Development and Implementation of the AIDA International Registry for Patients With Undifferentiated Systemic AutoInflammatory Diseases

Objective: This paper points out the design, development and deployment of the AutoInflammatory Disease Alliance (AIDA) International Registry dedicated to pediatric and adult patients affected by Undifferentiated Systemic AutoInflammatory Diseases (USAIDs). Methods: This is an electronic registry employed for real-world data collection about demographics, clinical, laboratory, instrumental and socioeconomic data of USAIDs patients. Data recruitment, based on the Research Electronic Data Capture (REDCap) tool, is designed to obtain standardized information for real-life research. The instrument is endowed with flexibility, and it could change over time according to the scientific acquisitions and potentially communicate with other similar tools; this platform ensures security, data quality and data governance. Results: The focus of the AIDA project is connecting physicians and researchers from all over the world to shed a new light on heterogeneous rare diseases. Since its birth, 110 centers from 23 countries and 4 continents have joined the AIDA project. Fifty-four centers have already obtained the approval from their local Ethics Committees. Currently, the platform counts 290 users (111 Principal Investigators, 179 Site Investigators, 2 Lead Investigators, and 2 data managers). The Registry is collecting baseline and follow-up data using 3,769 fields organized into 23 instruments, which include demographics, history, symptoms, trigger/risk factors, therapies, and healthcare information access for USAIDs patients. Conclusions: The development of the AIDA International Registry for USAIDs patients will facilitate the online collection of real standardized data, connecting a worldwide group of researchers: the Registry constitutes an international multicentre observational groundwork aimed at increasing the patient cohort of USAIDs in order to improve our knowledge of this peculiar cluster of autoinflammatory diseases. NCT 05200715 available at https://clinicaltrials.gov/

Joint turbo equalization for relaying schemes over frequency-selective fading channels

International audienceWe propose a single carrier joint frequency domain equalization and interference cancellation (FDE-IC) with diversity combining for different relaying schemes. We consider amplify-and-forward (AF) and ACK/NACK-aided decode-and-forward (DF) modes over multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) frequency selective relay channels. During the first time slot, the source transmits to both the relay and destination. In the second slot, the relay transmits the signal packet to the destination in the case of AF mode, while in DF the data block is transmitted either by the relay or the source depending on the ACK/NACK feedback. By deriving an equivalent source-relay-destination (S → R → D) channel for the AF mode, we propose an integrated iterative minimum mean square error (MMSE)-FDE-IC-aided transmission combining scheme where reception over multiple slots is viewed as virtual antennas. We also derive the joint combining scheme in the case of ACK/NACK-aided DF. Block error rate (BLER) performance is evaluated for different system setting

Turbo packet combining for relaying schemes over multiantenna broadband channels

International audienceThis paper focuses on turbo packet combining formultirelay systems operating over multiple-input–multiple-output(MIMO) broadband channels. We consider a relaying protocolthat represents a generalization of the classical point-to-point hybridautomatic repeat request (ARQ). In this protocol, relays playthe role of packet retransmitters instead of the source. Packet combininghas been widely studied for the point-to-point hybrid ARQ,and it has been shown that the virtual-antenna-concept-basedcombining strategy exhibits block error rate (BLER) performancethat is very close to the matched filter bound. However, the extensionof this combining strategy to cooperative communicationsoperating under the framework of broadband MIMO channelsis not straightforward. In this paper, we revisit this combiningstrategy. First, we build an appropriate system model in such away that the cooperation is disguised and the multirelay systembecomes equivalent to a point-to-point hybrid ARQ. We investigatethe outage probability and outage-based power loss of theconsidered multirelay system. Then, we extend the turbo packetcombiner inspired by the virtual antenna concept to cooperativecommunications. We focus on implementation issues and proposea hybrid combining strategy. Finally, BLER performances areinvestigated to demonstrate the gain offered by the studied turbopacket combiner

Turbo packet combining for broadband MIMO relay communication

International audienceIn this paper, we provide a survey of cooperative automatic repeat request (ARQ) protocols for multi-relay systems operating over multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) broadband channels. We study three main operating modes: amplify-and-forward (AF), decode-and-forward (DF), and positive/negative acknowledgment (ACK/NACK)-aided DF. We describe efficient minimum mean square error (MMSE) frequency domain equalization (FDE) iterative turbo packet combining techniques for cooperative ARQ, and show that they outperform conventional log-likelihood ratio (LLR)-based turbo combining

Relay ARQ strategies for single carrier MIMO broadband amplify-and-forward cooperative transmission

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Analysis of packet combining for single carrier multi-relay broadband system

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Turbo receiver design for MIMO relay ARQ transmissions

International audienceIn this paper, we investigate practical turbo receiver design for throughput-efficient relay ARQ transmissions over broadband cooperative MIMO channels. Our setup is comprised of three multi-antenna nodes: a source, a destination, and a relay node operating under the amplify-and-forward half-duplex relaying mode. To attain higher system average throughput, we adopt a two-slot transmission strategy where the ARQ mechanism is activated on top of the amplify-and-forward protocol. We derive a soft subpacket combiner allowing the destination node to jointly perform subpacket combining (over both time slots and multiple ARQ rounds) and frequency domain MMSE filtering. Its computational load is then smoothly relaxed via a recursive implementation alleviating the memory requirements when the number of ARQ rounds increases. Simulation results show that the proposed transmission strategy along with turbo reception at the destination side achieves significant average throughput performance gain compared with conventional ARQ-based cooperative relaying