vSkyConf: Cloud-assisted Multi-party Mobile Video Conferencing

As an important application in the busy world today, mobile video conferencing facilitates virtual face-to-face communication with friends, families and colleagues, via their mobile devices on the move. However, how to provision high-quality, multi-party video conferencing experiences over mobile devices is still an open challenge. The fundamental reason behind is the lack of computation and communication capacities on the mobile devices, to scale to large conferencing sessions. In this paper, we present vSkyConf, a cloud-assisted mobile video conferencing system to fundamentally improve the quality and scale of multi-party mobile video conferencing. By novelly employing a surrogate virtual machine in the cloud for each mobile user, we allow fully scalable communication among the conference participants via their surrogates, rather than directly. The surrogates exchange conferencing streams among each other, transcode the streams to the most appropriate bit rates, and buffer the streams for the most efficient delivery to the mobile recipients. A fully decentralized, optimal algorithm is designed to decide the best paths of streams and the most suitable surrogates for video transcoding along the paths, such that the limited bandwidth is fully utilized to deliver streams of the highest possible quality to the mobile recipients. We also carefully tailor a buffering mechanism on each surrogate to cooperate with optimal stream distribution. We have implemented vSkyConf based on Amazon EC2 and verified the excellent performance of our design, as compared to the widely adopted unicast solutions.Comment: 10 page

Effect and clinical medicine observation after phacoemulsification for herpes simplex keratitis with cataract

AIM: To research the vision changes after phacoemulsification for herpes simplex keratitis(HSK)with cataract, and the clinical effect of antiviral drugs in preventing HSK relapse as well.<p>METHODS:Twenty-two cases(22 eyes)with HSK combined cataract were treated by phacoemulsification and intraocular lens implantation, and then randomly divided into two groups. The patients in treatment group received aciclovir tablets and ganciclovir ophthalmic gel, those in control group received ganciclovir ophthalmic gel only. The vision changes after phacoemulsification were observed and the HSK relapse was analyzed.<p>RESULTS: After follow-up of 6 months, the visions of patients in both groups were improved. No relapse of HSK was found in the treatment group, and only one relapse of HSK was found in the control group after 6 months. There were no significant differences in therapy effects. <p>CONCLUSION: Under the protection of antiviral drug, cataract surgery can be applied to patients with HSK recurrence-free more than 6 months, and improve the visions effectively. Ganciclovir ophthalmic gel can effectively prevent the relapse of HSK after cataract surgery

Classification of protein quaternary structure by functional domain composition

BACKGROUND: The number and the arrangement of subunits that form a protein are referred to as quaternary structure. Quaternary structure is an important protein attribute that is closely related to its function. Proteins with quaternary structure are called oligomeric proteins. Oligomeric proteins are involved in various biological processes, such as metabolism, signal transduction, and chromosome replication. Thus, it is highly desirable to develop some computational methods to automatically classify the quaternary structure of proteins from their sequences. RESULTS: To explore this problem, we adopted an approach based on the functional domain composition of proteins. Every protein was represented by a vector calculated from the domains in the PFAM database. The nearest neighbor algorithm (NNA) was used for classifying the quaternary structure of proteins from this information. The jackknife cross-validation test was performed on the non-redundant protein dataset in which the sequence identity was less than 25%. The overall success rate obtained is 75.17%. Additionally, to demonstrate the effectiveness of this method, we predicted the proteins in an independent dataset and achieved an overall success rate of 84.11% CONCLUSION: Compared with the amino acid composition method and Blast, the results indicate that the domain composition approach may be a more effective and promising high-throughput method in dealing with this complicated problem in bioinformatics

Assessing the Behavioral Impact of a Diagnostic Decision Support System

Conference PaperBiomedical Informatic

Automated Transformation of Probabilistic Knowledge for a Medical Diagnostic System

Conference PaperBiomedical Informatic