Impacts of Residual Self-Interference, Hardware Impairment and Cascade Rayleigh Fading on the Performance of Full-Duplex Vehicle-to-Vehicle Relay Systems.

In practice, self-interference (SI) in full-duplex (FD) wireless communication systems cannot be completely eliminated due to imperfections in different factors, such as the SI channel estimation and hardware circuits. Therefore, residual SI (RSI) always exists in FD systems. In addition, hardware impairments (HIs) cannot be avoided in FD systems due to the non-ideal characteristics of electronic components. These issues motivate us to consider an FD-HI system with a decode-and-forward (DF) relay that is applied for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. Unlike previous works, the performance of the proposed FD-HI-V2V system is evaluated over cascaded Rayleigh fading channels (CRFCs). We mathematically obtain the exact closed-form expressions of the outage probability (OP), system throughput (ST), and ergodic capacity (EC) of the proposed FD-HI-V2V system under the joint and crossed effects of the RSI, HIs, and CRFCs. We validate all derived expressions via Monte-Carlo simulations. Based on these expressions, the OP, ST, and EC of the proposed FD-HI-V2V system are investigated and compared with other related systems, such as ideal hardware (ID) and half-duplex (HD) systems, as well as a system over traditional Rayleigh fading channels (RFCs), to clearly show the impacts of negative factors.

Development of the clinical assessment scale in autoimmune encephalitis.

OBJECTIVE: There is no scale for rating the severity of autoimmune encephalitis (AE). In this study, we aimed to develop a novel scale for rating severity in patients with diverse AE syndromes and to verify the reliability and validity of the developed scale. METHODS: The key items were generated by a panel of experts and selected according to content validity ratios. The developed scale was initially applied to 50 patients with AE (development cohort) to evaluate its acceptability, reproducibility, internal consistency, and construct validity. Then, the scale was applied to another independent cohort (validation cohort, n = 38). RESULTS: A new scale consisting of 9 items (seizure, memory dysfunction, psychiatric symptoms, consciousness, language problems, dyskinesia/dystonia, gait instability and ataxia, brainstem dysfunction, and weakness) was developed. Each item was assigned a value of up to 3 points. The total score could therefore range from 0 to 27. We named the scale the Clinical Assessment Scale in Autoimmune Encephalitis (CASE). The new scale showed excellent interobserver (intraclass correlation coefficient [ICC] = 0.97) and intraobserver (ICC = 0.96) reliability for total scores, was highly correlated with modified Rankin scale (r = 0.86, p < 0.001), and had acceptable internal consistency (Cronbach α = 0.88). Additionally, in the validation cohort, the scale showed high interobserver reliability (ICC = 0.99) and internal consistency (Cronbach α = 0.92). INTERPRETATION: CASE is a novel clinical scale for AE with a high level of clinimetric properties. It would be suitable for application in clinical practice and might help overcome the limitations of current outcome scales for AE. ANN NEUROL 2019;85:352-358.