Contrast-enhanced microCT evaluation of degeneration following partial and full width injuries to the mouse lumbar intervertebral disc

A targeted injury to the mouse intervertebral disc (IVD) is often used to recapitulate the degenerative cascade of the human pathology. Since injuries can vary in magnitude and localization, it is critical to examine the effects of different injuries on IVD degeneration. We thus evaluated the degenerative progression resulting from either a partial- or full-width injury to the mouse lumbar IVD using contrast-enhanced micro-computed tomography and histological analyses. A lateral-retroperitoneal surgical approach was used to access the lumbar IVD, and the injuries to the IVD were produced by either incising one side of the annulus fibrosus or puncturing both sides of the annulus fibrosus. Female C57BL/6J mice of 3-4 months age were used in this study. They were divided into three groups to undergo partial-width, full-width, or sham injuries. The L5/6 and L6/S1 lumbar IVDs were surgically exposed, and then the L6/S1 IVDs were injured using either a surgical scalpel (partial-width) or a 33G needle (full-width), with the L5/6 serving as an internal control. These animals recovered and then euthanized at either 2-, 4-, or 8-weeks after surgery for evaluation. The IVDs were assessed for degeneration using contrast-enhanced microCT (CEµCT) and histological analysis. The high-resolution 3D CEµCT evaluation of the IVD confirmed that the respective injuries were localized within one side of the annulus fibrosus or spanned the full width of the IVD. The full-width injury caused significant deteriorations in the nucleus pulposus, annulus fibrous and at the interfaces after 2 weeks, which was sustained through the 8 weeks, while the partial width injury caused localized disruptions that remained limited to the annulus fibrosus. The use of CEµCT revealed distinct IVD degeneration profiles resulting from partial- and full-width injuries. The partial width injury may serve as an alternative model for IVD degeneration resulting from localized annulus fibrosus injuries

DFX: A Low-latency Multi-FPGA Appliance for Accelerating Transformer-based Text Generation

Transformer is a deep learning language model widely used for natural language processing (NLP) services in datacenters. Among transformer models, Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) has achieved remarkable performance in text generation, or natural language generation (NLG), which needs the processing of a large input context in the summarization stage, followed by the generation stage that produces a single word at a time. The conventional platforms such as GPU are specialized for the parallel processing of large inputs in the summarization stage, but their performance significantly degrades in the generation stage due to its sequential characteristic. Therefore, an efficient hardware platform is required to address the high latency caused by the sequential characteristic of text generation. In this paper, we present DFX, a multi-FPGA acceleration appliance that executes GPT-2 model inference end-to-end with low latency and high throughput in both summarization and generation stages. DFX uses model parallelism and optimized dataflow that is model-and-hardware-aware for fast simultaneous workload execution among devices. Its compute cores operate on custom instructions and provide GPT-2 operations end-to-end. We implement the proposed hardware architecture on four Xilinx Alveo U280 FPGAs and utilize all of the channels of the high bandwidth memory (HBM) and the maximum number of compute resources for high hardware efficiency. DFX achieves 5.58x speedup and 3.99x energy efficiency over four NVIDIA V100 GPUs on the modern GPT-2 model. DFX is also 8.21x more cost-effective than the GPU appliance, suggesting that it is a promising solution for text generation workloads in cloud datacenters.Comment: Extension of HOTCHIPS 2022 and accepted in MICRO 202

Analysis of Content Legibility for Smartphones of Websites of the Korean Urological Association and Other Urological Societies in Korea

Purpose: We performed an analysis of the smartphone legibility of the websites of the Korean Urological Association (KUA) and other urological societies. Materials and Methods: This study was conducted on the websites of the KUA and nine other urological societies. Each website was accessed via iPhone Safari and Android Chrome, respectively, to evaluate the establishment and readability of the mobile web pages. The provision of Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds by the websites and whether the websites had Twitter and Facebook accounts were evaluated. In addition, a validation test on the web standards was performed by using the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C???) Markup Validation Service, and subsequently the numbers of errors and warnings that occurred were analyzed. Results: When accessed via Safari, two websites were legible, four were somewhat legible, and four were somewhat illegible. When accessed via Chrome, two websites were legible, six were somewhat legible, and two were somewhat illegible. One website provided an RSS feed and two websites managed members via separate Twitter accounts. No website supported mobile web pages. The result of the W3C??? Markup Validation test on 10 websites showed a mean error rate of 221.6 (range, 13-1,477) and a mean warning rate of 127.13 (range, 0-655). Conclusions: The smartphone legibility level of the websites of urological societies was relatively low. Improved smartphone legibility and web standard compliance of the websites of urological societies are required to keep up with the popularity of smartphones

Radiofrequency Catheter Ablation of Hemodynamically Unstable Ventricular Tachycardia Associated with Systemic Sclerosis

Systemic sclerosis (SS) is a connective tissue disease and cardiac involvement is common. Primary cardiac involvement such as conduction system disturbances and arrhythmias can also occur. However, reports of sustained ventricular tachycardia (VT) are rare. We report a case of catheter ablation of sustained ventricular tachycardia in a patient with systemic sclerosis using a conventional mapping system. A 64-yr-old woman with a 10-yr history of SS was referred for management of her ventricular tachycardia. There was no structural abnormality in cardiac chambers. However, electrophysiologic study revealed electrical substrate of ventricular tachycardia which could be ablated with pacemapping and substrate mapping. This case demonstrated successful conventional mapping and catheter ablation in a hemodynamically unstable patient with SS