In this paper, we propose a methodology to make Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) and Boolean Satis... more In this paper, we propose a methodology to make Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) and Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) Solvers cooperate. The underlying idea is simple: We start a verification task with BDDs, we go on with them as long as the problem remains of manageable size, then we switch to SAT, without losing the work done on the BDD domain. We propose target enlargement as an attempt to bring some of the advantages of state set manipulation from BDDs to SAT-based verification. We first, “enlarge” initial and target state sets of a given verification problem by affordable BDD manipulations. This step is carried on with a few breadth-first steps of traversal, or with what we call high-density dynamic abstraction, i.e., a new technique to collect under-approximate reachable state sets. Then, we perform SAT-based verification with the newly computed “enlarged ” sets. We experimentally test our methodology within an industrial environment, the Intel BOolean VErifier BOVE. Preliminary re...
Abstract—Constraints represent a key component of state-of-the-art verification tools based on co... more Abstract—Constraints represent a key component of state-of-the-art verification tools based on compositional approaches and assume–guarantee reasoning. In recent years, most of the research efforts on verification constraints have focused on defining formats and techniques to encode, or to synthesize, constraints starting from the specification of the design. In this paper, we analyze the impact of constraints on the performance of model checking tools, and we discuss how to effectively exploit them. We also introduce an approach to explicitly derive verification constraints hidden in the design and/or in the property under verification. Such constraints may simply come from true design constraints, embedded within the properties, or may be generated in the general effort to reduce or partition the state space. Experimental results show that, in both cases, we can reap benefits for the overall verification process in several hard-to-solve designs, where we obtain speed-ups of more t...
2003 Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference and Exhibition, 2003
Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) have been widely used in synthesis and verification. Boolean Sati... more Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) have been widely used in synthesis and verification. Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) Solvers, on the other hand, have been gaining ground only recently, with the introduction of efficient implementation procedures. Specifically, while BDDs have been mainly adopted to formally verify the correctness of hardware devices, SAT-based Bounded Model Checking (BMC) has been widely used for debugging. In this paper, we combine BDD and SAT-based methods to increase the efficiency of BMC. We first exploit affordable BDD-based symbolic approximate reachability analysis to gather information on the state space. Then, we use the collected overestimated reachable state sets to restrict the search space of a SAT-based BMC. This is possible by feeding the SAT solver with a description that is the combination of the original BMC problem with the extra information coming from BDD-based symbolic analysis. We develop specific strategies to appropriately mix BDD and SAT efforts, and to efficiently convert BDD-based symbolic state set representations into SAT-oriented ones. Experimental results prove the validity of our strategy to reduce the amount of variable assignments and variable conflicts generated by SAT solvers, with a subsequent significant performance gain. We gather results with four among the most used SAT solvers, namely Chaff, Limmat, BerkMin, and Siege. We could reduce the number of conflicts up to more than 100×, and the verification time up to 30×.
This paper addresses the problem of model checking multiple properties on the same circuit/system... more This paper addresses the problem of model checking multiple properties on the same circuit/system. Although this is a typical scenario in several industrial verification frameworks, most model checkers currently handle single properties, verifying multiple properties one at a time. Possible correlations and shared sub-problems, that could be considered while checking different properties, are typically ignored, either for the sake of simplicity or for Cone-Of-Influence minimization. In this paper we describe a preliminary effort oriented to exploit possible synergies among distinct verification tasks of several properties on the same circuit. Besides considering given sets of properties, we also show that multiple properties can be automatically extracted from individual properties, thus simplifying difficult model checking tasks. Preliminary experimental results indicate that our approach can lead to significant performance improvements.
2009 IEEE International High Level Design Validation and Test Workshop, 2009
This paper introduces an approach to effectively exploit incremental SAT in order to search for m... more This paper introduces an approach to effectively exploit incremental SAT in order to search for multiple equivalence-preserving transformations of combinational circuits. Typical applications such as redundancy removal with observability and external care conditions, adequate abstractions and other optimizations used in a state-of-the-art SAT-based model checker, can reap benefits from the proposed strategies. Our techniques exploit SAT incrementality, by iteratively refining
In this paper a non-canonical circuit-based state set representation is used to efficiently perfo... more In this paper a non-canonical circuit-based state set representation is used to efficiently perform quantifier elimination. The novelty of this approach lies in adapting equivalence checking and logic synthesis techniques, to the goal of compacting circuit based state set representations resulting from existential quantification. The method can be efficiently combined with other verification approaches such as inductive and SAT-based pre-image verifications.
This work revisits the formulation of interpolation sequences, in order to better understand thei... more This work revisits the formulation of interpolation sequences, in order to better understand their relationships with Bounded Model Checking and with other Unbounded Model Checking approaches relying on standard interpolation. We first focus on different Bounded Model Checking schemes (bound, exact and exact-assume), pointing out their impact on the interpolation-based strategy. Then, we compare the abstraction ability of interpolation sequences with standard interpolation, highlighting their convergence at potentially different sequential depths. We finally propose a tight integration of interpolation sequences with an abstraction-refinement strategy. Our contributions are first presented from a theoretical standpoint, then supported by experimental results (on academic and industrial benchmarks) adopting a state-of-the-art academic tool.
Introduction: Insulin resistance (IR) adversely affects cardiac performance and peripheral vasodi... more Introduction: Insulin resistance (IR) adversely affects cardiac performance and peripheral vasodilation reserve. Metformin, prescribed to prevent the progression of IR resistance into diabetes, has been shown to improve myocardial performance and endothelial function in insulin resistant individuals. Metabolomics in the study of the metabolite profile of a biological organism proved its efficacy in detecting metabolites changes as a result of a therapeutic intervention and, so, predicting the response. Aim: To evaluate myocardial and endothelium-dependent vasodilatory functions in an IR population subsequent to treatment with metformin and to determine the metabolic changes associated. Methods: Twenty consecutive patients recently diagnosed with IR were studied. All subjects underwent echocardiography with Speckle Tracking technique, peripheral arterial tonometry to measure the endothelial flow reserve (EFR) and metabolomic analysis by 1 H Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and multivariate analysis at baseline and after metformin treatment. Results: Inter-test comparison performed at baseline and after 3 months of metformin showed a significant reduction in weight (79 ± 15.4 vs 80.9 ± 16.2, P<0.05) and BMI (29.7 ± 5.3 vs 30.8 ± 5.2, p<0.05). Moreover we evidenced a significant increase in EFR (2.1 ± 0.43 vs 1.88 ± 0.47, p<0.05), and of the Global Longitudinal Strain (20.2 ± 4.21% vs 15.4 ± 3.06%, p<0.001). PLS-DA analysis of the metabolic profile detected by NMR identified two groups significantly different (cross validation p-value=0.005). More significant discriminating metabolites were: lactate, lipids, N.acetyl glycoproteins, valine, choline, betaine,creatine. Conclusions: The data obtained show that in IR subjects metformin improves myocardial and endothelial function. This effect was associated to significant metabolic changes characterized by means of a metabolomic approach.
Background: Metformin (MET) therapy exerts positive effects improving glucose tolerance and preve... more Background: Metformin (MET) therapy exerts positive effects improving glucose tolerance and preventing the evolution toward diabetes in insulin resistant patients. It has been shown that adding MET to exercise training does not improve insulin sensitivity. The aim of this study was to determine the effect of MET and exercise training alone or in combination on maximal aerobic capacity and, as a secondary end-point on quality of life indexes in individuals with insulin resistance. Methods: 75 insulin resistant patients were enrolled and subsequently assigned to MET (M), MET with exercise training (MEx), and exercise training alone (Ex). 12-weeks of supervised exercise-training program was carried out in both Ex and MEx groups. Cardiopulmonary exercise test and SF-36 to evaluate Health-Related Quality of Life (HRQoL) was performed at basal and after 12-weeks of treatment. Results: Cardiopulmonary exercise test showed a significant increase of peak VO2 in Ex and MEx whereas M showed no improvement of peak VO2 (Δ VO2 [CI 95%] Ex +0.26 [0.47 to 0.05] l/min; Δ VO2 MEx +0.19 [0.33 to 0.05] l/min; Δ VO2 M −0.09 [−0.03 to-0.15] l/min; M vs E p < 0.01; M vs MEx p < 0.01; MEx vs Ex p = ns). SF-36 highlighted a significant increase in general QoL index in the MEx (58.3 ± 19 vs 77.3 ± 16; p < 0.01) and Ex (62.1 ± 17 vs 73.7 ± 12; p < 0.005) groups. Conclusions: We evidenced that cardiopulmonary negative effects showed by MET therapy may be counterbalanced with the combination of exercise training. Given that exercise training associated with MET produced similar effects to exercise training alone in terms of maximal aerobic capacity and HRQoL, programmed exercise training remains the first choice therapy in insulin resistant patients.
Scheduling is widely recognized as a very important step in highlevel synthesis. Nevertheless, it... more Scheduling is widely recognized as a very important step in highlevel synthesis. Nevertheless, it is usually done without taking into account the effects on the actual hardware implementation. This paper presents an efficient symbolic technique to concurrently integrate operation scheduling and resource allocation. The technique inherits all the features of "standard" BDD-based control dominated scheduling, including resource-constraining, speculation and pruning. In addition, it introduces an efficient way of encoding allocation information within a symbolic scheduling automaton with a two-folded target. Firstly, it finds a minimum cost allocation of operation resources satisfying a given schedule. Secondly, it optimizes the amount of registers required to store intermediate results of operations. Theory and algorithms are developed and presented. Experimental results on a well known set of benchmarks show the potentiality of the approach.
International Conference on Computer Aided Design, 2006
This paper addresses SAT-based Unbounded Model Check- ing based on Craig Interpolants. This recen... more This paper addresses SAT-based Unbounded Model Check- ing based on Craig Interpolants. This recently introduced methodology is often able to outperform BDDs and other SAT-based techniques on large verification instances. Based on refutation proofs generated by SAT solvers, interpolants provide compact circuit representations of state sets, and abstract away several details non relevant for proofs. We propose three main contributions,
Interpolant-based model checking has been shown effective on large verification instances, as it ... more Interpolant-based model checking has been shown effective on large verification instances, as it efficiently combines automated abstraction and fixed-point checks. On the other hand, methods based on variable quantification have proved their ability to remove ...
Constraints represent a key component of state-of-the-art verification tools based on composition... more Constraints represent a key component of state-of-the-art verification tools based on compositional approaches and assume--guarantee reasoning. In recent years, most of the research efforts on verification constraints have focused on defining formats and ...
Background and purpose: Recent genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified several gen... more Background and purpose: Recent genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified several genetic variants associated with blood pressure (BP). We investigated whether genetic risk scores (GRS) constructed of these variants would be significant predictors for incident cardiovascular (CVD) events in the prospective, population-based setting. Methods: We genotyped 33 genome-wide significant variants in several Finnish cohorts (
Background: Insulin resistance (IR) is currently considered a crucial cardiovascular (CV) risk fa... more Background: Insulin resistance (IR) is currently considered a crucial cardiovascular (CV) risk factor, which seems to play a dominant role in the evolution toward cardiac and vascular impairment. Early IR-induced cardiac dysfunction can be assessed by Doppler-derived myocardial systolic strain rate (SR) index, measured at baseline and after dobutamine stress echocardiography (DSE). Methods: Thirty IR patients (HOMA-IR = 7 ± 5.2, age 52.6 ± 2.1 years), and 20 healthy, age and sex matched controls were studied. IR had been diagnosed in all patients in the 3 months preceding the study. Dobutamine echocardiography was performed in all subjects to exclude ischemic heart disease, and left ventricular contractile reserve (LVCR) was then assessed. LVCR was evaluated as an increase in the peak of an average longitudinal SR, measured in the basal and mid segments of 2 and 4 chamber ventricular walls. Results: No significant differences between the 2 groups were revealed by baseline echocardiography. In contrast, after DSE a significant decrease of Delta SR was found in the IR group in comparison to the controls (0.54 ± 0.31 s -1 vs 1.14 ± 0.45 s -1 ; p < 0.0001). Conclusions: Our results show that IR, even if isolated and arising within a short time period, not only represents the initial phase of future diabetes, but may adversely affect heart function, as evidenced by the depressed LVCR. Our data strengthen the need for attention to be paid to IR state and for an early therapeutic approach.
Percutaneous vertebroplasty (PVP) is a therapeutic, interventional radiological procedure involvi... more Percutaneous vertebroplasty (PVP) is a therapeutic, interventional radiological procedure involving bone cement injection into a vertebral body. Although PVP is considered a minimally invasive procedure, cement leakage into the perivertebral venous ...
[1] Levenson JW, McCarthy EP, Lynn J, et al. The last six months of life for patients with conges... more [1] Levenson JW, McCarthy EP, Lynn J, et al. The last six months of life for patients with congestive cardiac failure. J Am GeriatrSoc 2000;48(Suppl 5):S101–9. [2] Lehman R, Doust J, Glasziou P. Cardiac impairment or heart failure? BMJ 2005;331(7514):415–6. [3] www.heartstats.org [The British Heart Foundation statistics website]. [4] Heart Failure Society of America. Evaluation and management of patients with acute decompensated heart failure. J Card Fail 2006;12:e86–e103. [5] Anderson H, Ward C, Gomm SA, et al. The concerns of patients under palliative care and a heart failure clinic are not being met. Palliat Med 2001;15:279–86. [6] Murray S, Boyd K, Kendall M, Worth A, Benton TF, Clausen H. Dying of lung cancer or cardiac failure: prospective qualitative interview study of patients and their carers in the community. BMJ 2002;325:929. [7] Harding R, Selman L, Beynon T, et al. Meeting the communication and information needs of chronic heart failure patients. J Pain Symptom Manage 2008;36:149–56. [8] Hanratty B, Hibbert D, Mair F, et al. Doctors' perceptions of palliative care for heart failure: focus group study. BMJ 2002;325:581–5. [9] Jaarsma T, Beattie J, Ryder M, et al. Palliative care in heart failure: a position statement from the palliative care workshop of the Heart Failure Association of the European Society of Cardiology. Eur J Heart Fail 2009;11:433–43. [10] Heffner J, Barbieri C. End of life preferences for patients enrolled in heart failure rehabilitation programmes. Chest 2000;117(5):1474–81. [11] World Health Organisation website http://www.who.int/cancer/palliative/en/. [12] Wright AA, Zhang B, Ray A, et al. Associations between end of life discussions, patient mental health, medical care near death and caregiver bereavement adjustment. JAMA 2008;300:1665–73. [13] LevyWC, Mozaffarian D, Linker DT, et al. The Seattle heart failure model. Prediction of survival in heart failure. Circulation 2006;113:1424–33. [14] Bekelman DB, Rumsfeld JS, Havranek EP, et al. Symptom burden, depression and spiritual wellbeing: a comparison of heart failure and advanced cancer patients. J Gen Intern Med 2009;24:592–8. [15] Thomas K. The Gold Standards Framework: a programme for community palliative care. London: Department of Health; 2005. Available at http:// www.goldstandardsframework.nhs.uk. [16] Peterson PN, Rumsfeld JS, Liang L, et al. A validation risk score for in-hospital mortality in patients with heart failure from the American Heart Association Get With the Guidelines Programme. Circ Cardiovasc Qual Outcomes Jan 2010;1:25–32. [17] Davidson P, Paull G, Introna K, et al. Integrated, collaborative palliative care in heart failure. J Cardiovasc Nurs 2004;19(1):68–75. [18] Russo MJ, Gelijins AC, Stevenson LW, et al. The cost of medical management in advanced heart failure during the final two years of life. J Card Fail 2008;14:651–8.
V. Kutálek, V. Dvořák: On Complexity of Collective Communications on a Fat Cube Topology A recent... more V. Kutálek, V. Dvořák: On Complexity of Collective Communications on a Fat Cube Topology A recent renewed interest in hypercube interconnection network has been concentrated to the more scalable version known as a fat cube. The paper introduces several router models for fat nodes and uses them for cost comparison of both the hypercube... ... A. Gecow, M. Nowostawski, M. Purvis: Structural Tendencies in Complex Systems Development and their Implication for Software Systems Contemporary distributed software systems, exposed to highly ...
In this paper, we propose a methodology to make Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) and Boolean Satis... more In this paper, we propose a methodology to make Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) and Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) Solvers cooperate. The underlying idea is simple: We start a verification task with BDDs, we go on with them as long as the problem remains of manageable size, then we switch to SAT, without losing the work done on the BDD domain. We propose target enlargement as an attempt to bring some of the advantages of state set manipulation from BDDs to SAT-based verification. We first, “enlarge” initial and target state sets of a given verification problem by affordable BDD manipulations. This step is carried on with a few breadth-first steps of traversal, or with what we call high-density dynamic abstraction, i.e., a new technique to collect under-approximate reachable state sets. Then, we perform SAT-based verification with the newly computed “enlarged ” sets. We experimentally test our methodology within an industrial environment, the Intel BOolean VErifier BOVE. Preliminary re...
Abstract—Constraints represent a key component of state-of-the-art verification tools based on co... more Abstract—Constraints represent a key component of state-of-the-art verification tools based on compositional approaches and assume–guarantee reasoning. In recent years, most of the research efforts on verification constraints have focused on defining formats and techniques to encode, or to synthesize, constraints starting from the specification of the design. In this paper, we analyze the impact of constraints on the performance of model checking tools, and we discuss how to effectively exploit them. We also introduce an approach to explicitly derive verification constraints hidden in the design and/or in the property under verification. Such constraints may simply come from true design constraints, embedded within the properties, or may be generated in the general effort to reduce or partition the state space. Experimental results show that, in both cases, we can reap benefits for the overall verification process in several hard-to-solve designs, where we obtain speed-ups of more t...
2003 Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference and Exhibition, 2003
Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) have been widely used in synthesis and verification. Boolean Sati... more Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) have been widely used in synthesis and verification. Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) Solvers, on the other hand, have been gaining ground only recently, with the introduction of efficient implementation procedures. Specifically, while BDDs have been mainly adopted to formally verify the correctness of hardware devices, SAT-based Bounded Model Checking (BMC) has been widely used for debugging. In this paper, we combine BDD and SAT-based methods to increase the efficiency of BMC. We first exploit affordable BDD-based symbolic approximate reachability analysis to gather information on the state space. Then, we use the collected overestimated reachable state sets to restrict the search space of a SAT-based BMC. This is possible by feeding the SAT solver with a description that is the combination of the original BMC problem with the extra information coming from BDD-based symbolic analysis. We develop specific strategies to appropriately mix BDD and SAT efforts, and to efficiently convert BDD-based symbolic state set representations into SAT-oriented ones. Experimental results prove the validity of our strategy to reduce the amount of variable assignments and variable conflicts generated by SAT solvers, with a subsequent significant performance gain. We gather results with four among the most used SAT solvers, namely Chaff, Limmat, BerkMin, and Siege. We could reduce the number of conflicts up to more than 100×, and the verification time up to 30×.
This paper addresses the problem of model checking multiple properties on the same circuit/system... more This paper addresses the problem of model checking multiple properties on the same circuit/system. Although this is a typical scenario in several industrial verification frameworks, most model checkers currently handle single properties, verifying multiple properties one at a time. Possible correlations and shared sub-problems, that could be considered while checking different properties, are typically ignored, either for the sake of simplicity or for Cone-Of-Influence minimization. In this paper we describe a preliminary effort oriented to exploit possible synergies among distinct verification tasks of several properties on the same circuit. Besides considering given sets of properties, we also show that multiple properties can be automatically extracted from individual properties, thus simplifying difficult model checking tasks. Preliminary experimental results indicate that our approach can lead to significant performance improvements.
2009 IEEE International High Level Design Validation and Test Workshop, 2009
This paper introduces an approach to effectively exploit incremental SAT in order to search for m... more This paper introduces an approach to effectively exploit incremental SAT in order to search for multiple equivalence-preserving transformations of combinational circuits. Typical applications such as redundancy removal with observability and external care conditions, adequate abstractions and other optimizations used in a state-of-the-art SAT-based model checker, can reap benefits from the proposed strategies. Our techniques exploit SAT incrementality, by iteratively refining
In this paper a non-canonical circuit-based state set representation is used to efficiently perfo... more In this paper a non-canonical circuit-based state set representation is used to efficiently perform quantifier elimination. The novelty of this approach lies in adapting equivalence checking and logic synthesis techniques, to the goal of compacting circuit based state set representations resulting from existential quantification. The method can be efficiently combined with other verification approaches such as inductive and SAT-based pre-image verifications.
This work revisits the formulation of interpolation sequences, in order to better understand thei... more This work revisits the formulation of interpolation sequences, in order to better understand their relationships with Bounded Model Checking and with other Unbounded Model Checking approaches relying on standard interpolation. We first focus on different Bounded Model Checking schemes (bound, exact and exact-assume), pointing out their impact on the interpolation-based strategy. Then, we compare the abstraction ability of interpolation sequences with standard interpolation, highlighting their convergence at potentially different sequential depths. We finally propose a tight integration of interpolation sequences with an abstraction-refinement strategy. Our contributions are first presented from a theoretical standpoint, then supported by experimental results (on academic and industrial benchmarks) adopting a state-of-the-art academic tool.
Introduction: Insulin resistance (IR) adversely affects cardiac performance and peripheral vasodi... more Introduction: Insulin resistance (IR) adversely affects cardiac performance and peripheral vasodilation reserve. Metformin, prescribed to prevent the progression of IR resistance into diabetes, has been shown to improve myocardial performance and endothelial function in insulin resistant individuals. Metabolomics in the study of the metabolite profile of a biological organism proved its efficacy in detecting metabolites changes as a result of a therapeutic intervention and, so, predicting the response. Aim: To evaluate myocardial and endothelium-dependent vasodilatory functions in an IR population subsequent to treatment with metformin and to determine the metabolic changes associated. Methods: Twenty consecutive patients recently diagnosed with IR were studied. All subjects underwent echocardiography with Speckle Tracking technique, peripheral arterial tonometry to measure the endothelial flow reserve (EFR) and metabolomic analysis by 1 H Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and multivariate analysis at baseline and after metformin treatment. Results: Inter-test comparison performed at baseline and after 3 months of metformin showed a significant reduction in weight (79 ± 15.4 vs 80.9 ± 16.2, P<0.05) and BMI (29.7 ± 5.3 vs 30.8 ± 5.2, p<0.05). Moreover we evidenced a significant increase in EFR (2.1 ± 0.43 vs 1.88 ± 0.47, p<0.05), and of the Global Longitudinal Strain (20.2 ± 4.21% vs 15.4 ± 3.06%, p<0.001). PLS-DA analysis of the metabolic profile detected by NMR identified two groups significantly different (cross validation p-value=0.005). More significant discriminating metabolites were: lactate, lipids, N.acetyl glycoproteins, valine, choline, betaine,creatine. Conclusions: The data obtained show that in IR subjects metformin improves myocardial and endothelial function. This effect was associated to significant metabolic changes characterized by means of a metabolomic approach.
Background: Metformin (MET) therapy exerts positive effects improving glucose tolerance and preve... more Background: Metformin (MET) therapy exerts positive effects improving glucose tolerance and preventing the evolution toward diabetes in insulin resistant patients. It has been shown that adding MET to exercise training does not improve insulin sensitivity. The aim of this study was to determine the effect of MET and exercise training alone or in combination on maximal aerobic capacity and, as a secondary end-point on quality of life indexes in individuals with insulin resistance. Methods: 75 insulin resistant patients were enrolled and subsequently assigned to MET (M), MET with exercise training (MEx), and exercise training alone (Ex). 12-weeks of supervised exercise-training program was carried out in both Ex and MEx groups. Cardiopulmonary exercise test and SF-36 to evaluate Health-Related Quality of Life (HRQoL) was performed at basal and after 12-weeks of treatment. Results: Cardiopulmonary exercise test showed a significant increase of peak VO2 in Ex and MEx whereas M showed no improvement of peak VO2 (Δ VO2 [CI 95%] Ex +0.26 [0.47 to 0.05] l/min; Δ VO2 MEx +0.19 [0.33 to 0.05] l/min; Δ VO2 M −0.09 [−0.03 to-0.15] l/min; M vs E p < 0.01; M vs MEx p < 0.01; MEx vs Ex p = ns). SF-36 highlighted a significant increase in general QoL index in the MEx (58.3 ± 19 vs 77.3 ± 16; p < 0.01) and Ex (62.1 ± 17 vs 73.7 ± 12; p < 0.005) groups. Conclusions: We evidenced that cardiopulmonary negative effects showed by MET therapy may be counterbalanced with the combination of exercise training. Given that exercise training associated with MET produced similar effects to exercise training alone in terms of maximal aerobic capacity and HRQoL, programmed exercise training remains the first choice therapy in insulin resistant patients.
Scheduling is widely recognized as a very important step in highlevel synthesis. Nevertheless, it... more Scheduling is widely recognized as a very important step in highlevel synthesis. Nevertheless, it is usually done without taking into account the effects on the actual hardware implementation. This paper presents an efficient symbolic technique to concurrently integrate operation scheduling and resource allocation. The technique inherits all the features of "standard" BDD-based control dominated scheduling, including resource-constraining, speculation and pruning. In addition, it introduces an efficient way of encoding allocation information within a symbolic scheduling automaton with a two-folded target. Firstly, it finds a minimum cost allocation of operation resources satisfying a given schedule. Secondly, it optimizes the amount of registers required to store intermediate results of operations. Theory and algorithms are developed and presented. Experimental results on a well known set of benchmarks show the potentiality of the approach.
International Conference on Computer Aided Design, 2006
This paper addresses SAT-based Unbounded Model Check- ing based on Craig Interpolants. This recen... more This paper addresses SAT-based Unbounded Model Check- ing based on Craig Interpolants. This recently introduced methodology is often able to outperform BDDs and other SAT-based techniques on large verification instances. Based on refutation proofs generated by SAT solvers, interpolants provide compact circuit representations of state sets, and abstract away several details non relevant for proofs. We propose three main contributions,
Interpolant-based model checking has been shown effective on large verification instances, as it ... more Interpolant-based model checking has been shown effective on large verification instances, as it efficiently combines automated abstraction and fixed-point checks. On the other hand, methods based on variable quantification have proved their ability to remove ...
Constraints represent a key component of state-of-the-art verification tools based on composition... more Constraints represent a key component of state-of-the-art verification tools based on compositional approaches and assume--guarantee reasoning. In recent years, most of the research efforts on verification constraints have focused on defining formats and ...
Background and purpose: Recent genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified several gen... more Background and purpose: Recent genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified several genetic variants associated with blood pressure (BP). We investigated whether genetic risk scores (GRS) constructed of these variants would be significant predictors for incident cardiovascular (CVD) events in the prospective, population-based setting. Methods: We genotyped 33 genome-wide significant variants in several Finnish cohorts (
Background: Insulin resistance (IR) is currently considered a crucial cardiovascular (CV) risk fa... more Background: Insulin resistance (IR) is currently considered a crucial cardiovascular (CV) risk factor, which seems to play a dominant role in the evolution toward cardiac and vascular impairment. Early IR-induced cardiac dysfunction can be assessed by Doppler-derived myocardial systolic strain rate (SR) index, measured at baseline and after dobutamine stress echocardiography (DSE). Methods: Thirty IR patients (HOMA-IR = 7 ± 5.2, age 52.6 ± 2.1 years), and 20 healthy, age and sex matched controls were studied. IR had been diagnosed in all patients in the 3 months preceding the study. Dobutamine echocardiography was performed in all subjects to exclude ischemic heart disease, and left ventricular contractile reserve (LVCR) was then assessed. LVCR was evaluated as an increase in the peak of an average longitudinal SR, measured in the basal and mid segments of 2 and 4 chamber ventricular walls. Results: No significant differences between the 2 groups were revealed by baseline echocardiography. In contrast, after DSE a significant decrease of Delta SR was found in the IR group in comparison to the controls (0.54 ± 0.31 s -1 vs 1.14 ± 0.45 s -1 ; p < 0.0001). Conclusions: Our results show that IR, even if isolated and arising within a short time period, not only represents the initial phase of future diabetes, but may adversely affect heart function, as evidenced by the depressed LVCR. Our data strengthen the need for attention to be paid to IR state and for an early therapeutic approach.
Percutaneous vertebroplasty (PVP) is a therapeutic, interventional radiological procedure involvi... more Percutaneous vertebroplasty (PVP) is a therapeutic, interventional radiological procedure involving bone cement injection into a vertebral body. Although PVP is considered a minimally invasive procedure, cement leakage into the perivertebral venous ...
[1] Levenson JW, McCarthy EP, Lynn J, et al. The last six months of life for patients with conges... more [1] Levenson JW, McCarthy EP, Lynn J, et al. The last six months of life for patients with congestive cardiac failure. J Am GeriatrSoc 2000;48(Suppl 5):S101–9. [2] Lehman R, Doust J, Glasziou P. Cardiac impairment or heart failure? BMJ 2005;331(7514):415–6. [3] www.heartstats.org [The British Heart Foundation statistics website]. [4] Heart Failure Society of America. Evaluation and management of patients with acute decompensated heart failure. J Card Fail 2006;12:e86–e103. [5] Anderson H, Ward C, Gomm SA, et al. The concerns of patients under palliative care and a heart failure clinic are not being met. Palliat Med 2001;15:279–86. [6] Murray S, Boyd K, Kendall M, Worth A, Benton TF, Clausen H. Dying of lung cancer or cardiac failure: prospective qualitative interview study of patients and their carers in the community. BMJ 2002;325:929. [7] Harding R, Selman L, Beynon T, et al. Meeting the communication and information needs of chronic heart failure patients. J Pain Symptom Manage 2008;36:149–56. [8] Hanratty B, Hibbert D, Mair F, et al. Doctors' perceptions of palliative care for heart failure: focus group study. BMJ 2002;325:581–5. [9] Jaarsma T, Beattie J, Ryder M, et al. Palliative care in heart failure: a position statement from the palliative care workshop of the Heart Failure Association of the European Society of Cardiology. Eur J Heart Fail 2009;11:433–43. [10] Heffner J, Barbieri C. End of life preferences for patients enrolled in heart failure rehabilitation programmes. Chest 2000;117(5):1474–81. [11] World Health Organisation website http://www.who.int/cancer/palliative/en/. [12] Wright AA, Zhang B, Ray A, et al. Associations between end of life discussions, patient mental health, medical care near death and caregiver bereavement adjustment. JAMA 2008;300:1665–73. [13] LevyWC, Mozaffarian D, Linker DT, et al. The Seattle heart failure model. Prediction of survival in heart failure. Circulation 2006;113:1424–33. [14] Bekelman DB, Rumsfeld JS, Havranek EP, et al. Symptom burden, depression and spiritual wellbeing: a comparison of heart failure and advanced cancer patients. J Gen Intern Med 2009;24:592–8. [15] Thomas K. The Gold Standards Framework: a programme for community palliative care. London: Department of Health; 2005. Available at http:// www.goldstandardsframework.nhs.uk. [16] Peterson PN, Rumsfeld JS, Liang L, et al. A validation risk score for in-hospital mortality in patients with heart failure from the American Heart Association Get With the Guidelines Programme. Circ Cardiovasc Qual Outcomes Jan 2010;1:25–32. [17] Davidson P, Paull G, Introna K, et al. Integrated, collaborative palliative care in heart failure. J Cardiovasc Nurs 2004;19(1):68–75. [18] Russo MJ, Gelijins AC, Stevenson LW, et al. The cost of medical management in advanced heart failure during the final two years of life. J Card Fail 2008;14:651–8.
V. Kutálek, V. Dvořák: On Complexity of Collective Communications on a Fat Cube Topology A recent... more V. Kutálek, V. Dvořák: On Complexity of Collective Communications on a Fat Cube Topology A recent renewed interest in hypercube interconnection network has been concentrated to the more scalable version known as a fat cube. The paper introduces several router models for fat nodes and uses them for cost comparison of both the hypercube... ... A. Gecow, M. Nowostawski, M. Purvis: Structural Tendencies in Complex Systems Development and their Implication for Software Systems Contemporary distributed software systems, exposed to highly ...
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