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International audience; Until recently, Internet of Things applications were mainly seen as a means to gather sensor data for further processing in the Cloud. Nowadays, with the advent of Edge and Fog Computing, digital services are dragged closer to the physical world, with data processing and storage tasks distributed across the whole Cloud-to-Thing continuum. Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) is gaining momentum as one of the promising programming models for such digital services. This work investigates the current research landscape of applying FaaS over the Cloud-to-Thing continuum. In particular, we investigate the support offered by existing FaaS platforms for the deployment, placement, orchestration, and execution of functions across the whole continuum using the Systematic Mapping Study methodology. We selected 33 primary studies and analyzed their data, bringing a broad view on the current research landscape in the area.

Introduction Recurrent event rates after myocardial infarction (MI) remain unacceptably high, in part because of the continued growth and destabilization of residual coronary atherosclerotic plaques, which may occur despite lipid-lowering therapy. Inflammation is an important contributor to this ongoing risk. Recent studies have shown that the broad-acting anti-inflammatory agent, colchicine, may reduce adverse cardiovascular events in patients post-MI, although the mechanistic basis for this remains unclear. Advances in endovascular arterial wall imaging have allowed detailed characterization of the burden and compositional phenotype of coronary plaque, along with its natural history and responsiveness to treatment. One such example has been the use of optical coherence tomography (OCT) to demonstrate the plaque-stabilizing effects of statins on both fibrous cap thickness and the size of lipid pools within plaque. Methods The Phase 2, multi-centre, double-blind colchicine for coronary plaque modification in acute coronary syndrome (COCOMO-ACS) study will evaluate the effect of colchicine 0.5 mg daily on coronary plaque features using serial OCT imaging in patients following MI. Recruitment for the trial has been completed with 64 participants with non-ST elevation MI randomized 1:1 to colchicine or placebo in addition to guideline recommended therapies, including high-intensity statins. The primary endpoint is the effect of colchicine on the minimal fibrous cap thickness of non-culprit plaque over an 18-month period. Summary The COCOMO-ACS study will determine whether addition of colchicine 0.5 mg daily to standard post-MI treatment has incremental benefits on high-risk features of coronary artery plaques. If confirmed, this will provide new mechanistic insights into how colchicine may confer clinical benefits in patients with atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. Trial Registration ANZCTR trial registration number: ACTRN12618000809235. Date of trial registration: 11th of May 2018.

To enable and support smart environments, a recent ICT trend promotes pushing computation from the remote Cloud as close to data sources as possible, resulting in the emergence of the Fog and Edge computing paradigms. Together with Cloud computing, they represent a stacked architecture, in which raw datasets are first pre-processed locally at the Edge and then vertically offloaded to the Fog and/or the Cloud. However, as hardware is becoming increasingly powerful, Edge devices are seen as candidates for offering data processing capabilities, able to pool and share computing resources to achieve better performance at a lower network latency—a pattern that can be also applied to Fog nodes. In these circumstances, it is important to enable efficient, intelligent, and balanced allocation of resources, as well as their further orchestration, in an elastic and transparent manner. To address such a requirement, this article proposes an OpenStack-based middleware platform through which resource containers at the Edge, Fog, and Cloud levels can be discovered, combined, and provisioned to end users and applications, thereby facilitating and orchestrating offloading processes. As demonstrated through a proof of concept on an intelligent surveillance system, by converging the Edge, Fog, and Cloud, the proposed architecture has the potential to enable faster data processing, as compared to processing at the Edge, Fog, or Cloud levels separately. This also allows architects to combine different offloading patterns in a flexible and fine-grained manner, thus providing new workload engineering patterns. Measurements demonstrated the effectiveness of such patterns, even outperforming edge clusters.

Edge computing brings software in close proximity to end users and IoT devices. Given the increasing number of distributed Edge devices with various contexts, as well as the widely adopted continuous delivery practices, software developers need to maintain multiple application versions and frequently (re-)deploy them to a fleet of many devices with respect to their contexts. Doing this correctly and efficiently goes beyond manual capabilities and requires employing an intelligent and reliable automated approach. Accordingly this paper describes a joint research with a Smart Healthcare application provider on a model-based approach to automatically assigning multiple software deployments to hundreds of Edge gateways. From a Platform-Specific Model obtained from the existing Edge computing platform, we extract a Platform-Independent Model that describes a list of target devices and a pool of available deployments. Next, we use constraint solving to automatically assign deployments to devices at once, given their specific contexts. The resulting solution is transformed back to the PSM as to proceed with software deployment accordingly. We validate the approach with a Fleet Deployment prototype integrated into the DevOps toolchain currently used by the application provider. Initial experiments demonstrate the viability of the approach and its usefulness in supporting DevOps in Edge computing applications.

We aimed to investigate the procedural and long-term outcomes of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) for chronic total occlusion (CTO) in patients who had undergone previous coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) vs those who had not, and to evaluate the role of the Registry of CrossBoss and Hybrid procedures in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and United Kingdom (RECHARGE) score in predicting acute and long-term outcomes.We compiled a multicentre registry of consecutive patients undergoing CTO PCI at 7 centres between January 2009 and April 2017. The primary end point was target-vessel failure (TVF), a composite of cardiac death, target-vessel myocardial infarction, and target-vessel revascularization on follow-up.Overall, 2058 patients were included (patients who underwent CABG, n = 401; CABG-naïve patients, n = 1657). Patients who had undergone CABG were older and had a higher prevalence of comorbidities and higher occlusion complexity (RECHARGE score, 3.6 ± 1.3 vs 1.8 ± 1.2; P0.001). Antegrade dissection/re-entry techniques and the retrograde approach were used more frequently in patients who had undergone CABG. Procedural metrics were worse, and technical (82% vs 88%; P = 0.001) and procedural (81% vs 87%; P = 0.001) success was lower in patients who had undergone CABG. They also experienced a higher rate of major complications (3.7% vs 1.5%; P = 0.004). The RECHARGE score was inversely associated with technical success (P0.001). Median follow-up was 377 days (interquartile range, 277-766 days). The 24-month TVF rate was higher in patients who had undergone CABG than in CABG-naïve patients (16.1% vs 9.0%; P0.001). On multivariable analysis, the RECHARGE score (hazard ratio, 1.61; P0.001) remained an independent predictor of TVF, together with longer total stent length and not using a drug-eluting stent.Compared with CABG-naïve patients, CTO PCI in patients who had undergone CABG shows higher procedural complexity, worse success rates, and higher adjusted risk of TVF on follow-up.

Data on the impact of coronary chronic total occlusion (CTO) percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) on quality of life (QOL) are limited. To date, studies have been limited in sample size and have focused on only a few domains of the Seattle Angina Questionnaire (SAQ). We evaluated the relationship between coronary CTO PCI and QOL in patients with symptoms of angina, incorporating all aspects of the SAQ.The SAQ was used to interrogate patients at baseline and at 12 months after CTO PCI. The primary end point was improvement in SAQ scores.A total of 184 patients answered the baseline SAQ. One hundred twenty-two patients answered both questionnaires. SAQ responders were more likely to be men, more like to be in stable medical condition, and more likely to have undergone a successful procedure. We observed statistically significant improvement (P 0.0001) in physical limitation (mean difference [MD], +27; 95% confidence interval [CI], +23 to +32), angina stability (MD, +16; 95% CI, +10 to +21), angina frequency (MD, +27; 95% CI, +22 to +32), treatment satisfaction (MD, +10; 95% CI, +6 to +13), and QOL domains (MD, +28; 95% CI, +24 to +32). Patients with coronary artery bypass grafting, dissection re-entry techniques, and high complexity (Japanese CTO [J-CTO] ≥ 3) had a similar degree of improvement when compared with their counterparts.CTO PCI is associated with a significant improvement in QOL at 12 months. Patients with complex CTOs derive benefits similar to those in patients with less complex CTOs.

The entry to the subadventitial space is not a mode of failure, but the road to success in many chronic total occlusion (CTO) percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) cases. Long-term clinical outcomes of subadventitial stenting are favorable and similar to intraluminal stenting. However, the subadventitial space histology and physiology remains different to the coronary true intraluminal space. We report a complication specific to stenting of the subadventitial space, where overlapping stents dislocated from one another, which resulted in late non-occlusive stent thrombosis. We describe, for the first time in the literature, this complication, possible reasons behind, and the ways to avoid this potentially major mischief. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.