A Comparison of Co-methylation Relationships Between Rheumatoid Arthritis and Parkinson's Disease

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a complex autoimmune disease. Recent studies have identified the DNA methylation loci associated with RA and found that DNA methylation was a potential mediator of genetic risk. Parkinson's disease (PD) is a common neurodegenerative disease. Several studies have indicated that DNA methylation levels are linked to PD, and genes related to the immune system are significantly enriched in PD-related methylation modules. Although recent studies have provided profound insights into the DNA methylation of both RA and PD, no shared co-methylation relationships have been identified to date. Therefore, we sought to identify shared co-methylation relationships linked to RA and PD. Here, we calculated the Pearson's correlation coefficient (PCC) of 225,239,700 gene pairs and determined the differences and similarities between the two diseases. The global co-methylation change between in PD cases and controls was larger than that between RA cases and controls. We found 337 gene pairs with large changes that were shared between RA and PD. This co-methylation relationship study represents a new area of study for both RA and PD and provides new ideas for further study of the shared biological mechanisms of RA and PD

Predictors of multidomain decline in health‐related quality of life after stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) for prostate cancer

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/136687/1/cncr30519_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/136687/2/cncr30519.pd

Relationship Between Stressful Life Events and Sleep Quality: Rumination as a Mediator and Resilience as a Moderator

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between stressful life events and sleep quality and to probe the role of rumination and resilience in the relationship.Method: The Adolescent Self-Rating Life Events Checklist, Ruminative Responses Scale, Connor–Davidson Resilience Scale, and Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index were used among 1,065 college students. Statistical Product and Service Solutions (SPSS) 20.0 and the SPSS macro Process, which were specifically developed for assessing complex models including both mediators and moderators, were used to analyze the data.Results: High scores of stressful life events predicted worse sleep quality. Rumination partially mediated the relations between stressful life events and sleep quality. Resilience moderated the direct and indirect paths leading from stressful life events to sleep quality.Conclusions: The results demonstrate that stressful life events can directly affect the sleep quality of college students and indirectly through rumination. Additionally, increasing psychological resilience could decrease both the direct effect and the indirect effect of stressful life events affecting sleep quality. The results of this study may contribute to a better understanding of the effects, as well as the paths and conditions, of stressful life events on sleep quality in college students. Moreover, these findings can provide constructive suggestions for improving college students’ sleep quality

User-centric visible light networking

In this thesis, we propose a suite of schemes for indoor visible light communications (VLC), where multiple light emitting diode (LED) based access points (APs) serve multiple photo diode (PD) aided user equipment (UE). A novel user-centric (UC) VLC network is conceived, relying on user-clustering, resource allocation and sophisticated multiple access (MA) design. Our objective is to improve both the throughput and outage probability of the proposed UC-VLC network under practical indoor positioning and backhaul network design.Specifically, instead of relying on the conventional network-centric (NC) design, we conceive the novel concept of UC-VLC supported by amorphous cells exhibiting extra benefits. By beneficially clustering multiple attocells based on the location information of UEs, a centre-shifting UC-clustering strategy is proposed, leading to a multi-AP multi-UE scenario within each cluster. Upon employing the potent transmit pre-coding (TPC) concept, the multi-user interference (MUI) within each cluster can be completely eliminated, where multiple APs simultaneously serve the clustered UEs. Since the construction of the UC-clusters relies on the knowledge of the UEs' positions, the amalgamation of indoor positioning with the VLC network becomes important. Upon combining the benefits of triangulation and fingerprinting based positioning techniques, we propose a novel hybrid solution exhibiting a high accuracy, robustness and scalability.This is achieved by beneficially combining the low-complexity triangulation based positioning with high-accuracy fingerprinting, in order to efficiently support UC-clustering.Since the improvement of the UC-VLC over NC-VLC has in the past been quantified based on a number of idealized simplifying assumptions, such as operating exactly at the Shannon capacity, our motivation is to quantify the performance of the UC-VLC under more practical considerations. Therefore, adaptive modulation is invoked, which allows the individual UEs to be assigned various modulation-modes. Since the different modulation-modes require different power, the transmit power allocated to each AP is therefore dependent and dynamic. Furthermore, instead of greedily supporting all the UEs in the network, a dynamic scheduling scheme is advocated. To obtain the maximum throughput of the constructed UC-VLC under practical constraints, an efficient resource allocation strategy is required for dealing with the modulation-mode assignment, power allocation and the scheduling. To solve this complex maximization problem, a heuristic RA algorithm based on dynamic-programming is proposed. Aided by it, we will show under a range of scenarios that the achievable throughput and the outage probability of the proposed UC-VLC system are better than that of the conventional NC-VLC system.Then, we study the MA of VLC, when the APs are densely deployed, leading to an ultra-dense VLC network, where the inter-cell interference (ICI) amongst the densely-deployed APs is severe. To handle this challenge, both orthogonal MA (OMA) and non-orthogonal MA (NOMA) are considered. In order to cope with the grave ICI of our UC-VLC network, a hybrid NOMA and OMA scheme is proposed for enhancing the performance, where the frequency reuse (FR) technique and the TDMA-based scheduling may be dynamically invoked, which are further amalgamated with the spectrum-efficient NOMA scheme. We will show that the proposed MA scheme is more robust against the ICI, keeping the outage probability as low as possible, at a price of modestly degrading the achievable throughput.Finally, we consider the realistic backhaul issue of our VLC network. Since the ubiquitous mains power line constitutes a natural backbone feed for VLC, a combined power line communication (PLC) and VLC (PLC-VLC) network is conceived. More specifically, the source data arriving from the Ethernet is fed by a power line into the VLC network through the alternating current (AC) power supply, hence combining the power supply and data communication relying on PLC. In this PLC-VLC network, the power line connects the LEDs without requiring a duplicated fibre-backbone, which is implementationally convenient. To cope with the harsh impulse noise of the PLC channel, broadband OFDM PLC is used. The information gleaned from PLC is then forwarded to multiple UEs via visible light. To increase the downlink bit rate, the NOMA principle is invoked in our VLC network. For the sake of maximizing the sum-throughput of the PLC-VLC network, we conceive an optimal joint power allocation (JPA) strategy for each subcarrier in PLC and for each UE in VLC, which will be demonstrated to outperform the benchmarkers

Hybrid positioning for the amorphous-cell assisted user-centric visible light downlink

Visible light communications (VLCs) have attracted significant attention in recent years, where the novel concept of user-centric (UC) VLC based on amorphous cells (A-Cells) exhibits extra benefits compared with conventional circular cells. The construction of A-Cells relies on the knowledge of the users' positions; hence, the intrinsic amalgamation of VLC and positioning becomes important. Therefore, we propose a novel hybrid positioning technique by beneficially combining the low-complexity of triangulation-based positioning and the high accuracy of fingerprinting, in order to support A-Cell-assisted UC VLC under practical light-emitting diode linearity constraints with clipping distortion and noise. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed technique is capable of achieving a much higher positioning accuracy than triangulation at a lower complexity than fingerprinting, where the resultant system throughput is similar to that of perfect positioning

Reconstructed Hybrid Optical OFDM-NOMA for Multiuser VLC Systems

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is deemed to be a prospective multiple access technology of the next generation. However, in visible light communication (VLC), when advanced hybrid optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (O-OFDM), such as hybrid asymmetrically clipped O-OFDM (HACO-OFDM), is combined with NOMA, error propagation is induced, which degrades the system performance. Therefore, a novel reconstructed hybrid O-OFDM-NOMA (RHO-OFDM-NOMA) scheme is conceived in this paper. In order to eliminate the error propagation, the users in RHO-OFDM-NOMA opt for the ACO-OFDM or clipping-free O-OFDM signals according to their channel qualities, which are subsequently superimposed on pulse-amplitude-modulated discrete multitone (PAM-DMT) to yield the spectrum-efficient hybrid O-OFDM signal. Furthermore, a reconstruction process is designed to ensure the non-negativity. Compared with HACO-OFDM, the proposed RHO-OFDM can retain the error propagation in NOMA-VLC, whilst maintaining the superiorities of high spectral and power efficiency. It is demonstrated by simulation results that RHO-OFDM-NOMA can support a notably higher data rate than the NOMA schemes using conventional O-OFDM

Joint power allocation for the multi-user NOMA-downlink in a power-line-fed VLC network

Visible light communications (VLC) constitutes as a promising downlink technique of supporting the ever-increasing tele-traffic. Since the ubiquitous mains power line constitutes a natural backbone feed for VLC, a combined power line and VLC network is conceived, where the source data is fed by power line communications (PLC) into the VLC network. We refer to it as a PLC-VLC network, where the power-line connects the light emitting diodes (LED) without requiring a duplicated filter-backbone. Then the information is forwarded to multiple users via visible light. Furthermore, to increase the downlink bit rate, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is invoked in VLC. For the sake of maximizing the sum-throxughput, we conceive a joint PLC-VLC power allocation (JPA) strategy, where the power allocated both to the PLC and to the VLC links is jointly determined upon analysing the power-relationship between them. Our simulations demonstrate that NOMA significantly outperforms orthogonal multiple access (OMA) with the aid of the proposed JPA.<br/

Reconstructed Hybrid Optical OFDM-NOMA for Multiuser VLC Systems

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is deemed to be a prospective multiple access technology of the next generation. However, in visible light communication (VLC), when advanced hybrid optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (O-OFDM), such as hybrid asymmetrically clipped O-OFDM (HACO-OFDM), is combined with NOMA, error propagation is induced, which degrades the system performance. Therefore, a novel reconstructed hybrid O-OFDM-NOMA (RHO-OFDM-NOMA) scheme is conceived in this paper. In order to eliminate the error propagation, the users in RHO-OFDM-NOMA opt for the ACO-OFDM or clipping-free O-OFDM signals according to their channel qualities, which are subsequently superimposed on pulse-amplitude-modulated discrete multitone (PAM-DMT) to yield the spectrum-efficient hybrid O-OFDM signal. Furthermore, a reconstruction process is designed to ensure the non-negativity. Compared with HACO-OFDM, the proposed RHO-OFDM can retain the error propagation in NOMA-VLC, whilst maintaining the superiorities of high spectral and power efficiency. It is demonstrated by simulation results that RHO-OFDM-NOMA can support a notably higher data rate than the NOMA schemes using conventional O-OFDM

RDM-Hybrid Positioning Aided Amorphous-Cell Assisted User-Centric Visible Light Downlink Techniques

This RDM is associated with: Feng, S. et al (2016). Hybrid positioning for the amorphous-cell assisted user-centric visible light downlink. IEEE Access, 4, 2705-2713. This RDM includes the data set for plotting the result-figures of the above-mentioned paper. More explicitly, this RDM includes the data for plotting the x-axis and y-axis of a particular curve of the corresponding figure. </span