Integrated Sensing and Communication in Coordinated Cellular Networks

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) has recently merged as a promising technique to provide sensing services in future wireless networks. In the literature, numerous works have adopted a monostatic radar architecture to realize ISAC, i.e., employing the same base station (BS) to transmit the ISAC signal and receive the echo. Yet, the concurrent information transmission causes severe self-interference (SI) to the radar echo at the BS which cannot be effectively suppressed. To overcome this difficulty, in this paper, we propose a coordinated cellular network-supported multistatic radar architecture to implement ISAC. In particular, among all the coordinated BSs, we select a BS as the multistatic receiver to receive the sensing echo signal, while the other BSs act as the multistatic transmitters to collaborate with each other to facilitate cooperative ISAC. This allows us to spatially separate the ISAC signal transmission and radar echo reception, intrinsically circumventing the problem of SI. To this end, we jointly optimize the transmit and receive beamforming policy to minimize the sensing beam pattern mismatch error subject to both the communication and sensing quality-of-service requirements. The resulting non-convex optimization problem is tackled by a low-complexity alternating optimization-based suboptimal algorithm. Simulation results showed that the proposed scheme outperforms the two baseline schemes adopting conventional designs. Moreover, our results confirm that the proposed architecture is promising in achieving high-quality ISAC.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure

Sensing Mutual Information with Random Signals in Gaussian Channels

Sensing performance is typically evaluated by classical metrics, such as Cramer-Rao bound and signal-to-clutter-plus-noise ratio. The recent development of the integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) framework motivated the efforts to unify the metric for sensing and communication, where researchers have proposed to utilize mutual information (MI) to measure the sensing performance with deterministic signals. However, the need to communicate in ISAC systems necessitates the use of random signals for sensing applications and the closed-form evaluation for the sensing mutual information (SMI) with random signals is not yet available in the literature. This paper investigates the achievable performance and precoder design for sensing applications with random signals. For that purpose, we first derive the closed-form expression for the SMI with random signals by utilizing random matrix theory. The result reveals some interesting physical insights regarding the relation between the SMI with deterministic and random signals. The derived SMI is then utilized to optimize the precoder by leveraging a manifold-based optimization approach. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is validated by simulation results

A subset of methylated CpG sites differentiate psoriatic from normal skin.

Psoriasis is a chronic inflammatory immune-mediated disorder affecting the skin and other organs including joints. Over 1,300 transcripts are altered in psoriatic involved skin compared with normal skin. However, to our knowledge, global epigenetic profiling of psoriatic skin is previously unreported. Here, we describe a genome-wide study of altered CpG methylation in psoriatic skin. We determined the methylation levels at 27,578 CpG sites in skin samples from individuals with psoriasis (12 involved, 8 uninvolved) and 10 unaffected individuals. CpG methylation of involved skin differed from normal skin at 1,108 sites. Twelve mapped to the epidermal differentiation complex, upstream or within genes that are highly upregulated in psoriasis. Hierarchical clustering of 50 of the top differentially methylated (DM) sites separated psoriatic from normal skin samples with uninvolved skin exhibiting intermediate methylation. CpG sites where methylation was correlated with gene expression are reported. Sites with inverse correlations between methylation and nearby gene expression include those of KYNU, OAS2, S100A12, and SERPINB3, whose strong transcriptional upregulation is an important discriminator of psoriasis. Pyrosequencing of bisulfite-treated DNA from skin biopsies at three DM loci confirmed earlier findings and revealed reversion of methylation levels toward the non-psoriatic state after 1 month of anti-TNF-α therapy

Childhood Cancer Survival in the Highly Vulnerable Population of South Texas: Persistent Challenges for Adolescents and Hispanic Ethnicity

Background: This study examines childhood cancer survival rates and prognostic factors related to survival in the majority Hispanic population of South Texas (STX), whereas most other population studies in childhood cancer survival focus on populations with relatively few Hispanics. Methods: The population-based cohort study used Texas Cancer Registry data (1995-2017) to examine survival and prognostic factors. Results: The 5-year relative survival rate for STX cancer patients diagnosed at 0–19 years was 80.3% for all races/ethnicity. Hispanics had statistically significant lower 5-year relative survival rates than non-Hispanic Whites (NHW) for male and female together diagnosed at age ≥ 5 years. When comparing survival among Hispanics and NHW for the most common cancer, acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL), the difference was most striking in the 15-19 years age range, with 47.7% Hispanic patients surviving at 5 years compared to 78.4% of NHW counterparts. The multivariable-adjusted analysis showed that males [hazard ratio (HR): 1.13], patients diagnosed at age \u3c 1 year (HR: 1.69), at 10–14 year (HR: 1.42), or at 15–19 years (HR: 1.40), and Hispanics (HR: 1.38) had significantly increased mortality risk compared to the corresponding counterparts for all cancers. Conclusions: STX Hispanics had lower 5-year relative survival than NHW especially for ALL. Male gender, diagnosis at age \u3c 1 year or 10–19 years were also associated with decreased childhood cancer survival. Despite advances in treatment, Hispanics lag significantly behind NHW. Further cohort studies in STX are warranted to identify additional factors affecting survival and to develop interventional strategies