Management of thoracolaryngopelvic dysplasia

We report a family in which three members have thoracolaryngopelvic dysplasia (Barnes' syndrome). This family illustrates the phenotypic variability seen in this rare clinical entity and highlights the medical and surgical management necessary in such cases.     

Biocompatible force sensor with optical readout and dimensions of 6 nm3

We have developed a nanoscopic force sensor with optical readout. The sensor consists of a single-stranded DNA oligomer flanked by two dyes. The DNA acts as a nonlinear spring: when the spring is stretched, the distance between the two dyes increases, resulting in reduced F?rster resonance energy transfer. The sensor was calibrated between 0 and 20 pN using a combined magnetic tweezers/single-molecule fluorescence microscope. We show that it is possible to tune the sensor's force response by varying the interdye spacing and that the FRET efficiency of the sensors decreases with increasing force. We demonstrate the usefulness of these sensors by using them to measure the forces internal to a single polymer molecule, a small DNA loop. Partial conversion of the single-stranded DNA loop to a double-stranded form results in the accumulation of strain: a force of approximately 6 pN was measured in the loop upon hybridization. The sensors should allow measurement of forces internal to various materials, including programmable DNA self-assemblies, polymer meshes, and DNA-based machines.     

FEC-based AP downlink transmission schemes for multiple flows: Combining the reliability and throughput enhancement of intra- and inter-flow coding

We consider downlink access point (AP) networks and the corresponding reliable transmission schemes. It is well known that one can protect the network traffic against packet erasures by forward-error-correcting-codes (FEC). In addition to ensuring reliable delivery, FECs could substantially reduce the amount of feedback traffic, which is critical when designing high-performance AP protocols.In this work, we generalize the FEC-based schemes, also known as intra-flow coding schemes, for multiple downlink flows. In contrast with the classic approach that performs FEC separately on individual flows, we propose a new protocol MU-FEC, which incorporates the recent idea of inter-flow coding to further enhance the achievable throughput. Specifically, MU-FEC guarantees 100% reliability, is oblivious and robust to the underlying erasure probabilities, has near-optimal throughput higher than any existing inter-flow coding protocols, and can be practically implemented on top of 802.11. The design of MU-FEC consists of three components: batch-based operations, a systematic phase-based network coding decision policy, and smooth integration of inter-flow and intra-flow coding. We analytically show that MU-FEC can achieve much higher throughput than intra- or inter-flow coding alone, and validate its performance gain via extensive simulations. To our knowledge, MU-FEC is the first practical protocol that leverages both intra-flow and inter-flow network coding to solve a real-world problem in single-hop wireless networks.     

Sample-adaptive product quantization: asymptotic analysis andexamples

Vector quantization (VQ) is an efficient data compression technique for low bit rate applications. However the major disadvantage of VQ is that its encoding complexity increases dramatically with bit rate and vector dimension. Even though one can use a modified VQ, such as the tree-structured VQ, to reduce the encoding complexity, it is practically infeasible to implement such a VQ at a high bit rate or for large vector dimensions because of the huge memory requirement for its codebook and for the very large training sequence requirement. To overcome this difficulty, a structurally constrained VQ called the sample-adaptive product quantizer (SAPQ) has recently been proposed. We extensively study the SAPQ that is based on scalar quantizers in order to exploit the simplicity of scalar quantization. Through an asymptotic distortion result, we discuss the achievable performance and the relationship between distortion and encoding complexity. We illustrate that even when SAPQ is based on scalar quantizers, it can provide VQ-level performance. We also provide numerical results that show a 2-3 dB improvement over the Lloyd-Max (1982, 1960) quantizers for data rates above 4 b/point     

Network decomposition: theory and practice

We show that significant simplicities can be obtained for the analysis of a network when link capacities are large enough to carry many flows. We develop a network decomposition approach in which network analysis can be greatly simplified. We prove that the queue length at the downstream queue converges to that of a single queue obtained by removing the upstream queue, as the capacity and the number of flows at the upstream queue increase. The precise modes of convergence vary depending on the type of input traffic, i.e., from regulated traffic arrivals to point process inputs. Our results thus help simplify network analysis by decomposing the original network into a simplified network in which all the nodes with large capacity have been eliminated. By means of extensive numerical investigation under various network scenarios, we demonstrate different aspects and implications of our network decomposition approach. Some of our findings are that our techniques perform well especially for the cases when: i) many flows are multiplexed as they enter the queue and/or ii) departing flows are routed to different downstream nodes, i.e., no single flow dominates at any node.     

A minimum cost heterogeneous sensor network with a lifetime constraint

We consider a heterogeneous sensor network in which nodes are to be deployed over a unit area for the purpose of surveillance. An aircraft visits the area periodically and gathers data about the activity in the area from the sensor nodes. There are two types of nodes that are distributed over the area using two-dimensional homogeneous Poisson point processes; type 0 nodes with intensity (average number per unit area) /spl lambda//sub 0/ and battery energy E/sub 0/; and type 1 nodes with intensity /spl lambda//sub 1/ and battery energy E/sub 1/. Type 0 nodes do the sensing while type 1 nodes act as the cluster heads besides doing the sensing. Nodes use multihopping to communicate with their closest cluster heads. We determine them optimum node intensities (/spl lambda//sub 0/, /spl lambda//sub 1/) and node energies (E/sub 0/, E/sub 1/) that guarantee a lifetime of at least T units, while ensuring connectivity and coverage of the surveillance area with a high probability. We minimize the overall cost of the network under these constraints. Lifetime is defined as the number of successful data gathering trips (or cycles) that are possible until connectivity and/or coverage are lost. Conditions for a sharp cutoff are also taken into account, i.e., we ensure that almost all the nodes run out of energy at about the same time so that there is very little energy waste due to residual energy. We compare the results for random deployment with those of a grid deployment in which nodes are placed deterministically along grid points. We observe that in both cases /spl lambda//sub 1/ scales approximately as /spl radic/(/spl lambda//sub 0/). Our results can be directly extended to take into account unreliable nodes.     

Cross-layer optimization for wireless multihop networks with pairwise intersession network coding

For wireless multi-hop networks with unicast sessions, most coding opportunities involve only two or three sessions as coding across many sessions requires greater transmission power to broadcast the coded symbol to many receivers, which enhances interference. This work shows that with a new flow-based characterization of pairwise intersession network coding (coding across two unicast sessions), an optimal joint coding, scheduling, and rate-control scheme can be devised and implemented using only the binary XOR operation. The new scheduling/rate-control scheme demonstrates provably graceful throughput degradation with imperfect scheduling, which facilitates the design tradeoff between the throughput optimality and computational complexity of different scheduling schemes. Our results show that pairwise intersession network coding improves the throughput of non-coding solutions regardless of whether perfect/imperfect scheduling is used. Both the deterministic and stochastic packet arrivals and departures are considered. This work shows a striking resemblance between pairwise intersession network coding and non-coded solutions, and thus advocates extensions of non-coding wisdoms to their network coding counterpart.     

Finding shape axes using magnetic fields

This paper presents a novel method, based on magnetic field principles, for obtaining the axes of shapes. The method is based on directional information of the shape's boundary. By simulating a parallel algorithm, we are able to generate the inner as well as the outer axes (axes of concavities) of the shape. The preprocessing phase for this algorithm involves obtaining the shape's gradient. Each point of the gradient is substituted by a minute magnetic dipole. The cumulative magnetic field due to these dipoles is accumulated at all points in the image in a one-pass algorithm. The magnitude of the final magnetic vector field has valleys that are created from mutual and directionally balanced cancellations of opposing boundary segments. These valleys signify the axes of the shape. The axes are obtained by performing a valley search. The magnetic field modeling (MFM) method has an advantage over previous approaches since it utilizes not only the location information of the boundary, but also its directional information. As demonstrated, experimental results of the MFM method are much improved, compared to other skeletonization algorithms which tend to generate spurious and noisy axes.