Test Generation and Fault Simulation for Cell Fault Model using Stuck-at Fault Model based Test Tools

Cell Fault Model (CFM) is a well-adopted functional fault model used for cell-based circuits. Despite of the wide adoption of CFM, no test tool is available for the estimation of CFM testability. The vast majority of test tools are based on the single stuck-at fault model.In this paper we introduce a method to calculate the CFM testability of a cell-based circuit using any single stuck-at fault based test tool. Cells are substituted by equivalent cells and Test Generation and Fault Simulation for CFM are emulated by Test Generation and Fault Simulation for a set of single stuck-at faults of the equivalent cells. The equivalent cell is constructed from the original cell with a simple procedure, with no need of knowledge of gate-level implementation, or its function. With the proposed methodology, the maturity and effectiveness of stuck-at fault based tools is used in testing of digital circuits, with respect to Cell Fault Model, without developing new tools.     

Alirocumab in a high cardiovascular risk patient on hemodialysis with liver abnormalities

We present a male diabetic type 2 patient on hemodialysis (HD) with high cardiovascular (CVD) risk and hyperlipidemia. The patient was under cholesterol‐lowering therapy with statin and ezetimibe but he was obligated to discontinue due to chronic hepatitis C virus infection. Statins and ezetimibe may exert a potential hepatotoxic effect and for this reason, we attempted to find an alternative treatment to prevent CVD. Given that a potential hepatotoxic effect has not been reported for Abs SPCK9, we administered alirocumab 150 mg every 2 weeks for a total of 8 weeks. Low‐density lipoprotein levels have decreased and no side effects have been observed. In conclusion, alirocumab is a safe and efficient alternative therapy approach for HD patients with high CVD risk and liver abnormalities. We suggest that SPCK 9 inhibitors should be considered as a first line treatment for lowering cholesterol in this specific patient group.     

Skeletonization based on angle maps

This paper presents a novel skeleton pruning approach based on angle maps. The angle map of the test object is a representation of the object contour’s angles during a 2D empirical mode like decomposition (EMD-like). The intrinsic mode functions produced by the EMD like decomposition are used to compose the angle map of the object contour. This angle map has very good properties for obtaining the object’s skeleton. The experimental results demonstrate that the obtained skeletons match to hand-labelled skeletons provided by human subjects, even in the presence of significant noise and shape variations, cuts and tears, and have the same topology as the original skeletons.     

The Clinical Impact of Increasing the Hemodialysis Dose

Good evidence suggests that improvements in dialysis efficiency reduce morbidity and mortality of hemodialysis (HD) patients. Dialysis efficiency has also been related to better control of arterial blood pressure (BP), anemia, and serum phosphorus levels, and to improvement in patients' nutritional status. Over a 2‐year period, the present self‐controlled study of 34 HD patients (23 men, 11 women; age, 52.6 ± 14.5 years; HD duration, 55.9 ± 61.2 months) looked at the effect on clinical and laboratory parameters of increasing the delivered dialysis dose under a strict dry‐weight policy. Dialysis dose was increased without increasing dialysis time and frequency. A statistically significant increase was seen in delivered HD dose: the urea reduction ratio (URR) increased to 60% ± 10% from 52% ± 8%, and then to 71% ± 7% (p < 0.001); Kt/V_urea increased to 1.22 ± 0.28 from 0.93 ± 0.19, and then to 1.55 ± 0.29 (p < 0.001). A statistically significant increase in hemoglobin concentration also occurred—to 10.8 ± 1.9 g/dL from 10.4 ± 1.7 g/dL, and then to 11.0 ± 1.3 g/dL (p < 0.05 as compared to baseline)—with no significant difference in weekly erythropoietin dose. Statistically significant decreases occurred in the systolic and diastolic blood pressures during the first year; they then remained unchanged. Systolic blood pressure decreased to 131 ± 23 mmHg from 147 ± 24 mmHg (p < 0.001); diastolic blood pressure decreased to 65 ± 11 mmHg from 73 ± 12 mmHg (p < 0.001). Serum albumin increased insignificantly to 4.4 ± 0.4 g/dL from 4.3 ± 0.4 g/dL, and then significantly to 4.6 ± 0.3 g/dL (p = 0.002 as compared to both previous values). Normalized protein catabolic rate increased significantly to 1.16 ± 0.15 g/kg/day from 0.93 ± 0.16 g/kg/ day (p < 0.001), and then to 1.20 ± 0.17 g/kg/day (p < 0.001 as compared to baseline). We conclude that the increases achieved in average Kt/V_urea per hemodialysis session by increasing dialyzer membrane area, and blood and dialysate flows, without increasing dialysis time above 4 hours, in patients hemodialyzed thrice weekly, coupled with strict dry‐weight policy, resulted in improvements in hypertension, nutritional status, and anemia.     

Correlated at the Tail: Implications of Asymmetric Tail-Dependence Across Bitcoin Markets

Computational Economics - This paper is the first to fully characterize the relationship among cross-market Bitcoin prices to provide a complete picture of directional predictability of Bitcoin...     

An addendum on “Three-level designs: Evaluation and comparison for screening purposes”

In our recent paper “Three-Level Designs: Evaluation and Comparison for Screening Purposes”, by the same authors, we investigated and compared the original definitive screening designs and the designs that were constructed from weighing matrices. For this purpose, we used the generalized resolution and minimum aberration criteria as well as the projection estimation capacity criterion from the literature to perform the comparison. After our paper was accepted, it came to our attention that there were four significant papers, published by a number of authors, having related content and these were not mentioned in our paper. With this short addendum, we would like to kindly acknowledge the important contributions from those authors in those newly discovered papers in recent literature and also to include them in the related reference list.     

Decision-aided compensation of severe phase-impairment-induced inter-carrier interference in frequency-selective OFDM

A new, reduced complexity algorithm is proposed for compensating the Inter-Carrier Interference (ICI) caused by severe PHase Noise (PHN) and Residual Frequency Offset (RFO) in OFDM systems. The algorithm estimates and compensates the most significant terms of the frequency domain ICI process, which are optimally selected via a Minimum Mean Squared Error (MMSE) criterion. The algorithm requires minimal knowledge of the phase process statistics, the estimation of which is also considered. The scheme outperforms previously proposed compensation methods of similar complexity, when severe phase impairments are present.     

A semantic grid infrastructure enabling integrated access and analysis of multilevel biomedical data in support of postgenomic clinical trials on cancer.

This paper reports on original results of the Advancing Clinico-Genomic Trials on Cancer integrated project focusing on the design and development of a European biomedical grid infrastructure in support of multicentric, postgenomic clinical trials (CTs) on cancer. Postgenomic CTs use multilevel clinical and genomic data and advanced computational analysis and visualization tools to test hypothesis in trying to identify the molecular reasons for a disease and the stratification of patients in terms of treatment. This paper provides a presentation of the needs of users involved in postgenomic CTs, and presents such needs in the form of scenarios, which drive the requirements engineering phase of the project. Subsequently, the initial architecture specified by the project is presented, and its services are classified and discussed. A key set of such services are those used for wrapping heterogeneous clinical trial management systems and other public biological databases. Also, the main technological challenge, i.e. the design and development of semantically rich grid services is discussed. In achieving such an objective, extensive use of ontologies and metadata are required. The Master Ontology on Cancer, developed by the project, is presented, and our approach to develop the required metadata registries, which provide semantically rich information about available data and computational services, is provided. Finally, a short discussion of the work lying ahead is included.     

Monitoring the Coefficient of Variation Using a Variable Sampling Interval Control Chart

The coefficient of variation (CV) is a quality characteristic that has several applications in applied statistics and is receiving increasing attention in quality control. Few papers have proposed control charts that monitor this normalized measure of dispersion. In this paper, an adaptive Shewhart control chart implementing a variable sampling interval (VSI) strategy is proposed to monitor the CV. Tables are provided for the statistical properties of the VSI CV chart, and a comparison is performed with a Fixed Sampling Rate Shewhart chart for the CV. An example illustrates the use of these charts on real data gathered from a casting process. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Methods for interpreting the out‐of‐control signal of multivariate control charts: A comparison study

Multivariate control charts have proved to be a useful tool for identifying an out‐of‐control process. However, one of the main drawbacks of these charts is that they do not indicate which measured variables have been shifted. To overcome this issue, several alternative approaches that aim to diagnose faults the responsible variable(s) for the out‐of‐control signal and help identify aberrant variables may be found in the literature. This paper reviews several techniques that are used to diagnose the responsible variable(s) for the out‐of‐control signal and attempt to make a comparative study among them. In particular, we evaluate the performance of each method under different simulation scenarios in terms of successful identification of the out‐of‐control variables. Special attention has also been given to the computational approaches and especially in the ability of artificial neural networks to identify out‐of‐control signals. The obtained results show that: there is no particular method that can be considered as panacea; the artificial neural networks' performance depends heavily on the training data set.