Practical guidelines for rigor and reproducibility in preclinical and clinical studies on cardioprotection

The potential for ischemic preconditioning to reduce infarct size was first recognized more than 30 years ago. Despite extension of the concept to ischemic postconditioning and remote ischemic conditioning and literally thousands of experimental studies in various species and models which identified a multitude of signaling steps, so far there is only a single and very recent study, which has unequivocally translated cardioprotection to improved clinical outcome as the primary endpoint in patients. Many potential reasons for this disappointing lack of clinical translation of cardioprotection have been proposed, including lack of rigor and reproducibility in preclinical studies, and poor design and conduct of clinical trials. There is, however, universal agreement that robust preclinical data are a mandatory prerequisite to initiate a meaningful clinical trial. In this context, it is disconcerting that the CAESAR consortium (Consortium for preclinicAl assESsment of cARdioprotective therapies) in a highly standardized multi-center approach of preclinical studies identified only ischemic preconditioning, but not nitrite or sildenafil, when given as adjunct to reperfusion, to reduce infarct size. However, ischemic preconditioning—due to its very nature—can only be used in elective interventions, and not in acute myocardial infarction. Therefore, better strategies to identify robust and reproducible strategies of cardioprotection, which can subsequently be tested in clinical trials must be developed. We refer to the recent guidelines for experimental models of myocardial ischemia and infarction, and aim to provide now practical guidelines to ensure rigor and reproducibility in preclinical and clinical studies on cardioprotection. In line with the above guideline, we define rigor as standardized state-of-the-art design, conduct and reporting of a study, which is then a prerequisite for reproducibility, i.e. replication of results by another laboratory when performing exactly the same experiment

Accurate Sample Time Reconstruction of Inertial FIFO Data

In the context of modern cyber-physical systems, the accuracy of underlying sensor data plays an increasingly important role in sensor data fusion and feature extraction. The raw events of multiple sensors have to be aligned in time to enable high quality sensor fusion results. However, the growing number of simultaneously connected sensor devices make the energy saving data acquisition and processing more and more difficult. Hence, most of the modern sensors offer a first-in-first-out (FIFO) interface to store multiple data samples and to relax timing constraints, when handling multiple sensor devices. However, using the FIFO interface increases the negative influence of individual clock drifts—introduced by fabrication inaccuracies, temperature changes and wear-out effects—onto the sampling data reconstruction. Furthermore, additional timing offset errors due to communication and software latencies increases with a growing number of sensor devices. In this article, we present an approach for an accurate sample time reconstruction independent of the actual clock drift with the help of an internal sensor timer. Such timers are already available in modern sensors, manufactured in micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) technology. The presented approach focuses on calculating accurate time stamps using the sensor FIFO interface in a forward-only processing manner as a robust and energy saving solution. The proposed algorithm is able to lower the overall standard deviation of reconstructed sampling periods below 40 μ s, while run-time savings of up to 42% are achieved, compared to single sample acquisition

Development of an audio player as system-on-a-chip using an open source platform

Abstract — Open source software are becoming more widely-used, notably in the server and desktop applications. For embedded systems development, usage of open source software can also reduce development and licensing costs. We report on our experience in developing a Systemon-a-Chip (SoC) audio player using various open source components in both hardware and software parts as well as in the development process. The Ogg Vorbis audio decoder targeted for limited computing resource and low power consumption devices was developed on the free LEON SoC platform, which features SPARC-V8 architecture compatible processor and AMBA bus. The decoder runs on the open source RTEMS operating system making use of the royalty-free open source Vorbis library. We also aim to illustrate the use of hardware/software co-design techniques. Therefore, in order to speed up the decoding process, after an analysis, a computing-intensive part of the decoding algorithm was selected and designed as an AMBA compatible hardware core. The demonstration prototype was built on the XESS XSV-800 prototyping board using GNU/Linux workstations as development workstations. This project shows that development of SoC using open source platform is viable and might be the preferred choice in the future. I

Adapting a SoC to ATE Concurrent Test Capabilities

Abstract — Concurrent test features are available in the SoC testers to increase ATE throughput. To exploit these new features design modifications are necessary. In a case study, these modifications were applied to the open source LEON SoC platform containing an embedded 32 bit CPU, an AMBA bus, and several embedded cores. The concurrent test of LEON was performed on an SoC tester. The gain in test application time and area costs are quantified and obstacles in the design flow for concurrent test are discussed

New signal representation based on the fractional Fourier transform: definitions

The fractional Fourier transform is a mathematical operation that generalizes the well-known Fourier transform. This operation has been shown to have physical and optical fundamental meanings, and it has been experimentally implemented by relatively simple optical setups. Based on the fractional Fourier-transform operation, a new space-frequency chart definition is introduced. By the application of various geometric operations on this new chart, such as radial and angular shearing and rotation, optical systems may be designed or analyzed. The field distribution, as well as full information about the spectrum and the space–bandwidth product, can be easily obtained in all the stages of the optical system. © 1995 Optical Society of America 1