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Introduction & objectivesHead and neck dermatitis (HND) is a refractory phenotype of atopic dermatitis (AD) and can be a therapeutic challenge due to lack of responsiveness to conventional treatments. Previous studies have suggested that the microbiome and fungiome may play a role in inducing HND, but the underlying pathogenic mechanisms remain unknown. This study aimed to determine the link between HND and fungiome and to examine the contribution of Malassezia furfur.Materials and methodsTo identify the effect of the sensitization status of M. furfur on HND, 312 patients diagnosed with AD were enrolled. To elucidate the mechanism underlying the effects of M. furfur, human keratinocytes and dermal endothelial cells were cultured with M. furfur and treated with Th2 cytokines. The downstream effects of various cytokines, including inflammation and angiogenesis, were investigated by real-time quantitative PCR. To identify the association between changes in lipid composition and M. furfur sensitization status, D-squame tape stripping was performed. Lipid composition was evaluated by focusing on ceramide species using liquid chromatography coupled with tandem mass spectrometry.ResultsIncreased sensitization to M. furfur was observed in patients with HND. Additionally, sensitization to M. furfur was associated with increased disease severity in these patients. IL-4 treated human keratinocytes cultured with M. furfur produced significantly more VEGF, VEGFR, IL-31, and IL-33. IL-4/M. furfur co-cultured dermal endothelial cells exhibited significantly elevated VEGFR, TGF-β, TNF-α, and IL-1β levels. Stratum corneum lipid analysis revealed decreased levels of esterified omega-hydroxyacyl-sphingosine, indicating skin barrier dysfunction in HND. Finally, M. furfur growth was inhibited by the addition of these ceramides to culture media, while the growth of other microbiota, including Cutibacterium acnes, were not inhibited.ConclusionsUnder decreased levels of ceramide in AD patients with HND, M. furfur would proliferate, which may enhance pro-inflammatory cytokine levels, angiogenesis, and tissue remodeling. Thus, it plays a central role in the pathogenesis of HND in AD.

A spectrally encapsulated (SE) orthogonal frequency‐division multiplexing (OFDM) precoding scheme for wireless short packet transmission, which can suppress the out‐of‐band emission (OoBE) while maintaining the advantage of the cyclic prefix (CP)‐OFDM, is proposed. The SE‐OFDM symbol consists of a prefix, an inverse fast Fourier transform (IFFT) symbol, and a suffix generated by the head, center, and tail matrices, respectively. The prefix and suffix play the roles of a guard interval and suppress the OoBE, and the IFFT symbol has the same size as the discrete Fourier transform symbol in the CP‐OFDM symbol and serves as an information field. Specifically, as the center matrix generating the IFFT symbol is orthogonal, data and pilot symbols can be allocated to any subcarrier without distinction. Even if the proposed precoder is required to generate OFDM symbols with spectral efficiency in the transmitter, a corresponding decoder is not required in the receiver. The proposed scheme is compared with CP‐OFDM in terms of spectrum, OoBE, and bit‐error rate.

The multi-band UWAS (Underwater Wireless Acoustic Sensor) communication techniques are effective in terms of performance and throughput efficiency because they can overcome selective frequency fading by allocating the same data to different frequency bands, in an environment of rapidly changing channel transfer characteristic. However, the multi-band configuration may have a performance worse than the single-band one because performance degradation in one particular band affects the output from all the other bands. This problem can be solved by using a receiving end that analyzes the error rates of each band, sets threshold values and allocates the lower weights to the inferior bands. There are many methods of setting threshold values. In this paper, we proposed an algorithm to set the threshold value by using the preamble error rates, which are known data that have to be transmitted and received. In addition, we have analyzed the efficiency of multi-band transmission scheme in the UWAS communication by applying 1~4 number of multi-bands, using turbo pi codes, with a coding rate of 1/3. We evaluated the performance of the proposed multi-bands transmission model in real underwater environments. Experimental results showed that the performance increased as the number of multiple bands increased. Furthermore, the performance of multi-band was improved when the proposed threshold algorithm was applied.