Sleep Apnea and Fetal Growth Restriction (SAFER) study: Protocol for a pragmatic randomised clinical trial of positive airway pressure as an antenatal therapy for fetal growth restriction in maternal obstructive sleep apnoea

INTRODUCTION: Fetal growth restriction (FGR) is a major contributor to fetal and neonatal morbidity and mortality with intrauterine, neonatal and lifelong complications. This study explores maternal obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) as a potentially modifiable risk factor for FGR. We hypothesise that, in pregnancies complicated by FGR, treating mothers who have OSA using positive airway pressure (PAP) will improve birth weight and neonatal outcomes. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: The Sleep Apnea and Fetal Growth Restriction study is a prospective, block-randomised, single-blinded, multicentre, pragmatic controlled trial. We enrol pregnant women aged 18-50, between 22 and 31 weeks of gestation, with established FGR based on second trimester ultrasound, who do not have other prespecified known causes of FGR (such as congenital anomalies or intrauterine infection). In stage 1, participants are screened by questionnaire for OSA risk. If OSA risk is identified, participants proceed to stage 2, where they undergo home sleep apnoea testing. Participants are determined to have OSA if they have an apnoea-hypopnoea index (AHI) ≥5 (if the oxygen desaturation index (ODI) is also ≥5) or if they have an AHI ≥10 (even if the ODI is \u3c5). These participants proceed to stage 3, where they are randomised to nightly treatment with PAP or no PAP (standard care control), which is maintained until delivery. The primary outcome is unadjusted birth weight; secondary outcomes include fetal growth velocity on ultrasound, enrolment-to-delivery interval, gestational age at delivery, birth weight corrected for gestational age, stillbirth, Apgar score, rate of admission to higher levels of care (neonatal intensive care unit or special care nursery) and length of neonatal stay. These outcomes are compared between PAP and control using intention-to-treat analysis. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: This study has been approved by the Institutional Review Boards at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri; Hadassah Hebrew University Medical Center, Jerusalem; and the University of Rochester, New York. Recruitment began in Washington University in November 2019 but stopped from March to November 2020 due to COVID-19. Recruitment began in Hadassah Hebrew University in March 2021, and in the University of Rochester in May 2021. Dissemination plans include presentations at scientific conferences and scientific publications. TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER: NCT04084990

Detecting People in Artwork with CNNs

CNNs have massively improved performance in object detection in photographs. However research into object detection in artwork remains limited. We show state-of-the-art performance on a challenging dataset, People-Art, which contains people from photos, cartoons and 41 different artwork movements. We achieve this high performance by fine-tuning a CNN for this task, thus also demonstrating that training CNNs on photos results in overfitting for photos: only the first three or four layers transfer from photos to artwork. Although the CNN's performance is the highest yet, it remains less than 60\% AP, suggesting further work is needed for the cross-depiction problem. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46604-0_57Comment: 14 pages, plus 3 pages of references; 7 figures in ECCV 2016 Workshop

Public Service Broadcasting-Friends Groups as a Microcosm of Public Interest Media Advocacy

This article is concerned with the interdependencies between public service broadcasters and the third sector, an area in which there is little research that has provided in-depth analysis of case studies. It investigates and compares three public service broadcasting (PSB)-Friends groups in the UK, Australia, and South Africa. By means of analyzing semi-structured interviews and archival data, we address development, institutionalization and policy impact of the Voice of the Listener & Viewer, ABC-Friends, and SOS Coalition. Drawing on resource-mobilization theory we argue that, in particular, material, human, and informational resources, contextualized with political opportunities, have analytic value in explaining similarities and differences between the groups, which are conceived as a microcosm of public interest media advocacy

CAD directions for high performance asynchronous circuits

This paper describes a novel methodology for high performance asynchronous design based on timed circuits and on CAD support for their synthesis using relative timing. This methodology was developed for a prototype iA32 instruction length decoding and steering unit called RAPPID ("revolving asynchronous Pentium processor instruction decoder") that was fabricated and tested successfully. Silicon results show significant advantages-in particular, performance of 2.5-4.5 instructions per nS-with manageable risks using this design technology. RAPPID achieves three times faster performance and half the latency dissipating only half the power and requiring a minor area penalty as a comparable 400 MHz clocked circuit. Relative timing is based on user-defined and automatically extracted relative timing assumptions between signal transitions in a circuit and its environment. It supports the specification, synthesis, and verification of high-performance asynchronous circuits, such as pulse-mode circuits, that can be derived from an initial speed-independent specification. Relative Timing presents a "middle-ground" between clocked and asynchronous circuits, and is a fertile area for CAD development. We discuss possible directions for future CAD development.Peer Reviewe

Improving the Efficiency of Formal Verification: The Case of Clock-Domain Crossings

International audienceWe propose a novel semi-automatic methodology to formally verify clock-domain synchronization protocols in industrial-scale hardware designs. To establish the functional correctness of all clock-domain crossings (CDCs) in a system-on-chip (SoC), semi-automatic approaches require non-trivial manual deductive reasoning. In contrast, our approach produces a small sequence of easy queries to the user. The key idea is to use counterexample-guided abstraction refinement (CEGAR) as the algorithmic back-end. The user influences the course of the algorithm based on information extracted from intermediate abstract counterexamples. The workload on the user is small, both in terms of number of queries and the degree of design insight he is asked to provide. With this approach, we formally proved the correctness of every CDC in a recent SoC design from STMicroelectronics comprising over 300,000 registers and seven million gates

An Asynchronous Instruction Length Decoder

This paper describes an investigation of potential advantages and pitfalls of applying an asynchronous design methodology to an advanced microprocessor architecture. A prototype complex instruction set length decoding and steering unit was implemented using self-timed circuits. [The Revolving Asynchronous Pentium Processor Instruction Decoder (RAPPID) design implemented the complete Pentium II 32-bit MMX instruction set.] The prototype chip was fabricated on a 0.25CMOS process and tested successfully. Results show significant advantages---in particular, performance of 2.5-4.5 instructions per nanosecond---with manageable risks using this design technology. The prototype achieves three times the throughput and half the latency, dissipating only half the power and requiring about the same area as the fastest commercial 400-MHz clocked circuit fabricated on the same process