MSCI (China)

An analysis of risk factors affecting wound care clinical trials was performed to develop proactive risk mitigation strategies, and improve the safety and quality of trials conducted. Adherence to study protocol and compliance with regulatory requirements was examined, based on the rate of protocol deviations. Prospective, randomised clinical trials for diabetic foot ulcers (DFUs) and venous leg ulcers (VLUs) were compared for rates/types of deviations from study protocols. Adverse events were analysed in enrolled participants. The rate and patterns of serious adverse events (SAEs) and non-serious adverse events (AEs) were compared between the two wound indications. In all, 15 trials with a total of 261 participants and 223 adverse events were included in the analysis. The DFU group was noted to have a 10.4% higher incidence of SAEs and a 7.3% higher incidence of having any AEs compared with the VLU group. Analysis showed a higher number of deviations (n=325) in VLU trials compared with DFU trials (n=128). Overall, VLUs and DFUs had rates of deviation of 1.9 and 1.4 per enrolled patient, respectively. An understanding of the frequency/types of adverse events can contribute to the development of safety monitoring plans and risk mitigation strategies for wound care trials. Effective training and retention of research coordinators can reduce the number of deviations, and an understanding of the frequency and types of adverse events can inform safety management/risk mitigation plans.

Several new therapeutic drugs are now available for the management of rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Given that RA has been associated with an increased risk of certain cancers like lymphoma and lung cancer, concern remains about the safety of (newer) immunosuppressants used in RA management as it relates to the risk of cancer. Most meta-analyses of randomized clinical trials of tumor necrosis factor inhibitors (TNFi) have not observed an association between TNFi and risk of incident cancer. Studies of non-TNFi biologic disease modifying antirheumatic drugs (bDMARDs) and targeted synthetic DMARDs and cancer are also reassuring but limited and of short-term follow-up. Regarding the use of DMARDs in patients with RA and a prior malignancy, retrospective studies have shown that TNFi use is not associated with recurrence. There is a need for ongoing studies on the safety of non-TNFi bDMARDs and targeted synthetic disease modifying anti-rheumatic drugs and recurrent cancer. Further research is also needed to guide the patients, rheumatologists, and oncologists regarding the safest DMARDs to choose for patients with RA and a recent diagnosis of cancer.

With the rapid growth of data scale, data analysis applications start to meet the performance bottleneck, and thus requiring the aid of hardware acceleration. At the same time, Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), known for their high customizability and parallel nature, have gained momentum in the past decade. However, the efficiency of development for acceleration system based on FPGAs is severely constrained by the traditional languages and tools, due to their deficiency in expressibility, extendability, limited libraries and semantic gap between software and hardware design. This paper proposes a new open-source DSL based hardware design framework called VeriScala (https://github.com/VeriScala/VeriScala) that supports highly abstracted object-oriented hardware defining, programmatical testing, and interactive on-chip debugging. By adopting DSL embedded in Scala, we introduce modern software developing concepts into hardware designing including object-oriented programming, parameterized types, type safety, test automation, etc. VeriScala enables designers to describe their hardware designs in Scala, generate Verilog code automatically and interactively debug and test hardware design in real FPGA environment. Through the evaluation on real world applications and usability test, we show that VeriScala provides a practical approach for rapid prototyping of hardware acceleration systems. (This work is supported by the National Key Research & Development Program of China 2016YFB1000500)

The authors present an exact methodology for decomposing cross-sectional volatility into contributions from various factors. Treating country, industry, and style factors equally, they used their framework to investigate several relevant issues in the global equity markets, including the importance of country versus industry, emerging markets versus developed markets, and the strength of style factors vis-à-vis country and industry factors.

In recent years, online gaming has become very popular. In contrast to stand-alone games, online games tend to be large-scale and typically support interactions among users. However, due to the high network latency of the Internet, smooth interactions among the users are often difficult. The huge and dynamic geometry data sets also make it difficult for some machines, such as handheld devices, to run those games. These constraints have stimulated some research interests on online gaming, which may be broadly categorized into two areas: technological support and user-perceived visual quality . Technological support concerns the performance issues while user-perceived visual quality concerns the presentation quality and accuracy of the game. In this article, we propose a game-on-demand engine that addresses both research areas. The engine distributes game content progressively to each client based on the player's location in the game scene. It comprises a two-level content management scheme and a prioritized content delivery scheme to help identify and deliver relevant game content at appropriate quality to each client dynamically. To improve the effectiveness of the prioritized content delivery scheme, it also includes a synchronization scheme to minimize the location discrepancy of avatars (game players). We demonstrate the performance of the proposed engine through numerous experiments.