Endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP) is a diagnostic method and treatment approach for biliary diseases. However, biliary cannulation can be difficult in some cases. We performed ERCP in a 97-year-old woman with abdominal pain resulting from acute cholangitis caused by choledocholithiasis and observed difficult biliary cannulation. Eventually, the patient was successfully treat...

The robust H(∞) control for spacecraft rendezvous with a noncooperative target is addressed in this paper. The relative motion of chaser and noncooperative target is firstly modeled as the uncertain system, which contains uncertain orbit parameter and mass. Then the H(∞) performance and finite time performance are proposed, and a robust H(∞) controller is developed to drive the chaser to rendez...

In this paper, a local feedback control strategy is devised to drive a group of nonholonomic unicycle-type vehicles to a rendezvous point. The proposed control law is continuous and time-invariant. Using tools from graph theory, convergence and ultimate boundedness properties of the overall system are examined. Similar to the results for the rendezvous problem for vehicles governed by linear dy...

We address the problem of developing efficient cache coherence protocols implementing distributed shared memory (DSM) using message passing. A serious drawback of traditional approaches to this problem is that designers are required to state the desired coherence protocol at the level of asynchronous message interactions. We propose a method in which designers express the desired protocol at a ...

Submodule construction is the problem of finding a new submodule which, together with a given submodule, provides a behavior that conforms to a given desired global behavior. A new formulation of this problem and its solution in first-order logic is presented, and it is shown how the known solutions to this problem in the context of various communication paradigms and specification formalisms c...

Adversary-resistant communication bootstrapping is a fundamental problem faced by many circumvention (anti-censorship) systems such as Tor. Censoring regimes actively harvest and block published Tor entry points and bridge nodes. More recently, some countries have resorted to reactive (follow-up) probing of the destination hosts of outbound encrypted traffic to identify unpublished Tor nodes. W...

BACKGROUND Concurrent ipsilateral fractures of the proximal and shaft of the femur are rare complex fracture combinations. In this prospective cohort study, we evaluated clinical and radiological long-term results after operative treatment using several surgical strategies: the so-called "rendezvous" surgical technique, e.g., the combination of retrograde intramedullary nailing and dynamic hip ...