MicroRNAs as Potential Biomarkers in the Differential Diagnosis of Lipomatous Tumors and Their Mimics

Adipocytic tumors are the most common subtype of soft tissue tumors. In current clinical practice, distinguishing benign lipomas from well-differentiated liposarcomas (WDLPS), as well as dedifferentiated liposarcomas (DDLPS) from their morphologic mimics, remains a significant diagnostic challenge. This is especially so when examining small biopsy samples and without the aid of additional ancillary tests. Recognizing the important role that microRNAs (miRNAs) play in tumorigenesis and their potential utility in tumor classification, we analyzed routine clinical tissue samples of benign and malignant lipomatous tumors, as well as other sarcoma mimics, to identify distinguishing miRNA-based signatures that can aid in the differential diagnosis of these entities. We discovered a 6-miRNA signature that separated lipomas from WDLPS with high confidence (AUC of 0.963), as well as a separate 6-miRNA signature that distinguished DDLPS from their more aggressive histologic mimics (AUC of 0.740). Functional enrichment analysis unveiled possible mechanistic involvement of these predictive miRNAs in adipocytic cancer-related biological processes and pathways such as PI3K/AKT/mTOR and MAPK signaling, further supporting the relevance of these miRNAs as biomarkers for adipocytic tumors. Our results demonstrate that miRNA expression profiling may potentially be used as an adjunctive tool for the diagnosis of benign and malignant adipocytic tumors. Further validation studies are warranted.     

An investigation of the effects of the tool path on the removal of material in polishing

Uniformity of removal affects the finishing, and in some cases, the form accuracy of the polished surface. Tool paths are required for the automation of surface polishing. How the tool path may affect the removal of material in polishing is investigated in this paper. An analysis of how removal at a location due to polishing along adjacent path lines is presented. Four tool paths reportedly used in polishing are covered: scanning, bi-scanning, Hilbert and Peano paths. Removal in the inner surface as well as near the edges of surfaces is examined through simulations and analysis. The results show that, for the same path pitch, the peak-to-valley height (h_pv) in the inner part of the removal map is the same for scanning, bi-scanning and Peano, while the texture of the removal maps can be quite different. The h_pv values of Hilbert are more than double those of Peano, although both are fractal paths. Removal near the edges is particularly severe for scanning-type tool paths. The ratio of the edge peak height to the inner peak height is about 1.6 on average for scanning. The uniformity of removal further deteriorates as the ellipticity of the tool contact increases. When the contact direction is closely aligned with the path line direction, that ratio goes up to about 2.9 for contact ellipticity of 2. Polishing experiments have also been conducted. Both experiments and simulations point to the presence of edge effects in scanning paths and its absence in Peano paths. It is further proposed that, for more uniform removal of material: (1) changes in the tool path direction should be well distributed and (2) the direction of the path lines should be well balanced over the entire surface.     

Turbo multiuser detection for differentially modulated CDMA

In this letter, we study differentially modulated, iteratively decoded CDMA. The iterative multiuser receiver proposed consists of an additional soft-input soft-output (SISO) differential decoder, when compared to turbo multiuser detectors for absolutely modulated systems. Algorithms for iterative decoding with and without phase information at the receiver are developed. The resulting turbo receivers with differential modulation outperform coherent receivers with absolute modulation at moderate to high signal to noise ratios due to the interleaver gain associated with recursive inner encoders in serially concatenated encoding structures.     

A Power-Efficient High-Throughput 32-Thread SPARC Processor

This first generation of "Niagara" SPARC processors implements a power-efficient Chip Multi-Threading (CMT) architecture which maximizes overall throughput performance for commercial workloads. The target performance is achieved by exploiting high bandwidth rather than high frequency, thereby reducing hardware complexity and power. The UltraSPARC T1 processor combines eight four-threaded 64-b cores, a floating-point unit, a high-bandwidth interconnect crossbar, a shared 3-MB L2 Cache, four DDR2 DRAM interfaces, and a system interface unit. Power and thermal monitoring techniques further enhance CMT performance benefits, increasing overall chip reliability. The 378-mm² die is fabricated in Texas Instrument's 90-nm CMOS technology with nine layers of copper interconnect. The chip contains 279 million transistors and consumes a maximum of 63 W at 1.2 GHz and 1.2 V. Key functional units employ special circuit techniques to provide the high bandwidth required by a CMT architecture while optimizing power and silicon area. These include a highly integrated integer register file, a high-bandwidth interconnect crossbar, the shared L2 cache, and the IO subsystem. Key aspects of the physical design methodology are also discussed     

A Multi‐Functional Highly Efficient Upconversion Luminescent Film with an Array of Dielectric Microbeads Decorated with Metal Nanoparticles

Upconversion nanoparticles (UCNPs) have been integrated with photonic platforms to overcome the intrinsically low quantum efficiency limit of upconversion luminescence (UCL). However, platforms based on thin films lack transferability and flexibility, which hinders their broader and more practical application. A plasmonic structure is developed that works as a multi‐functional platform for flexible, transparent, and washable near‐infrared (NIR)‐to‐visible UCL films with ultra‐strong UCL intensity. The platform consists of dielectric microbeads decorated with plasmonic metal nanoparticles on an insulator/metal substrate. Distinct improvements in NIR confinement, visible light extraction, and boosted plasmonic effects for upconversion are observed. With weak NIR excitation, the UCL intensity is higher by three orders of magnitude relative to the reference platform. When the microbeads are organized in a square lattice array, the functionality of the platform can be expanded to wearable and washable UCL films. The platform can be transferred to transparent, flexible, and foldable films and still emit strong UCL with a wide viewing angle.     

A comparison between high-pass and low-pass \Updelta\Upsigma modulators

In this paper, high-pass (HP) $\Updelta\Upsigma$ modulators are compared against the traditional low-pass (LP) $\Updelta\Upsigma$ modulators. The objective of this comparison is to point out the advantages and drawbacks of the two modulators thereby allowing choosing the most suited for a given application. The metrics of comparison are the noise floor, power consumption, area and the effect of the non-idealities of all the basic blocks (i.e., operational transconductance amplifier, quantizer, switches and clocks). The comparative analysis shows that HP modulators are more suited for narrow band applications because of their immunity against DC-offset and flicker noise. For medium and wide band applications, LP modulators are preferred because of their higher robustness against switch imperfections and clock jitter.     

Thermal buffer materials for enhancement of device performance of organic light emitting diodes fabricated by laser imaging process

Laser Induced Thermal Imaging (LITI) is a laser addressed thermal patterning technology with unique advantages such as an excellent uniformity of transfer film thickness, a capability of multilayer stack transfer and a possibility to fabricate high resolution as well as large-area display. Nevertheless, it has been an obstacle to use such a laser imaging process as a commercial technology so far because of serious deterioration of the device performances plausibly due to a re-orientation of the molecular stacking especially in the emitting layer during thermal transfer process. To improve device performances, we devised a new concept to suppress the thermal degradation during such kind of thermal imaging process by using a high molecular weight small molecular species with large steric hindrance as well as high thermostability as a thermal buffer layer to realize highly efficient LITI devices. As a result, we obtained very high relative efficiency (by EQE) up to 91.5% at 1000 cd/m² from the LITI devices when we utilize 10-(naphthalene-2-yl)-3-(phenanthren-9-yl)spiro[benzo[ij]tetraphene-7,9′-fluorene] as a thermal buffer material.     

Performance enhancement in organic photovoltaic devices using plasma-polymerized fluorocarbon-modified Ag nanoparticles

In this work, Ag nanoparticles were modified by an ultra-thin plasma-polymerized fluorocarbon film (CF_X) to form a composite CF_X-modified Ag nanoparticles/indium tin oxide (ITO) anode for application in organic photovoltaic (OPV) devices. A CF_X-modified Ag nanoparticles/ITO anode exhibited a superior surface work function of 5.4 eV suited for application in OPV devices. The performance of zinc phthalocyanine:fullerene-based OPV devices showed a significant improvement when the structural identical cells are made with the CF_X-modified Ag nanoparticles/ITO. This work yielded a promising power conversion efficiency of 3.5 ± 0.1%, notably higher than that with a bare ITO anode (2.7 ± 0.1%).     

A 65-nm Dual-Core Multithreaded Xeon® Processor With 16-MB L3 Cache

This paper describes a dual-core 64-b Xeon MP processor implemented in a 65-nm eight-metal process. The 435-mm² die has 1.328-B transistors. Each core has two threads and a unified 1-MB L2 cache. The 16-MB shared, 16-way set-associative L3 cache implements both sleep and shut-off leakage reduction modes. Long channel transistors are used to reduce subthreshold leakage in cores and uncore (all portions of the die that are outside the cores) control logic. Multiple voltage and clock domains are employed to reduce power     

Different Directions of Switching of Chromium Oxide Thin Films

We have investigated the switching behavior of as-deposited CrO _x and post-annealed CrO _y films by use of a variety of electrodes (top electrode Ag, Ti; bottom electrode Pt, fluorine tin oxide (FTO)). Resistance switching is highly dependent on electrode material and post-annealing treatment. Among Pt devices, I–V hysteresis was observed for the Ag/CrO _x /Pt device only; no resistance switching was observed for Ag/CrO _y /Pt, Ti/CrO _x /Pt, and Ti/CrO _y /Pt devices. Among FTO devices, I–V hysteresis was observed for the Ag/CrO _x /FTO device whereas I–V hysteresis with the opposite switching direction was observed for Ag/CrO _y /FTO, Ti/CrO _x /FTO, and Ti/CrO _y /FTO devices. The direction of switching depends not only on electrode material but also on post-annealing treatment, which affects the density of grain boundaries. Thus, the density of grain boundaries determines the type of charge carrier involved in the switching process. For as-deposited CrO _x films with a high density of grain boundaries Ag filament paths mediated by electrochemical redox reaction were observed, irrespective of bottom electrode material (Pt or FTO). Post-annealed CrO _y films with a low density of grain boundaries suppressed electrochemical redox reaction in the Ag/CrO _y /Pt device but promoted short-range movement of O^2? ions through the bottom interface, resulting in resistance switching in the Ag/CrO _y /FTO device. Electrochemical redox reaction-controlled resistance switching occurred solely in oxides with a high density of grain boundaries or dislocations.