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Skillful rate-control inside motion estimation (ME) plays a crucial part in real-time mobile video coding because the available transmission bandwidth in mobile video coding applications within handhold devices is time-varying instead of fixed in the video coding standard H.264/AVC or H.265/high efficiency video coding (HEVC). Rate control consists of coding bit allocation and quantization parameter selection, which are difficult to implement in hardware. To overcome this issue, this paper achieves an ME rate control design on the basis of the improved machine learning (ML) scheme, and the auxiliary experimental outcomes reveal the coding effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method.

In this paper, a speed and power-efficient set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) design is introduced for one-dimensional (1-D) wavelet-based electrocardiography (ECG) compression systems with quality guarantee. To achieve real-time and low-power design objectives toward wearable quality-on-demand (QoD) ECG applications, we first propose a coding-time- and computation-efficient SPIHT algorithm using various types of coding status register files to overcome the disadvantages of low coding speeds and complicated hardware architectures characterizing prior SPIHT algorithms resulting from the necessity of dynamic computation and arrangement in the sorting and refinement processing phase. Second, a highly pipelined and power-efficient very large scale integration (VLSI) architecture is developed to implement a high-performance and low-power SPIHT design based on the proposed algorithm. The final simulation results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm can speed up the average coding time 1.52 to 2.74 times compared to prior work with an identical compression ratio for an 11-level $1024\times 1\,1-{\rm{D}}$ discrete wavelet transform at diverse target percentage root-mean-square differences (PRDT) on various MIT-BIH arrhythmia datasets. Applied to wearable wavelet-based QoD ECG applications, our proposed VLSI architecture attains a working frequency of 740 MHz and consumes an average of $\text{23}\ \mu {\text{W}}$ of power with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company 90-nm CMOS technology, which shows the effectiveness of speed and power over the state-of-the-art designs.

High-efficiency video coding (HEVC) is the emerging video coding standard, which provides a coding bit-rate reduction of up to 50% compared to the previous-generation video compression standard, H.264/AVC. A wide variety of video coding applications are applied in mobile devices; they suffer from the limited time-amending transmission bandwidth during data transmission. We present a low-hardware-complexity HEVC ME design that is not only aware of transmission bandwidth changes but capable of acceptable coding performance. In comparison with the HEVC test model (HM-16.6), the introduced HEVC ME scheme with rate-control capability can be realized in VLSI.

Solid-state disks (SSD) are widely used storage devices in current consumer electronics. However, the enhancement of SSD data retention and reliability given the high read/write activity are critical research topics. Many error correction codes (ECC) have been developed in the literature to solve the aforementioned issues by embedding ECC design in flash memory. Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghen (BCH) code is the most widely adopted ECC design owing to its error-correcting capability and hardware complexity. In this paper, we propose a hardware-efficient BCH coder that directly codes the input message without extra operations in the generation polynomial term. Compared with state-of-the-art designs, the proposed BCH coding design can save logic gate use and minimize the critical path delay with a 90-nm CMOS process.

Motion estimation (ME) is the most computation- and power-demanding module of portable video coding owing to the numerous calculations of rate–distortion (R-D) optimization operation and a large number of frame memory access. Nevertheless, how to minimize the power consumption of this component is the main research topic with regard to the H.264/AVC video coding standard. More severe problems arose in the latest video coding standard, called high-efficiency video coding (HEVC) because of the more R-D calculations and frame data access owing to utilization of larger block sizes and numerous block partitions for better coding bit-rate reduction than H.264/AVC. Accordingly, in this paper, we introduce a bandwidth-adjustable ME design, which is capability of not only awareness of bus bandwidth change but lower memory access times. Compared with the HEVC test model (HM-16.6), the proposed algorithm can save memory access under the common test conditions with negligible rate-distortion degradation.

A cationic liposome-PEG-PEI complex (LPPC) was used as a carrier for the encapsulation of hydrophobic curcumin to give curcumin/LPPC. Curcumin/LPPC had an average size less than 270 nm and a zeta potential of approximately 40 mV. The LPPC encapsulation efficiency for curcumin was about 45%. The authors found it surprising that the cytotoxic activity of the curcumin/LPPC was fivefold higher than curcumin when tested on curcumin-sensitive cells and 20-fold more active against curcumin-resistant cells. Curcumin/LPPC treatment caused a cell cycle arrest at G2/M phase, which rapidly resulted in apoptosis. The increased cytotoxic activity of curcumin/LPPC is likely attributable to its rapid accumulation in the cell. In vivo, administration of curcumin/LPPC inhibited about 60 - 90% of tumor growth in mice bearing CT-26 or B16F10 cells. These results demonstrate LPPC encapsulation technology is able to enhance the effects of antitumor drugs. Use of this technology may provide a new tool for cancer therapy, especially for drug-resistant cancer. From the Clinical Editor: This team of investigators used a cationic liposome-PEG-PEI complex (LPPC) to encapsulate curcumin. The different delivery method resulted in the five-fold increase of cytotoxic activity against curcumin-sensitive cells and twenty-fold against curcumin-resistant cells.

In this paper, a novel motion estimation (ME) scheme with efficient memory design is presented for the mobile multimedia applications in H.264/AVC. To obtain the optimal memory usage and achieve better coding quality under volatile system operating conditions, we propose a novel bandwidth-rate-distortion (B-R-D) algorithm by exploring the motion activity properties of various video sequences. This scheme allocates the optimized data bandwidth into the corresponding coded block in a rate distortion sense using the convex optimization approach. The experimental results indicate that our proposed B-R-D ME algorithm can achieve up to 71% bandwidth savings for CIF-size video.

This paper addresses the memory bandwidth problem of motion estimation in resource limited mobile video applications by an integrated bandwidth rate distortion optimization framework. The simulation result shows up to 86% bandwidth saving while keeps equivalent rate-distortion (R-D) performance and meets real time target compared with H.264 reference software for low motion CIF size video. For high motion sequence, the result shows our algorithm could better allocate the available bandwidth for high motion macroblock without violating the real time constraint when search range is set to ±16.

NF-κB regulates several important expressions, such as cytokine release, anti-apoptosis, adhesion molecule expression, and cell cycle processing. Several NF-κB inhibitors have been discovered as an anti-tumor or anti-inflammatory drug. The activity of NF-κB transcription factor is negatively regulated by IκB binding. In this study, IκB assay system was established and IκB–EGFP fusion protein was used as an indicator to monitor the effects of substances on the IκB degradation. The results indicated that the chosen hydroquinone could inhibit the IκB degradation and cause the cell de-attachment from the bottom of culture plate. In addition, this system could also monitor the IκB degradation of microbial metabolite of natural mixtures of propolis. Thus, the IκB assay system may be a good system for drug discovery related to microbial metabolite.