Three-dimensional ultrasound imaging systems for prostate cancerdiagnosis and treatment

3D ultrasound imaging system for imaging the prostate can be interfaced to any conventional ultrasound machine, and can accommodate side-firing transrectal ultrasound transducers. After acquiring a series of 2D ultrasound images, a 3D image is reconstructed. The 3D image is available to the physician, allowing the prostate to be viewed interactively in multiple simultaneous planes, allowing better visualization of its internal architecture. This approach allows the physician to record and view the whole prostate in successive examinations, making 3D TRUS well-suited to performing prospective or follow-up studies. The results indicate that 3D ultrasound imaging of the prostate has great potential as a tool for the diagnosis and follow-up of prostate disease     

Preparation and characterization of germanium oxysulfide glassy films for optics

Homogeneous amorphous films in the GeS₂-GeO₂ system have been deposited by a rf sputtering technique. Optical characterizations have shown that the cut-off wavelength and the linear indices increase with an increase in the S/O ratio. Raman spectroscopy indicates the presence of new modes that can be assigned to intermediate germanium oxysulfide structural units. Photo-sensitivity of the oxysulfide films has been demonstrated for irradiation near the band-gap. Diffraction gratings inscribed using 488 nm exposure displayed a limited diffraction efficiency (≤3%) that weakens with a corresponding decrease in the glass S/O ratio.     

Tradeoff of complexity and latency of iterative decoding for orthogonal convolutional codes

The complexities and latencies of iterative belief propagation (BP) and threshold decoding techniques for a new class of convolutional self-orthogonal codes are analysed using forward-only pipeline architectures. Computer simulation results show that over the additive white Gaussian noise channel at moderate signal- to-noise ratios, BP decoding yields one half the decoding delay when compared with threshold decoding at essentially the same error performances. However, the reduction in the decoding delay using BP is obtained at the cost of an increase of the implementation complexity.     

Search and determination of convolutional self-doubly orthogonal codes for iterative threshold decoding

In this paper, we present new results on the search and determination of wide-sense convolutional self-doubly orthogonal codes (CSO/sup 2/C-WS) which can be decoded using a simple iterative threshold decoding algorithm without interleaving. For their iterative decoding, in order to ensure the independence of observables over the first two iterations without the presence of interleavers, these CSO/sup 2/C must satisfy specific orthogonal properties of their generator connections. The error performances of CSO/sup 2/C, depend essentially on the number of taps J of the code generators but not on the code memory length. Since the overall latency of the iterative threshold decoding process is proportional to the memory length of the codes, therefore, when searching for the best CSO/sup 2/C-WS of a given J value, the memory length of the codes should be chosen to be as small as possible. In this paper, we present a code-searching technique based on heuristic computer searching algorithms which have yielded the best known CSO/sup 2/C-WS. The construction method for CSO/sup 2/C-WS has provided the best known r=1/2 codes with the shortest memory length having J/spl les/30. Although not very complex to implement, the search method presented here is quite efficient especially in reducing very substantially the execution time required to determine the codes with the shortest spans. Furthermore, in addition to presenting the search results for the codes, error performances obtained by simulation are also provided.     

Hematin treatment of acute porphyria. Early remission of an almost fatal relapse

Intravenous infusions of hematin in a young woman with acute porphyria in profound relapse was followed within 48 hours by remission of symptoms and rapid recovery. From a state of severe central and peripheral nervous-system involvement, the patient recovered so completely that she was able to leave the hospital in less than a month, with only a residual weakness of her arms. Serial studies of serum and urinary levles of porphyrin precursors and serum level of hematin provided highly important information about the effect of hematin on acute porphyria.     

On the performance of interference cancellation in wireless ad hoc networks

This letter presents a novel approach for deriving a lower bound on the outage probability of interference cancellation receiver in ad hoc networks for a class of channel fading. Our approach is based on the following observation: under the power decay law model for large-scale fading with an exponent α strictly greater than 2, the sum of the interferences at a receiver has the same order as the strongest signal. This feature still holds when the small-scale fading has a finite 2/α-fractional moment. This fact is used to develop an approximation which is also a compact lower bound on the outage probability.