Effects of human limb gestures on galvanic coupling intra-body communication for advanced healthcare system.

BACKGROUND: Intra-Body Communication (IBC), which utilizes the human body as the transmission medium to transmit signal, is a potential communication technique for the physiological data transfer among the sensors of remote healthcare monitoring system, in which the doctors are permitted to remotely access the healthcare data without interrupt to the patients' daily activities. METHODS: This work investigates the effects of human limb gestures including various joint angles, hand gripping force and loading on galvanic coupling IBC channel. The experiment results show that channel gain is significantly influenced by the joint angle (i.e. gain variation 1.09-11.70 dB, p < 0.014). The extension, as well as the appearance of joint in IBC channel increases the channel attenuation. While the other gestures and muscle fatigue have negligible effect (gain variation <0.77 dB, p > 0.793) on IBC channel. Moreover, the change of joint angle on human limb IBC channel causes significant variation in bit error rate (BER) performance. CONCLUSIONS: The results reveal the dynamic behavior of galvanic coupling IBC channel, and provide suggestions for practical IBC system design.

FXR expression is associated with the prognosis and pathological staging of patients with pancreatic cancer / 基础医学与临床

Objective To explore the correlation among farnesoid X receptor (FXR), clinical stage and survival time of patients with pancreatic cancer. Methods The total protein and mRNA were extracted from cultured 8 pan-creatic cancer cell lines,and the expression level of FXR in pancreatic cancer cells was detected by Western bolt and real-time PCR. We collected 5 cases of normal pancreatic tissue and 50 cases of pancreatic cancer tissues,and used immunohistochemistry method to detect FRX expression in normal pancreatic tissue and pancreatic cancer. Ac-cording to the different expression level of FXR,these 50 patients were divided into low expression group and high expression group, the correlation of clinical data and FRX expression level was analyzed. Furthermore, Kaplan-Meier and log-rank analysis of prognostic factors was assessed in a multivariable analysis using a Cox proportional hazards model. Results FXR was differently expressed in 8 pancreatic cancer cell lines and pancreatic cancer tis-sues. FXR was closely related to the pathological G stage of pancreatic cancer(P＜0.05). FXR and pathological G stage were significantly correlated with the patients' survival time. The survival time of the patients with high FXR expression was significantly longer than that of patients with low FXR expression (P＜0.05). Conclusions The expression of FXR is closely related to the pathological G stage in patients with pancreatic cancer. Both FXR expression and pathological G stage are independent prognostic factors in patients with pancreatic cancer.