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Aim. This study aims to investigate the therapeutic effect of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) on the negative symptoms of chronic schizophrenia and serum brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). Methods. A total of 86 patients with chronic schizophrenia hospitalised from March to October 2019 were randomly assigned to the active rTMS group or the sham rTMS group, with 43 patients in each group. All patients were administered paliperidone orally at a dose of 3--6 mg/d, and rTMS treatment was given to the active rTMS group. The Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) score and the serum BDNF concentration were calculated in both groups at baseline and after two and four weeks of treatment. Results. There were no statistically significant differences in the PANSS scores and serum BDNF concentrations between the two groups before treatment (p > 0.05). However, after four weeks of treatment, the change in the score on the negative symptom scale in the active rTMS group was greater than in the sham rTMS group (p < 0.05), and the serum BDNF levels in the active rTMS group were higher than in the sham rTMS group (p < 0.05). Conclusions. Four weeks of continuous rTMS treatment can effectively improve the negative symptoms of schizophrenia, and the serum concentration of BDNF increases as the duration of rTMS treatment increases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a game theoretic approach to analyze the public goods (PGs) allocation in peer-to-peer (p2p) networks. In order to reduce the free-riders and promote the cooperation among peers, we propose an incentive mechanism with cooperationbased game theory. In this paper, we regarded the contributed resources by cooperators as public goods (PGs). We also build the PGs allocation in P2P networks to be the optimization problem, and the optimal solution of PGs allocation satisfies the Bowen- Lindahl-Samuelson equilibrium. Firstly, based on the subscriber mechanism, we analyze the feasibility and prove the validity, which can achieve Nash equilibrium. However, this strategy cannot meet to Bowen-Lindahl-Samuelson equilibrium as the free-riders do not pay with their private goods for consuming the PGs. Secondly, based on the Walker mechanism, we analyze the feasibility and prove the validity for the same allocation problem, which meets to Bowen-Lindahl-Samuelson equilibrium and achieves Pareto efficiency within cooperative game. Simulations show that the proposed walker mechanism can significantly improve the network performance of throughout, and effectively alleviate free-riding problem in P2P networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network virtualization technology plays a key role in cloud computing, which serves as an effective approach for provisioning a flexible and highly adaptable shared substrate network to satisfy the demands of various applications or services. Recently, the problem of mapping a virtual network (VN) onto a substrate network has been addressed by various algorithms. However, these algorithms are typically efficient for unicast service-oriented virtual networks, and generally not applicable to multicast service-oriented virtual networks (MVNs). Furthermore, the survivable MVN mapping (SMVNM) problem that considers the survivability of MVN has not been studied and is also the focus of this work. In this research, we discuss SMVNM problem under regional failures in the substrate network and propose an efficient algorithm for solving this problem. We first propose a framework and formulate the SMVNM problem with the objective of minimizing mapping cost by using mixed integer linear programming. Then we design an efficient heuristic to solve this problem and introduce several optimizations to achieve the better mapping solutions. We validate and evaluate our framework and algorithms by conducting extensive simulations on different realistic networks under various scenarios, and by comparing with existing approaches. Our simulation experiments and results show that our approach outperforms existing solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]