A New Stochastic Inner Product Core Design for Digital FIR Filters

Stochastic computing (SC) is a computational technique with computational operations governed by probability instead of arithmetic rules. It recently found promising applications in digital and image processing areas and attracted attentions of researchers. In this paper, a new stochastic inner product (multiply and accumulate) core with an improved scaling scheme is presented for improving the accuracy and fault tolerance performance of SC based finite impulse response (FIR) digital filters. The proposed inner product core is designed using tree structured multiplexers which is capable of reducing the critical path and fault propagation in the stochastic circuitry. The designed inner product core can lead to construction of SC based light weight and multiplierless FIR digital filters. As a result, an SC based FIR digital FIR filter is implemented on Altera Cyclone V FPGA which operates on stochastic sequences of 256-bits length (8-bits precision level). Experimental results show that the developed filter has lower hardware cost, better accuracy and higher fault tolerance level compared with other stochastic implementations

A New Stochastic Inner Product Core Design for Digital FIR Filters

Stochastic computing (SC) is a computational technique with computational operations governed by probability instead of arithmetic rules. It recently found promising applications in digital and image processing areas and attracted attentions of researchers. In this paper, a new stochastic inner product (multiply and accumulate) core with an improved scaling scheme is presented for improving the accuracy and fault tolerance performance of SC based finite impulse response (FIR) digital filters. The proposed inner product core is designed using tree structured multiplexers which is capable of reducing the critical path and fault propagation in the stochastic circuitry. The designed inner product core can lead to construction of SC based light weight and multiplierless FIR digital filters. As a result, an SC based FIR digital FIR filter is implemented on Altera Cyclone V FPGA which operates on stochastic sequences of 256-bits length (8-bits precision level). Experimental results show that the developed filter has lower hardware cost, better accuracy and higher fault tolerance level compared with other stochastic implementations

NEW IN THE PATELLA FRACTURES TREATMENT

In the literature there is a gap of publications about patella fractures management which is due to the absence of serious attention to the injuries of this largest sesamoid bone. In addition, in the world literature there is a lack of monographs and toolkits for the treatment of patients with these injuries, furthermore, in textbooks and traumatology manuals there are only a few template recommendations to the tactics of treating patients with this trauma. Meanwhile, patella fractures represent approximately 0.5-1.5% of all fractures, delayed union, formation of a false joint, and the emergence of patellofemoral arthrosis after these fractures is not uncommon. In the scientific literature on traumatology there is no unified, all-recognized classification of these fractures, which hinders the development of a single algorithm for the treatment of patients with patellar fractures. There are no contradictory views to the treatment of patella fractures without displacement; however, in relation to the treatment of patients with complex patella fractures, there are divergent views between the fracture fragments preservation to partial or even total patellectomy. In connection with the foregoing, We considered the issue of treating patients with patella fractures topical. Based on a thorough analysis of treatment results of 113 patients we provided a working classification based on the number of patellar fracture fragments (two-fragmentary, three-fragmentary, four-fragmentary, multi-fragmentary, upper and lower pole fractures). Based on this classification, traditional, modified and new methods of treating patients with patellar fractures were used. This is described in more detail in the forthcoming article

Accumulation, Source Identification, and Cancer Risk Assessment of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) in Different Jordanian Vegetables

The accumulation of polyaromatic hydrocarbons in plants is considered one of the most serious threats faced by mankind because of their persistence in the environment and their carcinogenic and teratogenic effect on human health. The concentrations of sixteen priority polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (16 PAHs) were determined in four types of edible vegetables (tomatoes, zucchini, eggplants, and cucumbers), irrigation water, and agriculture soil, where samples were collected from the Jordan Valley, Jordan. The mean total concentration of 16 PAHs (∑16PAHs) ranged from 10.649 to 21.774 µg kg−1 in vegetables, 28.72 µg kg−1 in soil, and 0.218 µg L−1 in the water samples. The tomato samples posed the highest ∑16PAH concentration level in the vegetables, whereas the zucchini samples had the lowest. Generally, the PAHs with a high molecular weight and four or more benzene rings prevailed among the studied samples. The diagnostic ratios and the principal component analysis (PCA) revealed that the PAH contamination sources in soil and vegetables mainly originated from a pyrogenic origin, traffic emission sources, and biomass combustion. The bioconcentration factors (BCF) for ∑16PAHs have been observed in the order of tomatoes > cucumbers and eggplants > zucchini. A potential cancer risk related to lifetime consumption was revealed based on calculating the incremental lifetime cancer risk of PAHs (ILCR). Therefore, sustainable agricultural practices and avoiding biomass combusting would greatly help in minimizing the potential health risk from dietary exposure to PAHs

Identification of Arcanobacterium pyogenes isolated by post mortem examinations of a bearded dragon and a gecko by phenotypic and genotypic properties

The present study was designed to identify phenotypically and genotypically two Arcanobacterium (A.) pyogenes strains isolated by post mortem examinations of a bearded dragon and a gecko. The A. pyogenes strains showed the typical biochemical properties and displayed CAMP-like synergistic hemolytic activities with various indicator strains. The species identity could be confirmed genotypically by amplification and sequencing of the 16S rDNA gene and, as novel target gene, by sequencing of the beta subunit of RNA polymerase encoding gene rpoB, of both strains and of reference strains representing nine species of the genus Arcanobacterium. The species identity of the two A. pyogenes strains could additionally be confirmed by PCR mediated amplification of species specific parts of the 16S-23S rDNA intergenic spacer region, the pyolysin encoding gene plo and by amplification of the collagen-binding protein encoding gene cbpA. All these molecular targets might help to improve the future identification and further characterization of A. pyogenes which, as demonstrated in the present study, could also be isolated from reptile specimens

Arcanobacterium phocae infection in mink (Neovison vison), seals (Phoca vitulina, Halichoerus grypus) and otters (Lutra lutra)

Abstract Background Infectious skin disorders are not uncommon in mink. Such disorders are important as they have a negative impact on animal health and welfare as well as on the quality and value of the fur. This study presents the isolation of Arcanobacterium phocae from mink with severe skin lesions and other pathological conditions, and from wild seals and otters. Results In 2015, A. phocae was isolated for the first time in Denmark from outbreaks of dermatitis in mink farms. The outbreaks affected at least 12 farms. Originating from these 12 farms, 23 animals cultured positive for A. phocae. The main clinical findings were necrotizing pododermatitis or dermatitis located to other body sites, such as the lumbar and cervical regions. A. phocae could be isolated from skin lesions and in nine animals also from liver, spleen and lung, indicating a systemic spread. The bacterium was also, for the first time in Denmark, detected in dead seals (n = 9) (lungs, throat or wounds) and otters (n = 2) (throat and foot). Conclusions An infectious skin disorder in mink associated with A. phocae has started to occur in Danish farmed mink. The origin of the infection has not been identified and it is still not clear what the pathogenesis or the port of entry for A. phocae infections are

Compact and low power AES block cipher using lightweight key expansion mechanism and optimal number of S-Boxes

In the past decade, we observed the trend of technological advancement towards the field of portable electronics. As electronic devices shrink in size, constraints emerge in the form of limited power supply and area for the implementation of information security mechanisms. In this work, our goal is to produce a complete AES block cipher for data encryption and perform optimization in terms of power and size. Unlike the common approach of optimizing the circuitry of the expensive AES S-Box, this work contributes by proposing a compact key expansion mechanism to reduce hardware requirement and deducing the optimal number of S-Boxes to be used in an AES block cipher to achieve the desired performance. In addition, we optimized the design using a series of methodologies which include: (1) implementing the optimized AES S-Box proposed by Wong et al. [2], (2) reducing the number of pipeline registers, and (3) applying input bus sharing. As a result, we achieved three optimized configurations which employ different number of S-Boxes in their architectures. Our best architecture in terms of size and power consumption has a total logic element count of 1818, a total power dissipation of 122.40mW, and a throughput of 198.77Mbps. The design is implemented on a Cyclone II EP2C20F484C7 field-programmable gate array (FPGA)

A throughput maximised parallel architecture for 2D fast discrete pascal transform

In this paper, we present a fully pipelined parallel implementation of a two dimensional (2D) Discrete Pascal Transform (DPT). Our approach first makes use of the properties of the Kronecker product and the vec operation on matrices to form an alternate 2D DPT representation suitable for column parallel computation. Next, we lend ourselves to the results from Skodras' work in 1D DPT to achieve the final architecture for fast 2D DPT. With a fully pipelined implementation, the architecture possesses an initial latency of 2 (N - 1) clock cycles and a maximum throughput of one complete two dimensional transform every clock cycle, given any input matrix of size N x N. To evaluate our work, our results obtained from actual FPGA implementation were benchmarked against results from other previous works