Background-The mechanisms underlying paroxysmal atrial flutter/atrial fibrillation initiation by ectopic foci from various locations are unclear. Methods and Results-We used parallel computational techniques to study an anatomically accurate 3-dimensional atrial structure incorporating a detailed ionic-current model of an atrial myocyte. At the single-cell level, upregulation of the L-type Ca 2ϩ current I Ca,L steepened restitution curves of action potential duration and conduction velocity compared with the control. Spontaneous firings of ectopic foci, coupled with sinus activity, produced dynamic spatial dispersions of repolarization, including discordant alternans, which caused conduction block and reentry only for the elevated I Ca,L case. For each foci location, a vulnerable window for atrial flutter/atrial fibrillation induction was identified as a function of the coupling interval and focus cycle length. For ectopic foci in the pulmonary veins and left atrium, the site of conduction block and reentry gradually shifted, as a function of coupling interval, from the right atrium to the interatrial area and finally to the left atrium. The size of the vulnerable window was largest for pulmonary vein foci, becoming markedly smaller for right atrial foci, especially those near the sinoatrial node. Conclusions-These findings suggest that a mechanism of dynamically induced repolarization dispersion, especially discordant alternans, underlies the induction of atrial flutter/atrial fibrillation by atrial ectopic foci. The sites and likelihood of reentry induction varied according to ectopic focus location and timing, with the largest vulnerable window corresponding to the pulmonary vein region.

We report spontaneous antispiral wave formation in typical reaction-diffusion systems. Our findings qualitatively reproduce a series of phenomena recently observed in a Belousov-Zhabotinsky-type chemical reaction. We found that antispiral waves can occur only near the Hopf bifurcation, when the system is characterized by small amplitude oscillatory (as opposed to excitable) dynamics. For reaction-diffusion systems in the vicinity of the Hopf bifurcation, the specific conditions required for antispiral formation are established here through theoretical analyses and numerical simulations. Thus, this work provides a comprehensive description of the mechanisms underlying antispiral waves in reaction-diffusion systems.

As one of the core techniques in 5G, the Internet of Things is more interested than ever. Furthermore, radio frequency identification (RFID) plays a crucial role in Internet of Things development. Although the low-cost RFID system has wide prospect, it has to face with huge challenges because of potential security risks, privacy problems, and efficiency because of its restrictions on processing, storage, and power in RFID tags. One of the possible solutions in secure authentication of the low-cost RFID system is the lightweight RFID authentication protocol. A lightweight RFID mutual authentication protocol with cache in the reader is proposed in this paper, named LRMAPC. The LRMAPC can greatly reduce the computational and transmission cost. Especially, it can reduce computational costs greatly when a large number of tags want to be authenticated. We prove the correctness of LRMAPC using GNY logic. Compared with some existing works, LRMAPC achieves higher efficiency and stronger security. Furthermore, we developed LRMAPC into ULRMAPC, an ultralightweight RFID mutual authentication protocol with cache in the reader. Compared with SASI and Gossamer protocols, ULRMAPC also achieves higher efficiency and stronger security in storage and computation cost.

The dynamics of the generation of the various spike trains in neural pacemakers is of fundamental importance to the understanding of neural coding. Recent studies have demonstrated, theoretically and experimentally, that neural pacemakers produce chaotic oscillations. Deeper analyses in several neuronal models have revealed many nonlinear phenomena including periodadding bifurcations whose existence has not been experimentally confirmed. In this letter, we reported that the period-adding bifurcation with chaos was observed in the interspike interval (ISI) series generated by an experimental neural pacemaker when the extracellular calcium concentration was changed or a potassium channel blocker was administered at the site of the pacemaker. We also simulated our experimental discoveries by computing a generalized model of excitable cells. The chaotic phenomenon in the experiment and that in the model were demonstrated and compared using the nonlinear forecasting and surrogate data methods.