Case Report: Venous pulsatile tinnitus induced by enlarged oblique occipital sinus and resultant diverticulum/dehiscence of the sigmoid-jugular wall

Pulsatile tinnitus (PT) caused by enlarged oblique occipital sinus (OOS) and resultant diverticulum/dehiscence of the sigmoid-jugular wall has not been described in previous literature. This study recruits one case of PT induced by ipsilateral enlarged OOS and sigmoid-jugular wall diverticulum (case 1) alongside one case of PT induced by ipsilateral enlarged OOS and sigmoid-jugular wall dehiscence (case 2). Various radiologic and computational techniques including computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance (MR) imaging, Doppler ultrasound, and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation were implemented. Transmastoid sinus wall reconstruction was performed on case 1 with a large sigmoid-jugular diverticulum potentially traumatizing the facial nerve canal. Contrast-enhanced CT or MR venogram images coupling with three-dimensional reconstructed are advantageous in revealing the covert route of OOS that runs under the cerebellum and drains directly into jugular bulb (JB) region. PT in case 1 was successfully eliminated after transmastoid sinus wall reconstruction surgery. Tinnitus handicap inventory score in case 1 reduced from 70 to 0. The ipsilateral jugular outflow mean velocity (Vmn) and flow volume (FVOL) were 42.5 cm/s and 25.9 g/s (case 1 prior to surgery) and 56.6 cm/s and 41.2 g/s (case 2), respectively. Based on CFD simulation, the peak flow velocity in OOS was 1.85 m/s and 2.1 m/s, the wall pressure of the diverticular dome and dehiscence area of the SS-JB wall was 1724.7 Pa and 369.8 Pa in case 1 and 2, respectively. Enlarged OOS caries greater flow kinetic energy that possibly induces sigmoid-jugular wall diverticulum/dehiscence; transmastoid surgical method is safe and therapeutically effective against PT induced by enlarged OOS

Warp-Aware Adaptive Energy Efficiency Calibration for Multi-GPU Systems

Massive GPU acceleration processors have been used in high-performance computing systems. The Dennard-scaling has led to power and thermal constraints limiting the performance of such systems. The demand for both increased performance and energy-efficiency is highly desired. This paper presents a multi-layer low-power optimisation method for warps and tasks parallelisms. We present a dynamic frequency regulation scheme for performance parameters in terms of load balance and load imbalance. The method monitors the energy parameters in runtime and adjusts adaptively the voltage level to ensure the performance efficiency with energy reduction. The experimental results show that the multi-layer low-power optimisation with dynamic frequency regulation can achieve 40% energy consumption reduction with only 1.6% performance degradation, thus reducing 59% maximum energy consumption. It can further save about 30% energy consumption in comparison with the single-layer energy optimisation

FANCI serve as a prognostic biomarker correlated with immune infiltrates in skin cutaneous melanoma

BackgroundAs a member of tumor, Skin cutaneous melanoma (SKCM) poses a serious threat to people’s health because of its strong malignancy. Unfortunately, effective treatment methods for SKCM remain lacking. FANCI plays a vital role in the occurrence and metastasis of various tumor types. However, its regulatory role in SKCM is unclear. The purpose of this study was to explore the association of FANCI with SKCM.MethodsThis study investigated the expression of FANCI in GSE46517, GSE15605, and GSE114445 from the Gene Expression Omnibus database and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA)-SKCM datasets using the package “limma” or “DESeq2” in R environment and also investigated the prognostic significance of FANCI by utilizing the GEPIA database. Additionally, our research made use of real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) and immunohistochemical (IHC) staining to verify FANCI expression between SKCM and normal tissues and developed the knockdown of FANCI in A375 and A875 cells to further analyze the function of FANCI. Finally, this study analyzed the correlation of FANCI and tumor-infiltrating immune cells by CIBERSORT, ESTIMATE, and ssGSEA algorithms.ResultsThe FANCI level was increasing in SKCM tissues from GSE46517, GSE15605, GSE114445, and TCGA-SKCM. However, high FANCI expression correlated with poor overall survival. The RT-qPCR and IHC confirmed the accuracy of bioinformatics. Knocking down FANCI suppresses A375 and A875 cell proliferation, migration, and invasion. FANCI could be involved in the immunological milieu of SKCM by regulating immune responses and infiltrating numerous immune cells, particularly neutrophils, CD8+ T cells, and B cells. Furthermore, patients with SKCM who have a high FANCI expression level are reported to exhibit immunosuppression, whereas those with a low FANCI expression level are more likely to experience positive outcomes from immunotherapy.ConclusionsThe increased FANCI expression in SKCM can be a prognostic biomarker. Knockdown FANCI can reduce the occurrence and progression of SKCM. The FANCI expression provides a foundation for predicting the immune status and treatment of SKCM

Time series and Mel-frequency cepstrum coefficient analyses of venous pulsatile tinnitus vascular sound and flow velocity sensed by transcranial/retroauricular doppler ultrasound approaches

Venous pulsatile tinnitus (PT) arises from the motion of blood flow. However, the correlation between flow velocity and amplitude remains undiscovered. In this study, retroauricular colorcoded Doppler (RCCD) and transcranial color-coded Doppler (TCCD) ultrasound examination techniques were deployed to assess the hemoacoustics at the ipsilateral internal jugular vein (IJV), intradiverticular, mainstream sinus, and transverse sinus regions. Auto- and crosscorrelation analyses were used to analyze the correlations between flow velocity and amplitude. Furthermore, the Mel-frequency cepstrum coefficients were calculated, and the Melspectrogram was used to exhibit the human perception of PT. The mainstream sinus flow had the highest coefficient (cross-correlation coefficient = 0.781) among the sensed locations. The cross-correlation coefficient of the IJV was the second largest and close to that of the mainstream sinus flow. The transverse sinus flow had the lowest cross-correlation coefficient. Additionally, the transverse sinus septum was visualized for the first time using the RCCD technique in this study. In conclusion, cross-correlation analysis indicates that the amplitude of vascular sound is highly correlated to the vascular flow velocity. The Mel-spectrogram demonstrates the outcome of the human perception of PT, and its use can be extended to future psychoacoustic studies

Energy optimization of parallel programs in a heterogeneous system by combining processor core-shutdown and dynamic voltage scaling

Reducing power consumption and improving efficiency are important aspects of the development of supercomputers into large-scale systems. As a result, heterogeneous systems have become an important development trend in high-performance computing. From the perspective of heterogeneous systems, this study establishes a model for energy optimization of parallel programs (EOPP) and puts forward a method of using it. By considering the energy overheads caused by re-synchronization, voltage switching, and operations in critical sections, the model effectively combines processor core-shutdown and dynamic voltage scaling technologies, which can be applied in a heterogeneous system to guide the optimization process. The results show that the proposed model can effectively reduce the energy consumption of parallel programs. Moreover, increasing the proportion of operations in the critical section enhances the optimal frequency of a processor while decreasing the probability of conflicts in the critical section. It can thus provide optimization space for reducing the frequency of a processor which ultimately reduces the energy overhead of the system

Three-level performance optimization for heterogeneous systems based on software prefetching under power constraints

High power consumption has become one of the critical problems restricting the development of high-performance computers. Recently, there are numerous studies on optimizing the execution performance while satisfying the power constraint in recent years. However, these methods mainly focus on homogeneous systems without considering the power or speed difference of heterogeneous processors, so it is difficult to apply these methods in the heterogeneous systems with an accelerator. In this paper, by abstracting the current execution model of a heterogeneous system, we propose a new framework for managing the system power consumption with a three-level power control mechanism. The three levels from top to bottom are: system-level power controller (SPC), group-level power controller (GPC) and unit-level power controller (UPC). The study establishes a power management method for software prefetch in UPC to scale frequency and voltage of programs, select the optimal prefetch distance and guide optimization process to satisfy the constraint boundary according to power constraints. The strategy for dividing power based on key threads is put forward in GPC to preferentially allocate power to threads in key paths. In SPC, a method for evaluating the performance of heterogeneous processing engines is designed for dividing power in order to improve the overall execution performance of the system while sustaining the fairness between concurrent applications. Finally, the proposed framework is verified on a central processing unit (CPU)-graphics processing unit (GPU) heterogeneous system

Curcumin alleviates imiquimod‐induced psoriasis‐like inflammation and regulates gut microbiota of mice

Abstract Background As a polyphenolic compound originated from the food spice turmeric, curcumin (CUR) has various pharmacological effects, such as anti‐inflammatory, antioxidation, antiproliferative, and antiangiogenic activities. Psoriasis is centered on the overproduction of Th1‐ and Th2‐related cytokines (e.g., interleukin [IL]‐23, IL‐17, TNF‐α, IL‐22), which is involved in the occurrence and development of its pathogenesis. However, whether CUR is involved in the treatment of psoriasis and its specific mechanisms are not fully understood. Methods In this study, we detected the therapeutic effect of CUR (100 mg/kg/day) on IMQ‐induced dermatitis in mice, analyzed by PASI scores, ELISA, HE staining, immunofluorescence. Moreover, we further confirmed the alteration in the relative abundance of the gut microbiota through 16sRNA to explore whether CUR could regulate the gut microbiota of IMQ‐induced mice. Result Through intragastric administration, CUR can alleviate psoriasis‐like lesions of mice by decreasing PASI scores, reducing the level of IL‐6, IL‐17A, IL‐22, IL‐23, TNF‐α, and TGF‐β1, promoting the expression of IL‐10. Moreover, 16sRNA sequencing revealed that CUR could regulate the alteration in the abundance alteration of gut microbiota related to inflammation, such as Alistipes, Mucispirillum, and Rikenella at genus level. The correlation analysis further confirmed the close association between important microflora and psoriasis‐like inflammation indicators. Conclusions CUR exerts the effect of alleviating dermatitis of psoriatic mice by regulating Th‐17 related inflammatory factors. Moreover, the changes in gut microbiota via CUR may be another factor of relieving IMQ‐induced lesions in mice. Therefore, CUR may be a highly promising candidate for the treatment of psoriasis

Time-frequency analysis of venous pulsatile flow and sigmoid sinus vascular wall displacement causing pulsatile tinnitus using time series and magnitude squared coherence methods

Displacement of the sigmoid sinus vascular wall and intrasinus blood flow motion is known to cause pulsatile tinnitus (PT) in patients with sigmoid plate dehiscence. To investigate the source of sound that causes PT, this study sought to determine the correlation between in vivo displacement of the vascular wall and intrasinus flow hemodynamics. A confocal laser displacement sensor and color-coded Doppler ultrasound system were implemented on a participant diagnosed with venous PT. The displacement and Doppler velocity data were analyzed using time series and magnitude squared coherence methods. The median and peak displacement values of the vascular wall were 6.7 μm and 11.7 μm, respectively. The major frequency range of vascular displacement was below 4 Hz. The portmanteau test was rejected for different values of m. The cross-correlation of the two processes was not zero, indicating the existence of cross-correlation. The peak magnitude squared coherence of the two gauged signals was 0.3 at 7.143 Hz. The displacement of the sigmoid sinus vascular wall was temporally correlated with the intrasinus flow, although the major frequency range of the induced vascular displacement fell below the human hearing threshold. Therefore, the hydroacoustic and vibroacoustic sounds induced by the fluid-structure interaction between the vascular and osseous structures overweighed the displacement of the vascular wall at the focal dehiscence area in PT production

Whole procedure heterogeneous multiprocessors low-power optimization at algorithm-level

Power consumption reduction is the primary problem for the design and implementation of heterogeneous parallel systems. As it is difficult to make progress in the low-power optimization in the hardware layer to meet the increasing need for power optimization, more attention has been paid to low-power optimization in the hardware layer. The relationship between the execution time and dynamic power consumption of programs divided between homogeneous and heterogeneous computing sections is analysed. In addition, the communication power consumption for data transmission and dynamic multi-task allocation are described. Afterwards, this study establishes a power model for the whole procedure of heterogeneous parallel systems. By using this model, a selection algorithm is designed for the optimal frequency of processors with optimal power consumption under time constraints, optimal descent-based time allocation algorithms in multiple computing sections, and profiling dynamic analysis-based integral linear programming at algorithm-level, separately. Finally, the validity of the power optimization algorithm is ascertained using typical applications