We compared plaque characteristics between symptomatic and asymptomatic sides in patients with bilateral carotid vulnerable plaques using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Participants (n = 67; mean age: 65.8 ± 7.7 years, 61 males) with bilateral carotid vulnerable plaques were included. Vulnerable plaques were characterized by intraplaque hemorrhage (IPH), large lipid-rich necrotic core (LRNC), or fibrous cap rupture (FCR) on MRI. Symptomatic vulnerable plaques showed greater plaque burden, LRNC volume (median: 221.4 vs 134.8 mm ³ , P = .003), IPH volume (median: 32.2 vs 22.5 mm ³ , P = .030), maximum percentage (Max%) LRNC (median: 51.3% vs 41.8%, P = .002), Max%IPH (median: 13.4% vs 9.5%, P = .022), cumulative slices of LRNC (median: 10 vs 8, P = .005), and more juxtaluminal IPH and/or thrombus (29.9% vs 6.0%, P = .001) and FCR (37.3% vs 16.4%, P = .007) than asymptomatic ones. After adjusting for plaque burden, differences in juxtaluminal IPH and/or thrombus (odds ratio [OR]: 5.49, 95% CI: 1.61-18.75, P = .007) and FCR (OR: 2.90, 95% CI: 1.16-7.24, P = .022) between bilateral sides remained statistically significant. For patients with bilateral carotid vulnerable plaques, symptomatic plaques had greater burden, more juxtaluminal IPH and/or thrombus, and FCR compared with asymptomatic ones. The differences in juxtaluminal IPH and/or thrombus and FCR between bilateral sides were independent of plaque burden.

Private health information once confined to local medical institutions is migrating onto the Internet as an Electronic Health Record (EHR) that is accessed by cloud computing. No matter where it is hosted, health data is subject to security breaches, privacy abuses, and access control violations. However, novel technologies have new vulnerabilities, and allow new mitigations. In this paper, we propose a watermarking method in the architecture of cloud computing, to mitigate the risks of insider disclosures. Our design and preliminary implementation are accomplished by exploiting the MapReduce mechanism in the cloudlet we built. Our evaluation shows that our proposal addresses all of the requirements of the Cloud Oriented Architecture (COA) framework of the Jericho Forum.

Micromachined gyroscopes require high voltage (HV) for actuation and detection to improve its precision, but the deviation of the HV caused by temperature fluctuations will degrade the sensor’s performance. In this paper, a high-voltage temperature-insensitive charge pump is proposed. Without adopting BCD (bipolar-CMOS-DMOS) technology, the output voltage can be boosted over the breakdown voltage of n-well/substrate diode using triple-well NMOS (n-type metal-oxide-semiconductor) transistors. By controlling the pumping clock’s amplitude continuously, closed-loop regulation is realized to reduce the output voltage’s sensitivity to temperature changes. Besides, the output level is programmable linearly in a large range by changing the reference voltage. The whole circuit has been fabricated in a 0.18- $\mathsf{\mu }$ m standard CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) process with a total area of 2.53 mm ${}^2$ . Measurements indicate that its output voltage has a linear adjustable range from around 13 V to 16.95 V, and temperature tests show that the maximum variations of the output voltage at $-40\sim 80{}^{\circ }\mathrm{C}$ are less than 1.1%.