Finite Blocklength Rates over a Fading Channel with CSIT and CSIR

In this work, we obtain lower and upper bounds on the maximal transmission rate at a given codeword length $n$, average probability of error $\epsilon$ and power constraint $\bar{P}$, over a finite valued, block fading additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel with channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter and the receiver. These bounds characterize deviation of the finite blocklength coding rates from the channel capacity which is in turn achieved by the water filling power allocation across time. The bounds obtained also characterize the rate enhancement possible due to the CSI at the transmitter in the finite blocklength regime. The results are further elucidated via numerical examples.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, results for finite valued fading states, typos corrected, proofs elaborated, lower bound under short term power constraint improve

Polar Codes over Fading Channels with Power and Delay Constraints

The inherent nature of polar codes being channel specific makes it difficult to use them in a setting where the communication channel changes with time. In particular, to be able to use polar codes in a wireless scenario, varying attenuation due to fading needs to be mitigated. To the best of our knowledge, there has been no comprehensive work in this direction thus far. In this work, a practical scheme involving channel inversion with the knowledge of the channel state at the transmitter, is proposed. An additional practical constraint on the permissible average and peak power is imposed, which in turn makes the channel equivalent to an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel cascaded with an erasure channel. It is shown that the constructed polar code could be made to achieve the symmetric capacity of this channel. Further, a means to compute the optimal design rate of the polar code for a given power constraint is also discussed.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure

Prediction of overall survival for patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer : development of a prognostic model through a crowdsourced challenge with open clinical trial data

Background Improvements to prognostic models in metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer have the potential to augment clinical trial design and guide treatment strategies. In partnership with Project Data Sphere, a not-for-profit initiative allowing data from cancer clinical trials to be shared broadly with researchers, we designed an open-data, crowdsourced, DREAM (Dialogue for Reverse Engineering Assessments and Methods) challenge to not only identify a better prognostic model for prediction of survival in patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer but also engage a community of international data scientists to study this disease. Methods Data from the comparator arms of four phase 3 clinical trials in first-line metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer were obtained from Project Data Sphere, comprising 476 patients treated with docetaxel and prednisone from the ASCENT2 trial, 526 patients treated with docetaxel, prednisone, and placebo in the MAINSAIL trial, 598 patients treated with docetaxel, prednisone or prednisolone, and placebo in the VENICE trial, and 470 patients treated with docetaxel and placebo in the ENTHUSE 33 trial. Datasets consisting of more than 150 clinical variables were curated centrally, including demographics, laboratory values, medical history, lesion sites, and previous treatments. Data from ASCENT2, MAINSAIL, and VENICE were released publicly to be used as training data to predict the outcome of interest-namely, overall survival. Clinical data were also released for ENTHUSE 33, but data for outcome variables (overall survival and event status) were hidden from the challenge participants so that ENTHUSE 33 could be used for independent validation. Methods were evaluated using the integrated time-dependent area under the curve (iAUC). The reference model, based on eight clinical variables and a penalised Cox proportional-hazards model, was used to compare method performance. Further validation was done using data from a fifth trial-ENTHUSE M1-in which 266 patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer were treated with placebo alone. Findings 50 independent methods were developed to predict overall survival and were evaluated through the DREAM challenge. The top performer was based on an ensemble of penalised Cox regression models (ePCR), which uniquely identified predictive interaction effects with immune biomarkers and markers of hepatic and renal function. Overall, ePCR outperformed all other methods (iAUC 0.791; Bayes factor >5) and surpassed the reference model (iAUC 0.743; Bayes factor >20). Both the ePCR model and reference models stratified patients in the ENTHUSE 33 trial into high-risk and low-risk groups with significantly different overall survival (ePCR: hazard ratio 3.32, 95% CI 2.39-4.62, p Interpretation Novel prognostic factors were delineated, and the assessment of 50 methods developed by independent international teams establishes a benchmark for development of methods in the future. The results of this effort show that data-sharing, when combined with a crowdsourced challenge, is a robust and powerful framework to develop new prognostic models in advanced prostate cancer.Peer reviewe

Chemotactic behavior of spermatozoa captured using a microfluidic chip

Chemotaxis, as a mechanism for sperm guidance in vivo, is an enigma which has been difficult to demonstrate. To address this issue, various devices have been designed to study sperm chemotaxis in vitro. Limitations of traditional chemotaxis devices were related to the inability to maintain a stable concentration gradient as well as track single sperm over long times. Microfluidics technology, which provides superior control over fluid flow, has been recently used to generate stable concentration gradients for investigating the chemotactic behavior of several cell types including spermatozoa. However, the chemotactic behavior of sperm has not been unequivocally demonstrated even in these studies due to the inability to distinguish it from rheotaxis, thermotaxis, and chemokinesis. For instance, the presence of fluid flow in the microchannels not only destabilizes the concentration gradient but also elicits a rheotactic response from sperm. In this work, we have designed a microfluidic device which can be used to establish both, a uniform concentration and a uniform concentration gradient in a stationary fluid. By facilitating measurement of sperm response in ascending, descending, and uniform chemoattractant concentration, the assay could isolate sperm chemotactic response from rheotaxis and chemokinesis. The device was validated using acetylcholine, a known chemoattractant and further tested with rat oviductal fluid from the estrus phase. Published by AIP Publishing

An effective design for polar codes over multipath fading channels

Polar codes, recently adopted in 5G standard due to their excellent performance at a very low complexity compared to other competitive schemes in the literature, are deemed to be a strong candidate for the Internet of Things (IoT) applications as well due to meeting their requirements. However, since polar codes construction is naturally channel-dependent, there has recently been an increasing interest in addressing the challenge of making polar codes work in realistic fading environments as they do in a binary symmetric channel (BSC). Recent studies on polar codes for fading channels have mainly focused on constructing new specific polar codes suitable to particular fading channels. This results in a non-universal code structure, leading to continuous changes in the code structure based on the channel, which is not desirable in practice. To address this problem, we develop and propose a novel transceiver architecture which enables using the polar coding design of a binary input additive white Gaussian noise (BI-AWGN) channel for multipath fading channels without causing any change in the structure of the encoder and decoder sides. This is made possible by eliminating the channel fading effect so that a net AWGN channel can be seen at the input of a simple successive cancelation decoder (SCD). The novelty of the proposed solution lies in using a channel-based orthonormal transformation with optimal power allocation at the transmitter and another transformation at the receiver to make the net, effective channel seen by the SCD very similar to the AWGN. Simulation results show that the proposed design makes the bit error rate (BER) performance of polar codes over a frequency selective fading channel as same as that over an AWGN channel.No sponso