Dielectrically Modulated III-V Compound Semiconductor Based Pocket Doped Tunnel FET for Label Free Biosensing Applications.

In this paper, a novel structure of double gate tunnel FET has been proposed and simulated for biosensing applications. The device uses III-V compound semiconductors and an n+ doped pocket at the source channel junction. Biomolecules of different dielectric constants (K) with different charge densities (Nbio), both negative and positive, are inserted in the nano-gap cavities (15 nm ×1.5 nm) that have been created under gates near source channel junction to capture biomolecules. From extensive 2D simulations, ION sensitivity of 4.351 ×108/1.03 ×108/1.514 ×109 , subthreshold swing sensitivity of 15.67/20.21/18.57 mV/dec, and threshold voltage sensitivity of 18/12/23 mV for neutral (K = 12)/negatively charged biomolecules ( [Formula: see text] C/cm2, K = 12)/positively charged biomolecules ( [Formula: see text] C/cm2, K = 12) respectively has been observed. Also, transconductance sensitivity of 9.74 ×107 and ION/IOFF sensitivity of 5.255 ×108 for neutral biomolecules (K = 12) has been calculated. Furthermore, the device performance with one-third filled cavities, two-third filled cavities and fully filled cavities has also been studied. The performance of the proposed biosensor has been compared with the previously published work and it has been observed that the sensitivity of the proposed biosensor is 100 times better than the best reported biosensor.

L-Shaped High Performance Schottky Barrier FET as Dielectrically Modulated Label Free Biosensor.

In this work, we demonstrate the realization of L-Shaped Schottky Barrier FET as a biosensing device with improved sensitivity. The proposed device uses dual material gate with work functions of 4.2 eV (Al) and 4.8 eV (Cu) and Hafnium Oxide (HfO2) as the gate dielectric. In order to detect the biomolecule, a nano-gap cavity is created in the vertical gate (Gate1) by etching out the oxide. The electrical characteristics of biomolecules such as dielectric constant and charge density modulate the Schottky Barrier width, which in turn, changes the drive current of the device. Various sensitivity parameters have been thoroughly investigated at [Formula: see text] and a comparative analysis with the conventional device has been performed. The results so obtained reveal that [Formula: see text] sensitivity of the proposed device is much better for both neutral as well as charged biomolecules (maximum of 21x for neutral, at K = 12; 20x for charged biomolecules at ρ = -5×10 10cm-2, at K = 12). Besides this, the [Formula: see text] sensitivity, transconductance ( [Formula: see text]) sensitivity and selectivity show similar improvements. Further, the proposed device shows better sensitivity performance at low as well as at higher temperatures as compared to the state-of-the-art biosensing devices.

A Fair Contention Access Scheme for Low-Priority Traffic in Wireless Body Area Networks.

Recently, wireless body area networks (WBANs) have attracted significant consideration in ubiquitous healthcare. A number of medium access control (MAC) protocols, primarily derived from the superframe structure of the IEEE 802.15.4, have been proposed in literature. These MAC protocols aim to provide quality of service (QoS) by prioritizing different traffic types in WBANs. A contention access period (CAP)with high contention in priority-based MAC protocols can result in higher number of collisions and retransmissions. During CAP, traffic classes with higher priority are dominant over low-priority traffic; this has led to starvation of low-priority traffic, thus adversely affecting WBAN throughput, delay, and energy consumption. Hence, this paper proposes a traffic-adaptive priority-based superframe structure that is able to reduce contention in the CAP period, and provides a fair chance for low-priority traffic. Simulation results in ns-3 demonstrate that the proposed MAC protocol, called traffic- adaptive priority-based MAC (TAP-MAC), achieves low energy consumption, high throughput, and low latency compared to the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, and the most recent priority-based MAC protocol, called priority-based MAC protocol (PA-MAC).

Overview of management of acute renal failure and its evaluation; a case analysis.

The annual incidence is about 150 per million in the UK, but this figure is six times greater in the >80 years old group. Prerenal azotemia is considered as the most serious reason in community or hospital acquired acute renal failure (ARF). A 67-year-old middle age male was admitted to the hospital with a chief complaint of generalized weakness, volume depletion and dysuria. He has treated with metronidazole for diarrhoea caused by Clostridium difficile considered as the precipitating factor for the ARF. The patient has severe osteoarthritis and takes high dose non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs from the last two years. He also complains for obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and obesity. He has controlled hypertension was on lisinopril to control blood pressure. ARF is quite common, occurring in 80 million populations. Urinary obstruction should be excluded (a cause in around 5-10 of cases) because this is readily reversible if it is diagnosed early. A renal US will be sufficient to identify obstruction in 95 of cases. Most cases of ARF are expected to pre renal failure/acute tubular necrosis (ATN) 70-80%. Risk factor for development for at ATN are old age, drugs (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, gentamicin), sepsis, and chronic kidney disease and must be considered.

Does frequent hemodialysis regimen results in regression of left ventricular mass compared to conventional hemodialysis?

Several advances in dialysis therapies have been made. Still, the mortality in end-stage renal disease (ESRD) remains high at rates exceeding 15%. Cardiovascular disease from heart failure or sudden death remains an important cause for mortality in these groups. The most common cardiac anomaly in ESRD is cardiac hypertrophy and this has been observed in 75% of patients at the time of starting dialysis. Also, in patients on conventional hemodialysis (CHD) (4 hours, 3 times per week), left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH) is an independent risk factor for mortality, arrhythmias, heart failure and myocardial ischemia. Stroke work index and left ventricular mass (LVM) are closely associated, in ESRD.

Unusual oropharyngeal foreign body.

We present an unusual case of foreign body (sewing needle) in a young man, who swallowed it with bolus of food. It penetrated through soft palate into parapharyngeal space, detected with image intensifier and removed successfully. Postoperative course remained uneventful.

Object trajectory-based activity classification and recognition using hidden Markov models.

Motion trajectories provide rich spatiotemporal information about an object's activity. This paper presents novel classification algorithms for recognizing object activity using object motion trajectory. In the proposed classification system, trajectories are segmented at points of change in curvature, and the subtrajectories are represented by their principal component analysis (PCA) coefficients. We first present a framework to robustly estimate the multivariate probability density function based on PCA coefficients of the subtrajectories using Gaussian mixture models (GMMs). We show that GMM-based modeling alone cannot capture the temporal relations and ordering between underlying entities. To address this issue, we use hidden Markov models (HMMs) with a data-driven design in terms of number of states and topology (e.g., left-right versus ergodic). Experiments using a database of over 5700 complex trajectories (obtained from UCI-KDD data archives and Columbia University Multimedia Group) subdivided into 85 different classes demonstrate the superiority of our proposed HMM-based scheme using PCA coefficients of subtrajectories in comparison with other techniques in the literature.