Reconfigurable RF Front End Components for Multi-Radio Platform Applications

The multi-service requirements of the 3G and 4G communication systems, and their backward compatibility requirements, create challenges for the antenna and RF front-end designs with multi-band and wide-band techniques. These challenges include: multiple filters, which are lossy, bulky, and expensive, are needed in the system; device board size limitation and the associated isolation problems caused by the limited space and crowd circuits; and the insertion loss issues created by the single-pole-multi-through antenna switch. As will be shown, reconfigurable antennas can perform portions of the filter functions, which can help solve the multiple filters problem. Additionally, reconfigurable RF circuits can decrease the circuit size and output ports, which can help solve board size limitation, and isolation and antenna switch insertion loss issues. To validate the idea that reconfigurable antennas and reconfigurable RF circuits are a viable option for multi-service communication system, a reconfigurable patch antenna, a reconfigurable monopole antenna, and a reconfigurable power amplifier (PA) have been developed. All designs adapt state-of-the-art techniques. For the reconfigurable antenna designs, an experiment demonstrating its advantages, such as jamming signal resistance, has been performed. Reconfigurable antennas provide a better out-ofoperating- band noise performance than the multi-band antennas design, decreasing the need for filters in the system. A full investigation of reconfigurable antennas, including the single service reconfigurable antenna, the mixed signal service reconfigurable antenna, and the multi-band reconfigurable antenna, has been completed. The design challenges, which include switches investigation, switches integration, and service grouping techniques, have been discussed. In the reconfigurable PA portion, a reconfigurable PA structure has first been demonstrated, and includes a reconfigurable output matching network (MN) and a reconfigurable die design. To validate the proposed reconfigurable PA structure, a reconfigurable PA for a 3G cell phone system has been designed with a multi-chip module technique. The reconfigurable PA structure can significantly decrease the real-estate, cost, and complexity of the PA design. Further, by decreasing the number of output ports, the number of poles for the antenna switch will be decreased as well, leading to an insertion loss decrease

Multi Task Consistency Guided Source-Free Test-Time Domain Adaptation Medical Image Segmentation

Source-free test-time adaptation for medical image segmentation aims to enhance the adaptability of segmentation models to diverse and previously unseen test sets of the target domain, which contributes to the generalizability and robustness of medical image segmentation models without access to the source domain. Ensuring consistency between target edges and paired inputs is crucial for test-time adaptation. To improve the performance of test-time domain adaptation, we propose a multi task consistency guided source-free test-time domain adaptation medical image segmentation method which ensures the consistency of the local boundary predictions and the global prototype representation. Specifically, we introduce a local boundary consistency constraint method that explores the relationship between tissue region segmentation and tissue boundary localization tasks. Additionally, we propose a global feature consistency constraint toto enhance the intra-class compactness. We conduct extensive experiments on the segmentation of benchmark fundus images. Compared to prediction directly by the source domain model, the segmentation Dice score is improved by 6.27\% and 0.96\% in RIM-ONE-r3 and Drishti GS datasets, respectively. Additionally, the results of experiments demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing competitive domain adaptation segmentation algorithms.Comment: 31 pages,7 figure

Post-pandemic assessment of public knowledge, behavior, and skill on influenza prevention among the general population of Beijing, China

SummaryBackgroundThe aim of this study was to assess the knowledge, behavioral, and skill responses toward influenza in the general population of Beijing after pandemic influenza A (H1N1) 2009.MethodsA cross-sectional study was conducted in Beijing, China, in January 2011. A survey was conducted in which information was collected using a standardized questionnaire. A comprehensive evaluation index system of health literacy related to influenza was built to evaluate the level of health literacy regarding influenza prevention and control among residents in Beijing.ResultsThirteen thousand and fifty-three valid questionnaires were received. The average score for the sum of knowledge, behavior, and skill was 14.12±3.22, and the mean scores for knowledge, behavior, and skill were 4.65±1.20, 7.25±1.94, and 2.21±1.31, respectively. The qualified proportions of these three sections were 23.7%, 11.9%, and 43.4%, respectively, and the total proportion with a qualified level was 6.7%. There were significant differences in health literacy level related to influenza among the different gender, age, educational level, occupational status, and location groups (p<0.05). There was a significant association between knowledge and behavior (r=0.084, p<0.001), and knowledge and skill (r=0.102, p<0.001).ConclusionsThe health literacy level remains low among the general population in Beijing and the extent of relativities in knowledge, behavior, and skill about influenza was found to be weak. Therefore, improvements are needed in terms of certain aspects, particularly for the elderly and the population of rural districts. Educational level, as a significant factor in reducing the spread of influenza, should be considered seriously when intervention strategies are implemented

Facial expression transfer method based on frequency analysis

We propose a novel expression transfer method based on an analysis of the frequency of multi-expression facial images. We locate the facial features automatically and describe the shape deformations between a neutral expression and non-neutral expressions. The subtle expression changes are important visual clues to distinguish different expressions. These changes are more salient in the frequency domain than in the image domain. We extract the subtle local expression deformations for the source subject, coded in the wavelet decomposition. This information about expressions is transferred to a target subject. The resulting synthesized image preserves both the facial appearance of the target subject and the expression details of the source subject. This method is extended to dynamic expression transfer to allow a more precise interpretation of facial expressions. Experiments on Japanese Female Facial Expression (JAFFE), the extended Cohn-Kanade (CK+) and PIE facial expression databases show the superiority of our method over the state-of-the-art method

A sheep pangenome reveals the spectrum of structural variations and their effects on tail phenotypes

Structural variations (SVs) are a major contributor to genetic diversity and phenotypic variations, but their prevalence and functions in domestic animals are largely unexplored. Here we generated high-quality genome assemblies for 15 individuals from genetically diverse sheep breeds using Pacific Biosciences (PacBio) high-fidelity sequencing, discovering 130.3 Mb nonreference sequences, from which 588 genes were annotated. A total of 149,158 biallelic insertions/deletions, 6531 divergent alleles, and 14,707 multiallelic variations with precise breakpoints were discovered. The SV spectrum is characterized by an excess of derived insertions compared to deletions (94,422 vs. 33,571), suggesting recent active LINE expansions in sheep. Nearly half of the SVs display low to moderate linkage disequilibrium with surrounding single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and most SVs cannot be tagged by SNP probes from the widely used ovine 50K SNP chip. We identified 865 population-stratified SVs including 122 SVs possibly derived in the domestication process among 690 individuals from sheep breeds worldwide. A novel 168-bp insertion in the 5' untranslated region (5' UTR) of HOXB13 is found at high frequency in long-tailed sheep. Further genome-wide association study and gene expression analyses suggest that this mutation is causative for the long-tail trait. In summary, we have developed a panel of high-quality de novo assemblies and present a catalog of structural variations in sheep. Our data capture abundant candidate functional variations that were previously unexplored and provide a fundamental resource for understanding trait biology in sheep

Deep Cube-Pair Network for Hyperspectral Imagery Classification

Advanced classification methods, which can fully utilize the 3D characteristic of hyperspectral image (HSI) and generalize well to the test data given only limited labeled training samples (i.e., small training dataset), have long been the research objective for HSI classification problem. Witnessing the success of deep-learning-based methods, a cube-pair-based convolutional neural networks (CNN) classification architecture is proposed to cope this objective in this study, where cube-pair is used to address the small training dataset problem as well as preserve the 3D local structure of HSI data. Within this architecture, a 3D fully convolutional network is further modeled, which has less parameters compared with traditional CNN. Provided the same amount of training samples, the modeled network can go deeper than traditional CNN and thus has superior generalization ability. Experimental results on several HSI datasets demonstrate that the proposed method has superior classification results compared with other state-of-the-art competing methods