1 on cancer sidedness, use of boost, fractionation and extent of radiation fields. Groups were compared using Mann-Whitney U or t-tests for continuous variables, and chi-square or Fisher’s Exact tests for categorical variables, as appropriate. RESULTS: Twenty-seven patients with pre-pectoral and 26 patients with sub-pectoral implants were included. Patients with pre-pectoral reconstruction had lower average implant volumes (452cc vs 503cc) prior to radiation. There was no difference in chest wall coverage (p=0.107), internal mammary node coverage (p=0.215), heart dose (p=0.627) or lung V20Gy (p=0.774). CONCLUSION: In this assessment of radiotherapeutic dosimetry in patients undergoing immediate breast reconstruction, we found no significant difference in target coverage or normal tissue dose based on pre- versus sub-pectoral implant location. This suggests that implant placement can be selected to optimize reconstructive outcomes, without concern for compromise to the oncologic quality of PMRT.

MRI Staging of Anorectal Malignancy—A Reporting Dilemma: Is It Adenocarcinoma or Squamous Cell Carcinoma?

Abstract Aim Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of anorectal malignancy is often reported assuming low rectal adenocarcinoma (LRC). The biopsy may, however, reveal squamous cell carcinoma (SCC). Thus, the aim was to compare the imaging findings of SCC and LRC. Methods This was a retrospective study of patients who underwent staging MRI for anorectal malignancy (&lt;5 cm from the anal verge) for adenocarcinoma or squamous cell carcinoma between 2016 and 2021. Two radiologists blinded to biopsy reviewed MRI. Imaging findings and apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) values were compared between SCC and LRC. Results We studied 137 patients (n = 60 SCC, n = 77 LRC) with a mean age of 50.4 (standard deviation: 12.4) years and tumor length of 5.6 ± 1.9 cm. SCC patients were older, and their distal tumor margin was closer to the anal verge (5.3 vs. 22 mm for LRC; p &lt;0.001). T2 intermediate signal and diffusion restriction was seen in 97 and 98.2% of SCC and 75.3 and 77% of LRC, respectively. SCC had lower ADC values (0.910 × 10−3 mm2/s) than LRC (1.126 × 10−3 mm2/s; p &lt; 0.001). But there was no difference in the ADC values when T2 hyperintense tumors were excluded (p = 0.132). Extramural vascular invasion (EMVI) was more frequent in LRC (35.1 vs. 16.7%; p = 0.013). A combination of distance from the anal verge of less than 11 mm, absent EMVI, and the presence of internal iliac and inguinal nodes had an area under the curve (95% confidence interval) of 0.810 (0.737–0.884). Conclusion ADC values are unhelpful in differentiating SCC and LRC. Tumors closer to anal verge, absence of EMVI, and the presence of inguinal and internal-iliac nodes may point towards SCC.