Abstract Background The present study was carried out to evaluate the characteristics of solitary pulmonary nodule (SPN) in patients with previous cancer(s) and to analyse the outcome of its surgical ...treatment. Methods We retrospectively analysed 131 patients with history of previous malignancy submitted to lung surgery for new identified SPN between January 2004 and December 2009. Results The diagnosis was metastasis in 65 patients, primary lung cancer in 57, benign lesion in 9. Primary lung cancers were significantly larger, had higher maxSUV at CT-PET scanning, occurred after a longer disease-free interval in patients older and with worse lung function when compared with metastatic lesions. Overall survival at 5-year was 67% for benign lesions, 62% for primary lung cancer, 48% for metastatic disease. Histological subtype, SPN diameter less than 2 cm and DFI >36 months were factors influencing long-term prognosis of metastatic patients. Histological subtype and pathological staging were factors influencing long-term outcome of primary lung cancer patients. Discussion Surgical resection of solitary pulmonary nodule is essential in patients with history of previous cancer to rule out benign lesions, to offer diagnostic confirmation and local control of the disease in metastatic tumours and to correctly stage and treat primary lung cancer.
The concept of energy-efficient networking has begun to spread in the past few years, gaining increasing popularity. Besides the widespread sensitivity to ecological issues, such interest also stems ...from economic needs, since both energy costs and electrical requirements of telcos' and Internet Service Providers' infrastructures around the world show a continuously growing trend. In this respect, a common opinion among networking researchers is that the sole introduction of low consumption silicon technologies may not be enough to effectively curb energy requirements. Thus, for disruptively boosting the network energy efficiency, these hardware enhancements must be integrated with ad-hoc mechanisms that explicitly manage energy saving, by exploiting network-specific features. This paper aims at providing a twofold contribution to green networking. At first, we explore current perspectives in power consumption for next generation networks. Secondly, we provide a detailed survey on emerging technologies, projects, and work-in-progress standards, which can be adopted in networks and related infrastructures in order to reduce their carbon footprint. The considered approaches range from energy saving techniques for networked hosts, to technologies and mechanisms for designing next-generation and energy-aware networks and networking equipment.
An increasing number of applications require some form of guarantees from the network, in terms of bandwidth or access and transfer delay. This demand for quality of service can be met by means of ...different mechanisms, depending on the networks being traversed, as well as the degree of integration of the services with the communication infrastructure. Whereas end-to-end QoS provision is still an open problem, several possibilities now exist in local environments. The article investigates the capabilities offered by a P2P overlay for distributed bandwidth management in a controlled ad hoc deployment, to support specific requirements in service-oriented wireless networks. The mechanism proposed allows complementing the core functionalities of the IEEE 802.11e protocol, and enhancing them to handle local mobility and dynamic requests for bandwidth. The performance evaluation is provided in an emulated environment to show the effectiveness of the presented approach.
This book, Remote Instrumentation Services on the eInfrastructure, focuses on all aspects related to the effective exploitation of remote instrumentation and to the building of complex virtual ...laboratories on top of real devices and infrastructures.
Patients with locally advanced non-small cell lung cancer infiltrating the left atrium (LA) or the intrapericardial base of the pulmonary veins (PVs) are generally not considered good candidates for ...surgery because of the poor long-term survival. In the last 10 years, 31 consecutive patients with non-small cell lung cancer directly invading the LA or the intrapericardial base of the PVs underwent surgery. Pneumonectomy was the operation performed most frequently. In-hospital mortality was 9.7% and overall morbidity was 52%. One-, 2- and 3-year survival rates were 64, 46 and 30%, respectively with a mean survival of 22 months. The systemic recurrence of disease was the major cause of death at follow-up. At statistical analyses, the N-factor and the type of operation were related to poor long-term survival. In these patients, surgery could be performed with an acceptable operative mortality and morbidity. Surgery should be considered whenever a complete resection is technically possible. A careful preoperative evaluation is mandatory to select good candidates for surgery.
Accessing remote instrumentation worldwide is one of the goals of e-Science. The task of enabling the execution of complex experiments that involve the use of distributed scientific instruments must ...be supported by a number of different architectural domains, which inter-work in a coordinated fashion to provide the necessary functionality. These domains embrace the physical instruments, the communication network interconnecting the distributed systems, the service oriented abstractions and their middleware. The Grid paradigm (or, more generally, the Service Oriented Architecture -- SOA), viewed as a tool for the integration of distributed resources, plays a significant role, not only to manage computational aspects, but increasingly as an aggregator of measurement instrumentation and pervasive large-scale data acquisition platforms. In this context, the functionality of a SOA allows managing, maintaining and exploiting heterogeneous instrumentation and acquisition devices in a unified way, by providing standardized interfaces and common working environments to their users, but the peculiar aspects of dealing with real instruments of widely different categories may add new functional requirements to this scenario. On the other hand, the growing transport capacity of core and access networks allows data transfer at unprecedented speed, but new challenges arise from wireless access, wireless sensor networks, and the traversal of heterogeneous network domains. The book focuses on all aspects related to the effective exploitation of remote instrumentation and to the building complex virtual laboratories on top of real devices and infrastructures. These include SOA and related middleware, high-speed networking in support of Grid applications, wireless Grids for acquisition devices and sensor networks, Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning for real-time control, measurement instrumentation and methodology, as well as metrology issues in distributed systems. TOC:Open Grid Forum Research Group: Remote Instrumentation Services in Grid Environment-Overview of Activities.- Adapting the Instrument Element to Support a Remote Instrumentation Infrastructure.- Performance Analysis of a Grid-Based Instrumentation Device Farm.- Experimental Characterization of Wireless and Wired Access in Distributed Laboratories.- Virtual Laboratory and its Application in Genomics.- The European Grid Initiative.- Virtual Appliances: A Way to Provide Automatic Service Deployment.- Job Scheduling in Hierarchical Desktop Grids.- From Grid Islands to a World Wide Grid.- The Anatomy of Grid Resource Management.- SZTAKI Desktop Grid: Adapting Clusters for Desktop Grids.- SoRT Grid: A Grid Framework Compliant with Soft Real Time Requirements.- A Data Grid Architecture for Real-Time Electron Microscopy Applications.- A Network-Aware Grid for Efficient Parallel Monte Carlo Simulation of Coagulation Phenomena.- Practical Mechanisms for Managing Parallel and Interactive Jobs on Grid Environments.- Int.eu.grid.- Interactivitiy in Grid Computing in the Presence of Web Services.- Fusion Simulations, Data Visualization Results and Future Requirements.- Interactive Grid-Access Using Matlab.- Collaborative Interactivity in Parallel HPC Applications.- Interactive and Real-Time Applications on the EGEE Grid Infrastructure.- g-Eclipse.- Semantics-Based Context-Aware Dynamic Service Composition.- Distributed e-Science Application for Computational Speech Science.- SynchroNet.- Discovery of Resources in a Distributed Grid Environment Based on Specific Service Level Agreements (SLAs).- Inter-Domain SLA Enforcement in QoS-Enabled Networks.- High Bandwidth Data Acquisition and Network Streaming in VLBI.- Real-time Software Correlation.- AugerAccess.- Challenges and Design Issues in a Distributed Measurement Scenario.- The Distributed Measurement Systems.- Recent Progresses of the Remote Didactic Laboratory LA.DI.RE "G. Savastano" Project.- A Software Architecture for the m-Learning in Instrumentation and Measurement.- Performance of Linear Field Representation Techniques with Noise and Correlated Field Spectrum.- Hybrid Zigbee-RFID Networks for Energy Saving and Lifetime Maximization.- A Service Oriented Wireless Sensor Network for Power Metering.- Performance Evaluation of a Robust Data Aggregation Approach in Diverse Sensor Networking Environments.- Index.
The paper focuses on the assignment of a common bandwidth resource to TCP connections over a satellite channel. The connections are grouped according to their source-destination pairs, which ...correspond to the up- and down-link channels traversed, and each group may experience different fading conditions. By exploiting the tradeoff between bandwidth and channel redundancy (as determined by bit and coding rates) in the maximization of TCP goodput, an overall optimization problem is constructed, which can be solved by numerical techniques. Different relations between goodput maximization and fairness of the allocations are investigated, and a possible pricing scheme is proposed. The allocation strategies are tested and compared in a fading environment, first under static conditions, and then in a real dynamic scenario. The goodput-fairness optimization allows significant gains over bandwidth allocations only aimed at keeping the channel bit error rate below a given threshold in all fading conditions
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