Micro-payment systems are becoming an important part of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. The main reason is to address the “free-rider” problem in most existing content sharing systems. To address this issue we have developed a new micro-payment system for content sharing in P2P networks called P2P-Netpay. This is an offline, debit based protocol that provides a secure, flexible, usable and reliabl...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE CT-guided biopsy is the most commonly used method to obtain tissue for diagnosis in suspected cases of malignancy involving the spine. The purpose of this study was to demonstrate that a low-dose CT-guided spine biopsy protocol is as effective in tissue sampling as a regular-dose protocol, without adversely affecting procedural time or complication rates. MATERIALS AND ...

ion into micro protocols reduces the complexity of a protocol. It inherently provides structuring and enables understanding, easing network experimentation and engineering. Furthermore, encapsulation enables a dynamic instantiation of 100 4. Protocol Factory components, resulting in adaptive protocol stacks. This allows ProFab to create and exchange component instances dynamically at runtime ba...

Due to frequent handoff, Mobile IP has been confronted with some limitations. Cellular IP, one of micro-mobility protocols, was proposed to overcome these limitations and to provide good handoff performance. However, some drawbacks of Cellular IP like packet loss have been addressed. We propose an enhanced semi-soft handoff protocol based on a node’s decision to cope with these drawbacks. With ...

AIM To assess the diagnostic accuracy and radiation dose of split-bolus multidetector-row computed tomography (MDCT) protocol in the detection and characterization of focal liver lesions in oncologic patients. PATIENTS AND METHODS We retrospectively analyzed triphasic CT at initial diagnosis and follow-up split-bolus 64-detector row CT protocol in 48 oncologic patients with focal liver lesion...

Phase sensitive x-ray imaging expands the applicability of standard attenuation based techniques by offering several orders of magnitude of increase in sensitivity. Due to the short wavelength, x-ray phase is not directly measurable, but has to be put in evidence by the use of phase contrast techniques. The phase can then be reconstructed from one or several phase contrast images. In this study...

Aims In preclinical setting, micro-CT is used to provide anatomical information of small animals (e.g. mice), and can be used in conjunction with functional imaging modalities, which provide information on biological processes in tissues. The combination of micro-CT with functional imaging provides localization of the investigated process, i.e. physiology or disease, within the animal and furth...

In this paper, a distributed coordination scheme with local interactions is studied for multiple vehicle systems. We introduce a second-order consensus protocol and derive necessary and/or sufficient conditions under which consensus can be reached in the context of uni-directional interaction topologies. The consensus protocol is then applied to achieve altitude alignment among a team of micro ...

The anterior nares are a primary ecologic niche for Staphylococcus aureus, and nasal colonization by this opportunistic pathogen increases the risk of development of S. aureus infection. Clearance of S. aureus nasal colonization greatly reduces this risk. Mupirocin ointment is the current standard of care for clearance of S. aureus nasal colonization, but resistance to this antibiotic is emergi...