Jian-Jia Chen

There is considerable potential for integrating transarterial chemoembolization (TACE), programmed death-(ligand)1 (PD-[L]1) inhibitors, and molecular targeted treatments (MTT) in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). It is necessary to investigate the therapeutic efficacy and safety of TACE combined with PD-(L)1 inhibitors and MTT in real-world situations. In this nationwide, retrospective, cohort study, 826 HCC patients receiving either TACE plus PD-(L)1 blockades and MTT (combination group, n = 376) or TACE monotherapy (monotherapy group, n = 450) were included from January 2018 to May 2021. The primary endpoint was progression-free survival (PFS) according to modified RECIST. The secondary outcomes included overall survival (OS), objective response rate (ORR), and safety. We performed propensity score matching approaches to reduce bias between two groups. After matching, 228 pairs were included with a predominantly advanced disease population. Median PFS in combination group was 9.5 months (95% confidence interval [CI], 8.4-11.0) versus 8.0 months (95% CI, 6.6-9.5) (adjusted hazard ratio [HR], 0.70, P = 0.002). OS and ORR were also significantly higher in combination group (median OS, 19.2 [16.1-27.3] vs. 15.7 months [13.0-20.2]; adjusted HR, 0.63, P = 0.001; ORR, 60.1% vs. 32.0%; P < 0.001). Grade 3/4 adverse events were observed at a rate of 15.8% and 7.5% in combination and monotherapy groups, respectively. Our results suggest that TACE plus PD-(L)1 blockades and MTT could significantly improve PFS, OS, and ORR versus TACE monotherapy for Chinese patients with predominantly advanced HCC in real-world practice, with an acceptable safety profile.

This paper considers the scheduling of parallel real-time tasks with implicit deadlines. Each parallel task is characterized as a general directed acyclic graph (DAG). We analyze three different real-time scheduling strategies: two well known algorithms, namely global earliest-deadline-first and global rate-monotonic, and one new algorithm, namely federated scheduling. The federated scheduling algorithm proposed in this paper is a generalization of partitioned scheduling to parallel tasks. In this strategy, each high-utilization task (utilization ≥ 1) is assigned a set of dedicated cores and the remaining low-utilization tasks share the remaining cores. We prove capacity augmentation bounds for all three schedulers. In particular, we show that if on unit-speed cores, a task set has total utilization of at most m and the critical-path length of each task is smaller than its deadline, then federated scheduling can schedule that task set on m cores of speed 2, G-EDF can schedule it with speed 3 + v5/2 2.618, and G-RM can schedule it with speed 2 + v3 3.732. We also provide lower bounds on the speedup and show that the bounds are tight for federated scheduling and G-EDF when m is sufficiently large.

Energy-efficient designs have played import roles for hardware and software implementations for a decade. With the advanced technology of VLSI circuit designs, energy-efficiency can be achieved by adopting the dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) technique. In this paper, we survey the studies for energy-efficient scheduling in real-time systems on DVS platforms to cover both theoretical and practical issues.

BACKGROUND: The role of transarterial chemoembolization (TACE) in the treatment of advanced hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is unconfirmed. This study aimed to assess the efficacy and safety of immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) plus anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (anti-VEGF) antibody/tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) with or without TACE as first-line treatment for advanced HCC. METHODS: This nationwide, multicenter, retrospective cohort study included advanced HCC patients receiving either TACE with ICIs plus anti-VEGF antibody/TKIs (TACE-ICI-VEGF) or only ICIs plus anti-VEGF antibody/TKIs (ICI-VEGF) from January 2018 to December 2022. The study design followed the target trial emulation framework with stabilized inverse probability of treatment weighting (sIPTW) to minimize biases. The primary outcome was overall survival (OS). Secondary outcomes included progression-free survival (PFS), objective response rate (ORR), and safety. The study is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT05332821. FINDINGS: Among 1244 patients included in the analysis, 802 (64.5%) patients received TACE-ICI-VEGF treatment, and 442 (35.5%) patients received ICI-VEGF treatment. The median follow-up time was 21.1 months and 20.6 months, respectively. Post-application of sIPTW, baseline characteristics were well-balanced between the two groups. TACE-ICI-VEGF group exhibited a significantly improved median OS (22.6 months [95% CI: 21.2–23.9] vs 15.9 months [14.9–17.8]; P < 0.0001; adjusted hazard ratio [aHR] 0.63 [95% CI: 0.53–0.75]). Median PFS was also longer in TACE-ICI-VEGF group (9.9 months [9.1–10.6] vs 7.4 months [6.7–8.5]; P < 0.0001; aHR 0.74 [0.65–0.85]) per Response Evaluation Criteria in Solid Tumours (RECIST) version 1.1. A higher ORR was observed in TACE-ICI-VEGF group, by either RECIST v1.1 or modified RECIST (41.2% vs 22.9%, P < 0.0001; 47.3% vs 29.7%, P < 0.0001). Grade ≥3 adverse events occurred in 178 patients (22.2%) in TACE-ICI-VEGF group and 80 patients (18.1%) in ICI-VEGF group. INTERPRETATION: This multicenter study supports the use of TACE combined with ICIs and anti-VEGF antibody/TKIs as first-line treatment for advanced HCC, demonstrating an acceptable safety profile. FUNDING: 10.13039/501100001809National Natural Science Foundation of China, 10.13039/501100012166National Key Research and Development Program of China, Jiangsu Provincial Medical Innovation Center, Collaborative Innovation Center of Radiation Medicine of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions, and Nanjing Life Health Science and Technology Project.

Abstract—Employing COTS components in real-time embedded systems leads to timing challenges. When multiple CPU cores and DMA peripherals run simultaneously, contention for access to main memory can greatly increase a task’s WCET. In this paper, we introduce an analysis methodology that computes upper bounds to task delay due to memory contention. First, an arrival curve is derived for each core representing the maximum memory traffic produced by all tasks executed on it. Arrival curves are then combined with a representation of the cache behavior for the task under analysis to generate a delay bound. Based on the computed delay, we show how tasks can be feasibly scheduled according to assigned time slots on each core. I.