No abstract

No abstract

Modern software is bloated. Demand for new functionality has led developers to include more and more features, many of which become unneeded or unused as software evolves. This phenomenon, known as software bloat, results in software consuming more resources than it otherwise needs to. How to effectively and automatically debloat software is a long-standing problem in software engineering. Various debloating techniques have been proposed since the late 1990s. However, many of these techniques are built upon pure static analysis and have yet to be extended and evaluated in the context of modern Java applications where dynamic language features are prevalent. To this end, we develop an end-to-end bytecode debloating framework called JShrink. It augments traditional static reachability analysis with dynamic profiling and type dependency analysis and renovates existing bytecode transformations to account for new language features in modern Java. We highlight several nuanced technical challenges that must be handled properly and examine behavior preservation of debloated software via regression testing. We find that (1) JShrink is able to debloat our real-world Java benchmark suite by up to 47% (14% on average); (2) accounting for dynamic language features is indeed crucial to ensure behavior preservationÐreducing 98% of test failures incurred by a purely static equivalent, Jax, and 84% for ProGuard; and (3) compared with purely dynamic approaches, integrating static analysis with dynamic profiling makes the debloated software more robust to unseen test executionsÐin 22 out of 26 projects, the debloated software ran successfully under new tests.

High-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) can locally ablate biological tissues such as tumors, i.e., induce their rapid heating and coagulative necrosis without causing damage to surrounding healthy structures. It is widely used in clinical practice for minimally invasive treatment of prostate cancer. Nonablative, low-power HIFU was established as a promising tool for triggering the release of chemotherapeutic drugs from temperature-sensitive liposomes (TSLs). In this study, we combine ablative HIFU and thermally triggered chemotherapy to address the lack of safe and effective treatment options for elderly patients with high-risk localized prostate cancer. DU145 prostate cancer cells were exposed to chemotherapy (free and liposomal Sorafenib) and ablative HIFU, alone or in combination. Prior to cell viability assessment by trypan blue exclusion and flow cytometry, the uptake of TSLs by DU145 cells was verified by confocal microscopy and cryogenic scanning electron microscopy (cryo-SEM). The combination of TSLs encapsulating 10 μM Sorafenib and 8.7W HIFU resulted in a viability of less than 10% at 72 h post-treatment, which was significant less than the viability of the cells treated with free Sorafenib (76%), Sorafenib-loaded TSLs (63%), or HIFU alone (44%). This synergy was not observed on cells treated with Sorafenib-loaded nontemperature sensitive liposomes and HIFU. According to cryo-SEM analysis, cells exposed to ablative HIFU exhibited significant mechanical disruption. Water bath immersion experiments also showed an important role of mechanical effects in the synergistic enhancement of TSL-mediated chemotherapy by ablative HIFU. This combination therapy can be an effective strategy for treatment of geriatric prostate cancer patients.

The wetting behavior of a surface depends on both its surface chemistry and the characteristics of surface morphology and topography. Adding structure to a flat hydrophobic or oleophobic surface increases the effective contact angle and thus the hydrophobicity or oleophobicity of the surface, as exemplified by the lotus leaf analogy. We describe a simple strategy to introduce micropatterned roughness on surfaces of soft materials, utilizing the template of hexagonally packed pores of breath figures as molds. The generated inverse replicas represent micron scale patterned beadlike protrusions on hydrogel surfaces. This added roughness imparts superoleophobic properties (contact angle of the order of 150° and greater) to an inherently oleophobic flat hydrogel surface, when submerged. The introduced pattern on the hydrogel surface changes morphology as it swells in water to resemble morphologies remarkably analogous to the compound eye. Analysis of the wetting behavior using the Cassie-Baxter approximation leads to estimation of the contact angle in the superoleophobic regime and in agreement with the experimental value.