Preliminary Results of Hyperthermic Intraperitoneal Intraoperative Chemotherapy as an Adjuvant in Resectable Pancreatic Cancer

Background and Aims. 5-year survival in patients with pancreatic cancer is poor. Surgical resection is the only potentially curative resection. The results of adjuvant treatment either with chemotherapy or with radiotherapy have been contradictory and the incidence of local-regional recurrence remains high. If local-regional recurrence is controlled survival may be expected to increase. Hyperthermic intraoperative intraperitoneal chemotherapy (HIPEC) may be used in order to control local-regional recurrences. The purpose of the study is to identify the effect of HIPEC in patients with pancreatic cancer undergoing potentially resection. Patients and Methods. From 2007–2011, 21 patients, mean age 69.4 ± 9.5 (50–86) years, underwent tumor resection, and HIPEC with gemcitabine. The hospital mortality and morbidity rate was 9.5% and 33.3%, respectively. 5-year and median survival was 23% and 11 months, respectively. The recurrence rate was 50% but no patient developed local-regional recurrence. No patient was recorded with gemcitabine-induced toxicity. Conclusions. This clinical study of 21 patients is the first to combine an R0 pancreas cancer resection with HIPEC. Increased morbidity and mortality from intraoperative gemcitabine was not apparent. Patients with pancreatic cancer undergoing potentially curative resection in combination with HIPEC may be offered a survival benefit. Data suggested that local-regional recurrences may be greatly reduced. Further studies with greater number of patients are required to confirm these findings

Local or Global Radio Channel Blacklisting for IEEE 802.15.4-TSCH Networks?

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Improving LoRa Network Capacity Using Multiple Spreading Factor Configurations

International audienceLoRa networks enable long range communications for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The current LoRa technology provides a wide range of communication settings whereas many combination settings are orthogonal and, thus, they can be successfully decoded at the gateway when the signals are transmitted simultaneously. Previous simulation results showed that the LoRa network capacity can be improved when multiple communication parameters are applied. In this paper, we model a LoRa network consisting of nodes with different communication settings in terms of bandwidth and spreading factor. We compute the average success probability per configuration as a function of density taking into account both intra and inter-spreading factor collisions. We, also, formulate and solve an optimization problem to maximize the node capacity for a given deployment area and frequency by optimizing the number of nodes having different spreading factor configurations. We present numerical results and we show that solutions close to the optimal can increase the maximum number of nodes by more than 700% compared to case where equal number of users per spreading factor are considered

Blacklisting-Based Channel Hopping Approaches in Low-Power and Lossy Networks

International audienceMore and more industrial applications require high reliability, while relying on low-power devices for their flexibility. Unfortunately, radio transmissions are prone to unreliability, and are very sensitive to external interference. Therefore, a great amount of effort has been put on channel hopping approaches, which help to combat external interference by reducing the number of packet losses. This approach is combined with a strict schedule of the transmissions to allow the devices to save energy. However, some of the radio channels are subjected to strong interference. Blacklisting techniques identify the interfered radio channels that demonstrate low packet delivery radio and avoid using them to transmit data packets. In this article, we study different distributed and global blacklisting techniques and investigate their dependencies on the scheduling algorithm. We also present a new scheme to exploit a blacklist by making the employed scheduling algorithm blacklist-aware. Our results rely on a real experimental dataset to quantify the performance of all these approaches and demonstrate the interest of blacklisting to improve network reliability

LOST: Localized blacklisting aware scheduling algorithm for IEEE 802.15.4-TSCH networks

International audienceIndustrial applications require more and more low-power operations, low-delay, deterministic communications as well as end-to-end reliability close to 100%. IEEE 802.15.4-TSCH (Time-Slotted Channel Hopping) relies on a channel hopping technique while scheduling properly the transmissions to provide a high end-to-end reliability. Because of external interference, some channels may perform very poorly locally, which impacts negatively the reliability for some radio links. We propose here the first distributed scheduling solution which reactively allocates the cells to each pair of nodes while also considering local blacklists. These local blacklists are constructed on a per-radio link basis to reflect the actual performance encountered locally. Our simulations highlight the relevance of our distributed blacklisting aware scheduling algorithm to improve both the reliability and the delay efficiency compared with DeTAS, a state of the art distributed solution