Current options for the treatment of the early-stage HCC conforming to the Milan criteria consist of liver transplantation, hepatic resection (HR), transcatheter arterial chemoembolization (TACE) and radiofrequency ablation (RFA) .Whether HR or RFA is the better treatment for early HCC has long been debated. The aim of our paper is to compare the therapeutic effects of radiofrequency ablation (RFA) and hepatic resection (HR) in the treatment of early-stage hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Controlled trials evaluating the efficacy between RFA and HR for the treatment of early-stage HCC published before June 2013 were searched electronically using MEDLINE, PubMed, Cochrane Library, and EMBASE databases. Using inclusion and exclusion criteria, two randomized controlled trials and 10 nonrandomized controlled trials were included in the meta- analysis. The results showed that the 3,5-year overall survival rates and 1,3,5 disease-free survival rates were significantly lower after RFA than after HR. However, complications after treatment were less common and the length of hospital stay was significantly shorter after RFA. Additionally, there was no significant difference in the 1-year overall survival rate between RFA and HR. The conclusions of the results show that the difference in the short-term effectiveness of RFA and HR in the treatment of small HCC is not notable, but the long-term efficacy of HR is better than that of RFA. However, HR is associated with more complications and a longer hospital stay.

A reconfigurable bandwidth antenna for an impulse radio-UWB (IR/UWB) system design is illustrated in this paper. By adopting a continuously tunable low-pass filter by varactor at the feed of the antenna, the proposed antenna obtains a continuous tunable bandwidth from 1.02 GHz to 2.42 GHz. To ensure the identifiability of transmitted pulses in (IR-UWB) system, the antenna is analyzed in both frequency domain and time domain. The proposed antenna is valid with a system fidelity factor (SFF) above 0.8 while the bandwidth is tuning. The compact size, low cost, and tunable bandwidth with the identifiability of the transmitted pulse makes it suitable for UWB impulse radars to improve the utility ratio of frequency, and dynamic adjustment avoids interference of the IR-UWB in other communication frequency bands.

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An autoencoder-residual (AE-Res) network is designated to assist the linearization of the wideband photonic scanning channelized receiver. It is capable of adaptively suppressing spurious distortions over multiple octaves of signal bandwidth, obviating the need for calculating the multifactorial nonlinear transfer functions. Proof-of-concept experiments indicate that the improvement of the third-order spur-free dynamic range (SFDR2/3) is 17.44 dB. Moreover, the results for real wireless communication signals demonstrate that the improvement of the spurious suppression ratio (SSR) is 39.69 dB and the reduction of the noise floor is ∼10 dB.

A novel reconfigurable filter antenna with three ports for three dependent switchable states for impulse radio-ultrawideband (IR-UWB)/wireless local area network (WLAN)/worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX) applications is presented in this paper. Three positive-intrinsic-negative diodes, controlled by direct current, are employed to realize frequency reconfiguration of one ultra-wideband state and two narrowband states (2.4 GHz and 3.5 GHz). The time domain characteristic of the proposed antenna in the ultra-wideband state is studied, because of the features of the IR-UWB system. The time domain analysis shows that the reconfigurable filtering antenna in the wideband state performs similarly to the original UWB antenna. The compact size, low cost, and expanded reconfigurable filtering features make it suitable for IR-UWB systems that are integrated with WLAN/WiMAX communications.