Search

Sequential postoperative intraperitoneal chemotherapy (SPIC) is a chemotherapy abdominal infusion given as a postoperative adjuvant treatment for 6 months after cytoreductive surgery (CRS) for peritoneal surface malignancies. It has most commonly been used in conjunction with ovarian cancer where the SPIC treatment has been integrated with adjuvant systemic chemotherapy. This review investigates the role of SPIC in the setting of colorectal cancer with peritoneal metastases. The focus is on the CRS+SPIC combination treatment with no systemic chemotherapy component. Several cohort studies, several comparative studies, and one randomized trial have been reported with several important endpoints. The following aspects will be covered in this review: overall survival, disease-free survival, morbidity, quality-of-life, and cost-effectiveness. In comparison to systemic chemotherapy alone for isolated resectable colorectal peritoneal metastases, CRS+SPIC is superior concerning overall survival, has no difference in morbidity, is similar in quality-of-life, and SPIC is cast-effective. In comparison to HIPEC, results are conflicting in multivariate analysis; but in a univariate analysis HIPEC (most often combined with systemic adjuvant therapy) appears superior to SPIC alone (no systemic component). The future of SPIC is uncertain. However, a combination of HIPEC and SPIC +/- a systemic chemotherapy component is a possible direction to explore further.

The ZEBRA technology - since several years under development at ISC Konstanz - is a bifacial IBC solar cell concept based on a standard industrial low cost manufacturing process still without passivating contacts. In this work, we present results of the industrial implementation of the ZEBRA cell technology in a 200 MW p /year production line in Xining (China) in a collaboration between HHSD/SPIC Xi'an Solar Power and ISC Konstanz. In particular, we report on processes for this advanced bifacial IBC technology and on first results achieved in industrial production at SPIC. At the current stage of ramp-up of the industrial cell line, average energy conversion efficiencies of 23.6% and open circuit voltages above 700 mV have been achieved. These values are reached using a simple cell process, based on standard LP-BBr 3 - and POCl 3 -tube furnace diffusion steps and on a screen printing metallization process that is compatible with any commercial format (e.g. also M6, M8 and M12) of n-type Cz-Si wafers. Modules have been fabricated in SPIC's industrial manufacturing line by soldering of ribbons on half-cut ZEBRA-cells. Thereby a P mpp of around 360 W p has been achieved using a module design based on 120 G1 half-cells corresponding to an efficiency of around 21.2%.

For AP1000 passive containment cooling system, the decay heat is removed by sequential heat transfer processes and it at last is transferred to the surrounding atmosphere. Based on this feature of passive containment cooling system, a Sequential-Parallel Interdependent Complement Scaling (SPIC) approach, sourced from the H2TS, three-level and FSA methods, was proposed and it emphasized the systematic top-down approach. SPIC core lay on its interdependent complement scheme among the sequential and parallel systems or subsystems to offset main distortions and based on SPIC, the interpedently coupled features of the sequential and parallel processes for passive containment could be fully used to minimize the distortions during scaling. For its preliminary application, general analyses were then systematically made on AP1000 containment. Decomposition was performed and governing equations were established for every subsystem or block system. These equations were then nondimensionalized. Scaling criterion group was finally formed and by preliminary analyses, it showed that the scaling-down for the specific structure dimension was restricted by more than one dimensionless number and accordingly their distortions could not be directly avoided. When the current interdependent complement is used, most distortions could be avoided.

In this paper, a high-side p-channel LDMOS (p-LDMOS) with an auto-biased n-channel LDMOS (n-LDMOS) based on Triple-RESURF technology is proposed. The p-LDMOS utilizes both carriers to conduct the on-state current; therefore, the specific on-resistance ( $R_{{\rm on},{\rm sp}}$ ) can be much reduced because of much higher electron mobility. The simulation result shows that the proposed 300-V p-LDMOS obtains a $R_{{\rm on},{\rm sp}}$ of 16.97 mΩ/cm2, which is about 65% reduced compared with the Triple-RESURF silicon limit and is comparable to an optimized n-LDMOS (BV = 340 V, $R_{{\rm on},{\rm sp}} = 18$ mΩ/cm2 ). In addition, due to larger current capability, the active area of the proposed p-LDMOS is only about one third of an optimized Triple-RESURF p-LDMOS. The turn-on ( $t_{r}$ ) and turn-off time ( $t_{f}$ ) are reduced by 51.2% and 40.0%, compared to the optimized Triple-RESURF p-LDMOS, respectively.

The South Pacific island countries (SPIC) are among the most vulnerable countries in the world to economic shocks, climate change and natural disasters. Agriculture including livestock production makes important contribution to socio-economic development in the region. However, the livestock sector is marred by many livestock diseases, which are crippling the economies as well as threatening the food security of the island nations, most of which have high dependence on imports. Limited veterinary medical facilities, high cost of conventional medicine and remoteness of some rural farming communities make it difficult for farmers to treat their diseased animals. Nevertheless, the island nations are endowed with vast reserves of medicinal plants in diverse ecosystems including mangroves, rainforests and tropical dry forests. Despite the ubiquity of traditional medicine systems, most of the plant species have been used to treat human aliments in the SPIC and very few farmers utilise herbal medicine to treat their animals. This review highlights the common diseases affecting livestock production in the SPIC, threats to ethno-veterinary knowledge, and potential plant species and their efficacies to treat animal diseases and parasites. It also discusses the common methods of preparation of veterinary herbal medicine and possible ways of making the medicine available in the formal and informal markets in the region. It is envisaged that the review will stimulate further ethno-veterinary research among livestock disease management practices in the SPIC.

Over the years, the Internet has been enhanced with new accessible correspondence advancements, for both fixed and versatile organizations and gadgets, showing a significant development in terms of execution, with consistently expanding affordable information rates. The Internet research network has continued attempting to develop the transport layer protocols to coordinate present-day organizations' abilities to receive the rewards of the new correspondence advances ultimately. This paper studies the principle oddities identified with transport protocols that have been as of late proposed, distinguishing three fundamental examination patterns. The advancement of clog control calculations, to target ideal execution in testing situations, conceivably with the utilization of machine learning methods; the proposition of spic and span transport protocols, option in contrast to the Transmission Control Protocol formally known as TCP also, executed in the client space.

Palm region of interest (ROI) extraction is an indispensable procedure in palmprint recognition. Prior works generally perform well on palm ROI extraction because of dedicated devices and well-controlled environment. To make hand placement less-constrained and improve usability, mobile palmprint recognition has attracted a wide attention in recent years. For mobile phone images captured in complex natural environment, palm ROI extraction is a challenging work due to varying illumination, complex background and contactless acquisition mode. In this paper, a mobile palmprint dataset (SPIC) is at first established with five smartphones, comprising 4000 images collected from 128 persons in two separate sessions. Furthermore, a novel pre-processing approach is proposed to achieve ROI extraction in mobile scenarios, which include colour component selection, learning-based fast hand segmentation and geometry-driven valley point location. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve high extraction accuracy and computational efficiency on PolyU1.0, HA-BJTU and SPIC palmprint databases.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to present an analytical drain current model for output characteristics of strained‐Si/SiGe bulk MOSFET.Design/methodology/approachA physics‐based model for current output characteristics and transconductance of strained‐Si/SiGe bulk devices has been developed incorporating the impact of strain (in terms of equivalent Ge mole fraction), strained silicon thin film thickness, gate work function, channel length and other device parameters. The accuracy of the results obtained using this model is verified by comparing them with 2D device simulations.FindingsThis model correctly predicts the output characteristics, IDS−VGS characteristics, transconductance and output conductance of the strained‐Si/SiGe MOSFET and demonstrates a significant enhancement in the drain current of the MOSFET with increasing strain in the strained‐Si thin film, i.e. with increasing equivalent Ge concentration in the SiGe bulk.Research limitations/implicationsCan be implemented in a SPICE like simulator for studying circuit behaviour containing strained‐Si/SiGe bulk MOSFETs.Practical implicationsThe model discussed in this paper can be easily implemented in a circuit simulator and used for the characterization of strained silicon devices. This complements the recent trend of investigation of new materials and device structures to maintain the rate of advancement in VLSI technology.Originality/valueThis paper presents, for the first time, a compact surface potential‐based analytical model for strained‐Si/SiGe MOSFETs which predicts the device characteristics reasonably well over their range of operation.

With an aim to develop a safe, immunogenic fowl typhoid (FT) vaccine, the safety and efficacy of 1009ΔspiCΔcrp, a spiC and crp deletion mutant of Salmonella gallinarum, were evaluated in chickens. Three-day-old chickens were intramuscularly immunized with 1009ΔspiCΔcrp (1×10(7)CFU) and boosted 7days later (at 10-days old) with the same dose and via the same route (vaccinated group). The vaccinated group showed no clinical symptoms and no differences in body weight compared to the unvaccinated control group. 1009ΔspiCΔcrp bacteria colonized and persisted in the liver and spleen of vaccinated chickens for >14days, and significant specific humoral and cellular immune responses were induced. Vaccinated chickens were challenged with S. gallinarum strain SG9 at 21days post-immunization (24-day-old chickens), and efficient protection was observed based on the mortality and clinical symptoms, as compared to those in the control group. These results demonstrate that 1009ΔspiCΔcrp can be used as a live attenuated vaccine.

In this paper, a novel double RESURF LDMOS with multiple rings in non-uniform drift region is proposed and successfully fabricated. The proposed device maximizes the benefits of the double RESURF technique by optimizes key process and device geometrical parameters in order to achieve the lowest on-resistance with the desired breakdown voltage. In addition, a versatile JFET device is firstly developed. The JFET device cannot only be used as the current detector, but also be used as the internal power supply for SPIC. Besides, it is compatible with Bipolar-CMOS technology, without any additional processes required.

A semi-insulation structure was proposed for high block voltage for vertical DMOS power devices. A smart power integrated circuit (SPIC) was designed and fabricated. The tested result of D-S block voltage of vertical DMOS is about 120V. The breakdown voltage of the isolation structure is about 129V.

High speed detection of breast masses from mammography images at an affordable cost is a problem of practical significance in large volume real-time processing and diagnostic assessments. In this paper, we present a new approach to real-time detection of breast masses by introducing the concept of cognitive cells that has a fully parallel high speed computing architecture realised in a low cost hardware. The prototype system was tested using the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) that achieved an average speed of 6 ms for processing a single 1024x1024 pixels mammography image. Initial results shows feasibility of using cognitive cells for suspicious breast cancer mass detection in mammograms with superior performances in speed in comparison to other standard methods. We report specificity of 95.25% and the cancer false positives per image as 2.275 for MISC, ASYM, CIRC and SPIC cases, while a relatively lower specificity of 70% and the false positives per image as 2.25 is reported for CALC and ARCH cases of abnormalities.

A novel low-side structure based on the optimum variation lateral doping (OPTVLD) technique, which is formed by many inner VDMOS cells combining an outermost LDMOS, is realized in the 0.8μm BiCMOS-compatible technology. With the benefit of the additional vertical cells, it presents a low specific on-resistance with high breakdown voltage, which significantly advances the prior art. Furthermore, since this low-side structure is capable of being integrated with high-side structure and circuits on a single chip, through the low-cost self-isolation (SI) technology, it is very attractive for fabricating the smart power IC (SPIC) better and cheaper.

Purpose Effects of viewing time on the recognition of red/green and blue/green pseudoisochromatic plates were evaluated to improve clinical application. Methods Special pseudoisochromatic “C” or “E” plates (in following referred to as “spic-plates”) allow repeated exams with identical demands on color vision. The study included 5 daltonian subjects with a best corrected visual acuity BCVA of 1.0, 5 diabetic patients with non proliferative diabetic retinopathy NPDR, BCVA 0.8 or better, and 10 normal observers. Under standard illumination and viewing distance, the viewing time was 1 s, 3 s, or unrestricted until the subject had arrived at his or her final estimate. Results Daltonian subjects were unable to recognize the red / green spic-plates during a viewing time of 1 s or 3 s. Under unrestricted observation, 3 of 5 daltonian subjects deciphered the red/ green spic plates. Blue/green spic-plate results in the daltonian subjects matched those of normal observers. 3 of 5 diabetic patients failed in the blue/green spic plate at 1 s, one at 3 s of viewing time. With one exception at 1 s, the diabetic patients passed the red/green spic plates, as normal observers did. Conclusion Besides the angle of observation and the level and spectral composition of illumination, the viewing time has an influnence on the results of color vision testing by pseudoisochromatic plates. In clinical application, viewing time should be considered e.g. following Ishihara’s advice of 3 s Commercial interest

A novel p-type DP-OPTVLD (Double-Paths & OPTimum-Variational-Lateral-Doping) LDMOS is proposed. It features the double hole-conductive paths formed by a top and a buried p-layer in the drift region using OPTVLD technique, which significantly contribute to reducing device specific on-resistance. The design principle and electrical characteristics of the proposed structure are investigated theoretically and experimentally. Simulation results show that the specific on-resistances are 155/689 mΩ·cm2 with breakdown voltages of 300/800 V for the proposed structure, respectively, which are less than 60% of that with corresponding breakdown voltages for the conventional structure. This structure used as high-side can apply to SPIC with a low integration difficulty and a low fabrication cost.

This paper describes a probabilistic sonar Altering technique dealing with sonar cross-talking and multiple reflections. The filtered sonar data is then used to feed the probabilistic scan matching algorithm spIC, which is also described. This scan matching algorithm deals with sonar range and angular errors. Experimental results demonstrate the utility of the combined use of probabilistic filtering and scan matching by evaluating the robustness, accuracy and computational cost. Also, the results obtained with spIC are compared with those provided by well known scan matching algorithms such as ICP and IDC.

A SPIC (Smart Power IC) process with a wide range of devices up to 700 V has been designed and optimized. An important feature is that all the devices have been realized by using a fully implanted triple-well technology in a P-type single crystal without epitaxial layer or buried layer. The results of this process are the low fabrication cost, simple process and small chip area. In addition to high voltage lateral DMOS (HV-LDMOS) transistor with the breakdown voltage (BV) 700 V as well as JFET device and low voltage CMOS (LV-CMOS) transistors have been fabricated using this process, a NPN type bipolar transistor is also realized and optimized by a additional implantation and drive-in. The major features of this process for SPIC fabrication have been clearly demonstrated.

A novel super-junction (SJ) LDMOS (SJ-LDMOS) with partial N-buried layer is proposed which allows high breakdown voltage (BV) and low on-resistance (Ron). The proposed structure overcomes the substrate-assisted-depletion effect thus achieving the charge compensation between the n and p pillars as well as a uniform electric field distribution in the drift region in the off-state. The N-buried layer also provides a low current path in the on-state. In addition, the proposed device is compatible with smart power technology

We describe the design and implementation and discrete validation of a high-voltage BCD-technology based smart power integrated circuit (SPIC) design, which is an "one-chip solution" to control, drive, and protect a two-stage distributed power system (DPS). As such, the proposed SPIC achieves higher power density, reduced design-cycle time, and enhanced system reliability. The DPS comprises a front-end AC-DC single-switch power-factor-correction (PFC) converter, which is cascaded with a back-end DC-DC four-switch full-bridge zero-voltage-switching (FBZVS) converter. The current-and the voltage-mode controllers for the PFC and the FBZVS converters, respectively, are integrated into the SPIC. The SPIC can "directly" fire the 2 high-side and 3 low-side devices in the power system. A combination of bootstrap and charge-pump techniques is used to power the gate-drive circuits for the high-side power devices; hence, the duty cycle for a high-side power device is 100% and independent of the turn-on time of the low-side power device in the same leg of the FBZVS converter. Additionally, a more reliable two-stage fault protection scheme is implemented in the SPIC including protection features such as under-voltage lockout, over-current protection, adaptive shoot-through protection, and soft-start capability. This paper illustrates several key experimental results obtained by controlling the DPS using the discrete SPIC to validate the functionalities of the latter and its satisfactory performance.

An operational amplifier BiCMOS design technique is implemented to improve overall CMOS characteristics. An analysis is performed of the architecture operational amplifier for 1- mu m BiCMOS technology. A comparison between a CMOS and BiCMOS operational amplifier is performed and verified by the circuit-level simulator SPIC. It is shown that in order to improve BiCMOS operational amplifier deficiencies better design techniques and a more complex operational amplifier architecture could be used. >

The novel structure for surface voltage sustaining region makes power (or high-voltage) devices capable of implementation on conventional CMOS or BiCMOS ICs without demanding additional processes. The electrical performances of this kind of power devices are much better than that made by the BCD techniques. Different kinds of devices using both the low-side and high-side can be made.

Among all cancer types, breast cancer is the one with the second highest incidence rate for women. Mammography is the most used method for breast cancer detection, as it reveals abnormalities such as masses, calcifications, asymmetries and architectural distortions. In this paper, we propose a classification method for breast cancer that has been tested for six different cancer types: CALC, CIRC, SPIC, MISC, ARCH, ASYM. The proposed approach is composed of a SVM classifier trained with LBP features. The MIAS image database was used in the experiments and ROC curves were generated. To the best of our knowledge, our approach is the first to handle those six different cancer types using the same technique. One important result of the proposed approach is that it was tested over six different breast cancer types proving to be generic enough to obtain high classification results in all cases.