Psi: A Silicon Compiler for Very Fast Protocol Processing

Conventional protocols implementations typically fall short, by a few orders of magnitude, of supporting the speeds afforded by high-speed optical transmission media. This protocol processing bottleneck is a key hurdle in taking advantage of the opportunities presented by high-speed communications. This paper describes PSi, a silicon compiler that transforms formal protocol specifications into efficient VLSI implementations. PSi takes advantage of the parallelisms intrinsic to a given protocol to accomplish very high-speed implementations. Initial application of PSi to the IEEE 802.2 (logical link control) leads to processing rates in the order of 106 packets per second (p/s). The 802.2 was selected as a benchmark of complexity; light-weight protocols can accomplish even higher processing rates, reaching the limits set by chip clock rates (i.e., a packet per cycle). These speeds significantly exceed typical of software implementations (up to a few hundred p/s) or special hardware-assisted implementations (up to a few thousands p/s). More importantly, at these rates when the packet size is 103-4 bits the protocol throughput of 109-10 bits/sec reaches the limiting throughput afforded by memory technology. Thus, the protocol processing bottleneck is pushed to the ultimate bounds set by VLSI technologies

Atherosclerosis of the ascending aorta is a predictor of renal dysfunction after cardiac operations

AbstractObjectives: Renal dysfunction occurring after cardiac operations has been attributed to various factors, but the importance of an atherosclerotic thoracic aorta has not been previously evaluated. The purpose of this study was to identify predictors of postoperative renal dysfunction (50% or more increase from preoperative values) and to evaluate the importance of atherosclerosis of the ascending aorta as a predictor of this complication. Methods: Nine hundred seventy-eight consecutive patients, 50 years of age and older with normal preoperative renal function (serum creatinine level of 1.5 mg/dL or less), who were scheduled to undergo cardiac surgery were prospectively evaluated. Atherosclerosis of the ascending aorta was assessed during the operation (with epiaortic ultrasound), and patients were divided into 3 groups according to its severity (normal-to-mild, moderate, and severe). Results: Univariate predictors of renal dysfunction at postoperative day 1 were atherosclerosis of the ascending aorta (P < .045) and postoperative low cardiac output (P = .05); at postoperative day 6 they were atherosclerosis of the ascending aorta (P < .0001), postoperative low cardiac output (P < .0001), advanced age (P = .001), decreased preoperative left ventricular function (P = .01), and female gender (P = .03). Multivariate analysis showed that atherosclerosis of the ascending aorta (odds ratio, 3.06; P = .04) was the only independent predictor of postoperative renal dysfunction at day 1 and that postoperative low cardiac output (odds ratio, 4.83; P < .0001), atherosclerosis of the ascending aorta (odds ratio, 2.13; P = .0006), and preoperative left ventricular dysfunction (odds ratio, 1.48; P = .028) were independent predictors of postoperative renal dysfunction at day 6. Conclusions: An atherosclerotic ascending aorta is an important predictor of postoperative renal dysfunction, possibly because atheroembolism to the kidneys occurs in the perioperative period (ie, during surgical manipulation of an atherosclerotic aorta) or because the diseased aorta may be a marker of widespread atherosclerotic disease that may predispose to perioperative renal dysfunction. (J Thorac Cardiovasc Surg 1999;117:111-6

PENGARUH KOMPRES HANGAT TERHADAP PENURUNAN TEKANAN DARAH PADA PASIEN HIPERTENSI DI RUMAH SAKIT UMUM IMELDA PEKERJA INDONESIA MEDAN TAHUN 2022

Hypertension is often called the "silent killer" because hypertension sufferers often never experience health problems due to the disease they suffer from. Hypertension or high blood pressure is a chronic condition characterized by increased blood pressure on the walls of the arteries. The initial symptoms of hypertension are usually asymptomatic, only characterized by an increase in blood pressure. The aim of this research is to find out whether there is an effect of giving warm compresses on reducing hypertension. This research method uses a quasi experiment by giving warm compresses to hypertension sufferers. The sample used in this research was 36 people using purposive sampling technique. Inclusion criteria were willing to become participants, sufferers suffering from grade 1 hypertension, communicative and cooperative, no other comorbidities. The instruments created were demographic sheets and observation sheets and were analyzed univariately and bivariately. With the Wilcoxon test, the p-value was 0.01 (P-value &lt;0.05). It can be concluded that the effect of warm compresses on reducing blood pressure in patients can be used to prevent stroke and improve health in the community.Hipertensi sering disebut “silent killer”karena penderita hipertensi sering tidak pernah mengalami gangguan kesehatan atas penyakit yang dideritanya. Hipertensi atau penyakit tekanan darah tinggi adalah suatu keadaan kronis yang ditandai dengan meningkatnya tekanan darah pada dinding pembuluh darah arteri. Gejala awal hipertensi biasanya adalah asimtomatik, hanya ditandai dengan kenaikan tekanan darah. Tujuan penelitian ini yaitu untuk mengetahui apakah ada pengaruh dalam pemberian kompres hangat terhadap penurunan hipertensi. Metode penelitian ini menggunakan quasi experiment dengan pemberian kompres hangat pada penderita hipertensi. Sampel yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini sebanyak 36 orang dengan teknik purposice sampling. Kriteria inklusi bersedia menjadi partisipan, penderita menderita hipertensi grade 1, komunikatif dan kooperatif, tidak ada penyakit penyerta lainnya. Instrumen yang dibuat adalah lembar demografi dan lembar observasi dan dianalisa univariat dan bivariat. Dengan uji wilcoxon didapatkan hasil p-value 0,01 (P-value &lt;0,05). Dapat disimpulkan bahwa pengaruh kompres hangat terhadap penurunan tekanan darah pada pasien dapat digunakan untuk mencegah stroke dan meningkatkan kesehatan di masyarakat

Atherosclerosis of the ascending aorta is an independent predictor of long-term neurologic events and mortality

AbstractOBJECTIVESThis study was undertaken to determine whether atherosclerosis of the ascending aorta is a predictor of long-term neurologic events and mortality.BACKGROUNDAtherosclerosis of the thoracic aorta has been recently considered a significant predictor of neurologic events and peripheral embolism, but not of long-term mortality.METHODSLong-term follow-up (a total of 5,859 person-years) was conducted of 1,957 consecutive patients ≥50 years old who underwent cardiac surgery. Atherosclerosis of the ascending aorta was assessed intraoperatively (epiaortic ultrasound) and patients were divided into four groups according to severity (normal, mild, moderate or severe). Carotid artery disease was evaluated (carotid ultrasound) in 1,467 (75%) patients. Cox proportional-hazards regression analysis was performed to assess the independent effect of predictors on neurologic events and mortality.RESULTSA total of 491 events occurred in 472 patients (neurologic events 92, all-cause mortality 399). Independent predictors of long-term neurologic events were: hypertension (p = 0.009), ascending aorta atherosclerosis (p = 0.011) and diabetes mellitus (p = 0.015). The independent predictors of mortality were advanced age (p < 0.0001), left ventricular dysfunction (p < 0.0001), ascending aorta atherosclerosis (p < 0.0001), hypertension (p = 0.0001) and diabetes mellitus (p = 0.0002). There was >1.5-fold increase in the incidence of both neurologic events and mortality as the severity of atherosclerosis increased from normal-mild to moderate, and a greater than threefold increase in the incidence of both as the severity of atherosclerosis increased from normal-mild to severe.CONCLUSIONSAtherosclerosis of the ascending aorta is an independent predictor of long-term neurologic events and mortality. These results provide additional evidence that in addition to being a direct cause of cerebral atheroembolism, an atherosclerotic ascending aorta may be a marker of generalized atherosclerosis and thus of increased morbidity and mortality

Facing erythrocytosis: Results of an international physician survey.

We observed a good agreement among hematologists regarding the diagnostic procedures and a widespread awareness regarding the importance of the new 2016 WHO criteria and bone marrow his-tology. On the other side, we observed a marked heterogeneity in treatment practice, regarding both the Hct threshold and the use of anti-platelet agents

Implementation of an Optimal First-Order Method for Strongly Convex Total Variation Regularization

We present a practical implementation of an optimal first-order method, due to Nesterov, for large-scale total variation regularization in tomographic reconstruction, image deblurring, etc. The algorithm applies to $\mu$-strongly convex objective functions with $L$-Lipschitz continuous gradient. In the framework of Nesterov both $\mu$ and $L$ are assumed known -- an assumption that is seldom satisfied in practice. We propose to incorporate mechanisms to estimate locally sufficient $\mu$ and $L$ during the iterations. The mechanisms also allow for the application to non-strongly convex functions. We discuss the iteration complexity of several first-order methods, including the proposed algorithm, and we use a 3D tomography problem to compare the performance of these methods. The results show that for ill-conditioned problems solved to high accuracy, the proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art first-order methods, as also suggested by theoretical results.Comment: 23 pages, 4 figure

Pathway-based factor analysis of gene expression data produces highly heritable phenotypes that associate with age

2Abstract. Statistical factor analysis methods have previously been used to remove noise components from high dimensional data prior to genetic asso-ciation mapping, and in a guided fashion to summarise biologically relevant sources of variation. Here we show how the derived factors summarising path-way expression can be used to analyse the relationships between expression, heritability and ageing. We used skin gene expression data from 647 twins from the MuTHER Consortium and applied factor analysis to concisely summarise patterns of gene expression, both to remove broad confounding influences and to produce concise pathway-level phenotypes. We derived 930 “pathway phe-notypes ” which summarised patterns of variation across 186 KEGG pathways (five phenotypes per pathway). We identified 69 significant associations of age with phenotype from 57 distinct KEGG pathways at a stringent Bon-ferroni threshold (P &lt; 5.38 × 10−5). These phenotypes are more heritable (h2 = 0.32) than gene expression levels. On average, expression levels of 16% of genes within these pathways are associated with age. Several significan

Sparse Matrix-Based HPC Tomography

Tomographic imaging has benefited from advances in X-ray sources, detectors and optics to enable novel observations in science, engineering and medicine. These advances have come with a dramatic increase of input data in the form of faster frame rates, larger fields of view or higher resolution, so high performance solutions are currently widely used for analysis. Tomographic instruments can vary significantly from one to another, including the hardware employed for reconstruction: from single CPU workstations to large scale hybrid CPU/GPU supercomputers. Flexibility on the software interfaces and reconstruction engines are also highly valued to allow for easy development and prototyping. This paper presents a novel software framework for tomographic analysis that tackles all aforementioned requirements. The proposed solution capitalizes on the increased performance of sparse matrix-vector multiplication and exploits multi-CPU and GPU reconstruction over MPI. The solution is implemented in Python and relies on CuPy for fast GPU operators and CUDA kernel integration, and on SciPy for CPU sparse matrix computation. As opposed to previous tomography solutions that are tailor-made for specific use cases or hardware, the proposed software is designed to provide flexible, portable and high-performance operators that can be used for continuous integration at different production environments, but also for prototyping new experimental settings or for algorithmic development. The experimental results demonstrate how our implementation can even outperform state-of-the-art software packages used at advanced X-ray sources worldwide

Restoration of Hepatic Glucokinase Expression Corrects Hepatic Glucose Flux and Normalizes Plasma Glucose in Zucker Diabetic Fatty Rats

OBJECTIVE—We examined in 20-week-old Zucker diabetic fatty (ZDF) rats whether restoration of hepatic glucokinase (GK) expression would alter hepatic glucose flux and improve hyperglycemia

Ischaemic strokes in patients with pulmonary arteriovenous malformations and hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia: associations with iron deficiency and platelets.

<div><p>Background</p><p>Pulmonary first pass filtration of particles marginally exceeding ∼7 µm (the size of a red blood cell) is used routinely in diagnostics, and allows cellular aggregates forming or entering the circulation in the preceding cardiac cycle to lodge safely in pulmonary capillaries/arterioles. Pulmonary arteriovenous malformations compromise capillary bed filtration, and are commonly associated with ischaemic stroke. Cohorts with CT-scan evident malformations associated with the highest contrast echocardiographic shunt grades are known to be at higher stroke risk. Our goal was to identify within this broad grouping, which patients were at higher risk of stroke.</p><p>Methodology</p><p>497 consecutive patients with CT-proven pulmonary arteriovenous malformations due to hereditary haemorrhagic telangiectasia were studied. Relationships with radiologically-confirmed clinical ischaemic stroke were examined using logistic regression, receiver operating characteristic analyses, and platelet studies.</p><p>Principal Findings</p><p>Sixty-one individuals (12.3%) had acute, non-iatrogenic ischaemic clinical strokes at a median age of 52 (IQR 41–63) years. In crude and age-adjusted logistic regression, stroke risk was associated not with venous thromboemboli or conventional neurovascular risk factors, but with low serum iron (adjusted odds ratio 0.96 [95% confidence intervals 0.92, 1.00]), and more weakly with low oxygen saturations reflecting a larger right-to-left shunt (adjusted OR 0.96 [0.92, 1.01]). For the same pulmonary arteriovenous malformations, the stroke risk would approximately double with serum iron 6 µmol/L compared to mid-normal range (7–27 µmol/L). Platelet studies confirmed overlooked data that iron deficiency is associated with exuberant platelet aggregation to serotonin (5HT), correcting following iron treatment. By MANOVA, adjusting for participant and 5HT, iron or ferritin explained 14% of the variance in log-transformed aggregation-rate (p = 0.039/p = 0.021).</p><p>Significance</p><p>These data suggest that patients with compromised pulmonary capillary filtration due to pulmonary arteriovenous malformations are at increased risk of ischaemic stroke if they are iron deficient, and that mechanisms are likely to include enhanced aggregation of circulating platelets.</p></div