National University of Defense Technology

About: National University of Defense Technology is a education organization based out in Changsha, China. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Computer science & Radar. The organization has 39430 authors who have published 40181 publications receiving 358979 citations. The organization is also known as: Guófáng Kēxuéjìshù Dàxué & NUDT.

Proposed modifications and incorporation of plasma Epstein-Barr virus DNA improve the TNM staging system for Epstein-Barr virus-related nasopharyngeal carcinoma.

Abstract: BACKGROUND The prognosis of patients who have Epstein-Barr virus (EBV)-related nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) in which the tumor tissues harbor EBV have a better prognosis than those without EBV-related NPC. Therefore, the eighth edition of the TNM staging system could be modified for EBV-related NPC by incorporating the measurement of plasma EBV DNA. METHODS In total, 979 patients with NPC who received intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) were retrospectively reviewed. Recursive partitioning analysis was conducted based on tumor (T) classification, lymph node (N) classification, and EBV DNA measurement to derive objectively the proposed stage groupings. The validity of the proposed stage groupings was confirmed in a prospective cohort of 550 consecutive patients who also received with IMRT. RESULTS The pretreatment plasma EBV DNA level was identified as a significant, negative prognostic factor for progression-free survival and overall survival in univariate analysis (all P 2000 copies/mL; T1-T3N2, EBV DNA ≤2000 copies/mL), stage RIII (T1-T3N2, EBV DNA >2000 copies/mL; T4N0-N2), and stage RIVA (any T and N3). In the validation cohort, the 5-year progression-free survival rate was 100%, 87.9%, 76.7%, 68.7%, and 50.4% for proposed stage RI, RIIA, RIIB, RIII, and RIV NPC, respectively (P < .001). Compared with the eighth edition TNM stage groupings, the proposed stage groupings incorporating EBV DNA provided better hazard consistency, hazard discrimination, outcome prediction, and sample size balance. CONCLUSIONS The proposed stage groupings have better prognostic performance than the eighth edition of the TNM staging system. EBV DNA titers should be included in the TNM staging system to assess patients who have EBV-related NPC.

QoS-Aware Fault-Tolerant Scheduling for Real-Time Tasks on Heterogeneous Clusters

Abstract: Fault-tolerant scheduling plays a significant role in improving system reliability of clusters. Although extensive fault-tolerant scheduling algorithms have been proposed for real-time tasks in parallel and distributed systems, quality of service (QoS) requirements of tasks have not been taken into account. This paper presents a fault-tolerant scheduling algorithm called QAFT that can tolerate one node's permanent failures at one time instant for real-time tasks with QoS needs on heterogeneous clusters. In order to improve system flexibility, reliability, schedulability, and resource utilization, QAFT strives to either advance the start time of primary copies and delay the start time of backup copies in order to help backup copies adopt the passive execution scheme, or to decrease the simultaneous execution time of the primary and backup copies of a task as much as possible to improve resource utilization. QAFT is capable of adaptively adjusting the QoS levels of tasks and the execution schemes of backup copies to attain high system flexibility. Furthermore, we employ the overlapping technology of backup copies. The latest start time of backup copies and their constraints are analyzed and discussed. We conduct extensive experiments to compare our QAFT with two existing schemes-NOQAFT and DYFARS. Experimental results show that QAFT significantly improves the scheduling quality of NOQAFT and DYFARS.

High-contrast light-by-light switching and AND gate based on nonlinear photonic crystals

Abstract: We present a light-by-light photonic crystal configuration consisting of a bent waveguide with three embedded Kerr-type nonlinear rods and a T-branch waveguide. We show that such a configuration can also demonstrate all-optical AND gate operation with extremely high contrast between the OFF state and the ON state in its transmission. The photonic crystal configuration of all-optical light-by-light switching is simple and thus facilitates the fabrication of practical all-optical devices and further large-scale optical integration.