Background: 15% of oocytes collected in ART cycles are immature. These oocytes may be matured following IVM program. It is possible to cryopreserve the immature oocytes for further use in ART after application of IVM. The aim was to determine the maturation rate, morphology and viability of human immature oocytes after fresh IVM and vitrified-IVM program. Materials and Methods: 63 women who und...

Background: Cryopreservation of ovaries is an important technique in assisted reproduction technology. Physical forces like hydrostatic pressure have a pivotal role in reproduction systems. Due to changes in intrafollicular pressure during ovulatory process, this study designed to examine the effects of hydrostatic pressure on oocyte maturation and cell death in cumulus cells from cryopreserved...

LUCIA, a new Italian talking head based on a modified version of the Cohen-Massaro’s labial coarticulation model is described. A semi-automatic minimization technique, working on real cinematic data, acquired by the ELITE optoelectronic system, was used to train the dynamic characteristics of the model. LUCIA is an MPEG-4 standard facial animation system working on standard FAP visual parameter...

We present the first fair e-cash system with a compact wallet that enables users to spend efficiently k coins while only sending to the merchant O(λ log k) bits, where λ is a security parameter. The best previously known schemes require to transmit data of size at least linear in the number of spent coins. This result is achieved thanks to a new way to use the Batch RSA technique and a tree-bas...

We consider the problem of estimating the length of a shortest path in a DAG whose edge lengths are known only approximately but can be determined exactly at a cost. Initially, each edge e is known only to lie within an interval [le; he]; the estimation algorithm can pay ce to nd the exact length of e. In particular, we study the problem of nding the cheapest set of edges such that, if exactly ...

At Crypto 2013, Coron, Lepoint, and Tibouchi (CLT) proposed a practical Graded Encoding Scheme (GES) over the integers, which has very similar cryptographic features to ideal multilinear maps. In fact, the scheme of Coron et al. is the second proposal of a secure GES, and has advantages over the first scheme of Garg, Gentry, and Halevi (GGH). For example, unlike the GGH construction, the subgro...

We construct the first constant-size hierarchical identity-based signature (HIBS) without random oracles the signature size is O(λs) bits, where λs is the security parameter, and it is independent of the number of levels in the hierarchy. We observe that an efficient hierarchical identity-based signcryption (HIBSC) scheme without random oracles can be compositioned from our HIBS and Boneh, Boye...

The ordering of messages according to a given time measure is a largely discussed topic. Nevertheless, wireless or wired systems considering the order of messages do not use the access layer to accomplish this task. In this paper, we discuss the use of non-destructive bit-wise arbitration on the MAC layer for real-time message ordering in wireless sensor networks. With this access method, it is...