Assessment of Malignant Biliary Obstruction by Percutaneous Transhepatic Cholangiography: A Prospective Cohort Study

Introduction: Malignant Biliary Obstruction (MBO) is caused by hepatic metastasis, gall bladder carcinoma, other distant metastasis, icteric hepatocellular carcinoma and lymphoma. Different signs and symptoms of obstruction includes pruritus, jaundice, altered food taste, renal dysfunction, anorexia, malnutrition which ultimately leads to impaired immune dysfunction and impaired quality of life. Aim: To determine the extent of biliary ductal involvement in patients with MBO through Magnetic Resonance Cholangiopancreatography (MRCP) and Percutaneous Transhepatic Cholangiography (PTC) technique and to compare the number of biliary drainage required. Materials and Methods: A prospective cohort study was undertaken at Department of Radiodiagnosis, Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia Institute of Medical Sciences, Lucknow, India. It included total 40 patients (24 females and 16 males) with strong clinicopathological and laboratory investigation suspicious of MBO. Patients with suspected MBO were examined with MR cholangiography. All patients then underwent PTC and Biliary Drainage (PTBD) and/or stent placement after MR cholangiography. The statistical analysis was done using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 21.0. Results: As out of 40 patients, 16 (40%) were males and 24 (60%) were females and the mean age was 53.87±9.49 years with maximum age noted to be 75 years and minimum age of patient in study was 35 years. The most common block observed on MRCP was type IIIA (35%) and after MRCP the distribution of level of hilar block on PTC was obtained with the most common block found was of type II (32.5%). Maximum number of biliary drains during PTBD was three. In MRCP three biliary drain were used in 47.5% patients while in PTC it was used only in 40% patients. Conclusion: Based on diagnostic performance, PTC was found to be superior for the assessment of MBO. PTC played an important role in scheduling the therapeutic strategy for malignant biliary stricture.

Characterizing WDT subsystem of a Wi-Fi controller in an Automobile based on MIPS32 CPU platform across PVT

Currently due to increase in stress in present lifestyle, there is a need for people to choose automated cars for transportation purpose. As a result the controllers incorporated in the automobiles must be critically characterized to ensure safety, security and confront of the users. The whole SoC consists of various Sub-modules among which WDT is one of the crucial and most common block found in all silicones. Yet validation of this module has to be done so as to guard the system from going into an hang-over due to some malfunction in hardware devices in the real-time environment or some software faults. This paper emphasizes the characterization of the watch dog timer in a Wi-Fi controller based on MIPS32 CPU platform across PVT. Hence the watchdog timer module is critically characterized across PVT to stress test the system and the obtained data logs are analyzed to form a comprehensive report.

A review on control systems hardware and software for robots of various scale and purpose. Part 2. Service robotics

A review of robotic systems was carried out. The paper analyzes applied hardware and software solutions and summarizes the most common block diagrams of control systems. The analysis of approaches to control systems scaling, the use of intelligent control, the achievement of fault tolerance, and the reduction of the weight and size of control system elements belonging to various classes of robotic systems were carried out. The goal of the review is finding common approaches used in various areas of robotics to build on their basis a uniform methodology for designing scalable intelligent control systems for robots with a given level of fault tolerance on a unified component base. This part is dedicated to service robotics. The following conclusions are made on the basis of the review results: the key technology in service robotics from the point of view of scalability is the Robot Operating System (ROS); service robotics is today the main springboard for testing intelligent algorithms for the tactical and strategic control levels that are integrated into a common system based on ROS; the problem of ensuring fault tolerance in the service robotics is practically neglected, with the exception of the issue of increasing reliability by changing behavioral algorithms; in a number of areas of service robotics, in which the reduction of mass and dimensions is especially important, the robot control systems are implemented on a single computing device, in other cases a multi-level architecture implemented on Linux-based embedded computers with ROS are used.

Development and Performance Test including Mechanical and Thermal of New Tenon Composite Block Masonry Walls

To improve the thermal performance of external masonry walls, a new tenon composite block is proposed as the external maintenance component which contains the internal hollow concrete block part, the external block part, and the extruded polystyrene layer fixed by tenons. The production process and concrete material mixing ratio were optimized for the new tenon composite block to promote its application. The mechanical strength and thermal properties of the optimized tenon composite blocks were tested with experiments and numerical simulation in this study. The testing and simulation results indicated that after utilizing the two optimized concrete mixing ratios, the tenon composite block strength matched the strength requirements according to the related design code. The thermal performance of the tenon composite block wall was also good compared with that of a common block wall.

NEW KEY EXPANSION FUNCTION OF RIJNDAEL 128-BIT RESISTANCE TO THE RELATED-KEY ATTACKS

A master key of special length is manipulated based on the key schedule to create round sub-keys in most block ciphers. A strong key schedule is described as a cipher that will be more resistant to various forms of attacks, especially in related-key model attacks. Rijndael is the most common block cipher, and it was adopted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, USA in 2001 as an Advance Encryption Standard. However, a few studies on cryptanalysis revealed that a security weakness of Rijndael refers to its vulnerability to related-key differential attack as well as the related-key boomerang attack, which is mainly caused by the lack of nonlinearity in the key schedule of Rijndael. In relation to this, constructing a key schedule that is both efficient and provably secure has been an ongoing open problem. Hence, this paper presents a method to improve the key schedule of Rijndael 128-bit for the purpose of making it more resistance to the related-key differential and boomerang attacks. In this study, two statistical tests, namely the Frequency test and the Strict Avalanche Criterion test were employed to respectively evaluate the properties of bit confusion and bit diffusion. The results showed that the proposed key expansion function has excellent statistical properties and agrees with the concept of Shannon’s diffusion and confusion bits. Meanwhile, the Mixed Integer Linear Programming based approach was adopted to evaluate the resistance of the proposed approach towards the related-key differential and boomerang attacks. The proposed approach was also found to be resistant against the two attacks discovered in the original Rijndael. Overall, these results proved that the proposed approach is able to perform better compared to the original Rijndael key expansion function and that of the previous research.

AN EFFICIENT METHOD TO DETECT MUTUAL OVERLAP OF A LARGE SET OF UNORDERED IMAGES FOR STRUCTURE-FROM-MOTION

Recently, low-cost 3D reconstruction based on images has become a popular focus of photogrammetry and computer vision research. Methods which can handle an arbitrary geometric setup of a large number of unordered and convergent images are of particular interest. However, determining the mutual overlap poses a considerable challenge.<br><br> We propose a new method which was inspired by and improves upon methods employing random k-d forests for this task. Specifically, we first derive features from the images and then a random k-d forest is used to find the nearest neighbours in feature space. Subsequently, the degree of similarity between individual images, the image overlaps and thus images belonging to a common block are calculated as input to a structure-from-motion (sfm) pipeline. In our experiments we show the general applicability of the new method and compare it with other methods by analyzing the time efficiency. Orientations and 3D reconstructions were successfully conducted with our overlap graphs by sfm. The results show a speed-up of a factor of 80 compared to conventional pairwise matching, and of 8 and 2 compared to the VocMatch approach using 1 and 4 CPU, respectively.

Fault Isolation of DQ Failures in 14 nm SRAM Using Laser Voltage Imaging and Probing

Through custom test pattern generation and SRAM design analysis, we present the first demonstration of Laser Voltage Imaging (LVI) and Probing (LVP) for the successful fault isolation and physical analysis of DQ failures within a 14nm SRAM macro. These findings revealed the fail site to reside within the I/O circuitry of the associated failing pin, a previously overlooked location as common block failures are typically associated with physical anomalies within the SRAM periphery.

TRANSFORMATION METHODS FOR USING COMBINATION OF REMOTELY SENSED DATA AND CADASTRAL MAPS

In order to examine using cadastral maps as base maps for aerial orthophotos, two different 2D transformation methods were applied between various coordinate systems. Study area was chosen from Kagithane district in Istanbul. The used data is an orthophoto (30 cm spatial resolution), and cadastral map (1:1000) taken from land office, containing the same region. Transformation methods are chosen as; 1st Order Polynomial Transformation and Helmert 2D Transformation within this study. The test points, used to determine the coefficients between the datums, were 26 common traverse points and the check points, used to compare the transformed coordinates to reliable true coordinates, were 10 common block corners. The transformation methods were applied using Matlab software. After applying the methods, residuals were calculated and compared between each transformation method in order to use cadastral maps as reliable vector data.

TRANSFORMATION METHODS FOR USING COMBINATION OF REMOTELY SENSED DATA AND CADASTRAL MAPS

In order to examine using cadastral maps as base maps for aerial orthophotos, two different 2D transformation methods were applied between various coordinate systems. Study area was chosen from Kagithane district in Istanbul. The used data is an orthophoto (30 cm spatial resolution), and cadastral map (1:1000) taken from land office, containing the same region. Transformation methods are chosen as; 1st Order Polynomial Transformation and Helmert 2D Transformation within this study. The test points, used to determine the coefficients between the datums, were 26 common traverse points and the check points, used to compare the transformed coordinates to reliable true coordinates, were 10 common block corners. The transformation methods were applied using Matlab software. After applying the methods, residuals were calculated and compared between each transformation method in order to use cadastral maps as reliable vector data.