Search Results (109)

The diverse application scenarios envisioned for sixth generation (6G) are characterized by the deep integration of sensing and ubiquitous connectivity, which imposes unprecedentedly stringent security requirements. However, due to the open nature of wireless channels, mobile communications systems always face severe information security threats such as falsification, spoofing, interception, and repudiation. Cryptography-based symmetric and asymmetric encryption techniques remain mainstream solutions for information protection. Symmetric encryption is efficient and secure for legitimate users but suffers from key-distribution difficulties over open wireless channels, whereas asymmetric encryption resolves this problem but faces increasing risks from quantum computing due to its reliance on structured mathematical hardness assumptions. In response to these limitations, physical layer security (PLS) has gained a great deal of research attention as a powerful security component that leverages the features of varying wireless channels. Existing PLS schemes can be broadly classified into two categories. The first one takes advantage of the legitimate link’s opportunistic channel-quality superiority over or different spatial-domain directions from the attacking link, which still faces many practical implementation difficulties. The second category is termed physical-layer key generation (PLKG). It extracts the unique features of the legitimate link’s channel variation, which is often reciprocal, as the source of secret key generation and therefore can naturally implement secure key distribution tasks. This advantage no doubt injects new vigor to symmetric encryption as a stronger protection approach. Following this trend, we in this paper concentrate on the PLKG techniques. Specifically, we present a comprehensive overview on existing PLKG schemes, discussing diverse secret key generation and reconciliation methods. We further investigate the model-driven and deep-learning-based approaches tailored for the scenario with imperfect channel reciprocity between the sender and receiver. After comprehensively reviewing major existing schemes, we further discuss a recently proposed PLKG design based on codeword reconstruction, which makes use of the strong error-correcting capability of the forward-error-correction (FEC) codes to effectively implement secure and consistent secret key generation between the legitimate sender and receiver. Finally, we share our opinions on the unsolved challenges and potential research directions dedicated to PLKG toward meeting the security requirements of 6G. Full article

Quantum key distribution (QKD) employs quantum states to generate shared cryptographic keys. An attacker interacting with the modeled non-orthogonal quantum signals can affect the monitored statistics, and hence they can be detected under the specified protocol assumptions, but this trait does not inherently authenticate the classical channel, and it does not prevent implementation side channels. In this work, we introduce ModPhase-8 (QUEST), a proposed QKD modulation and adaptive-receiver architecture evaluated through analytical modeling and simulation. Instead of using only a few quantum signal types, our system uses eight carefully designed signal variations created by adjusting the phase between two very short light pulses. The eight phase states are organized into four phase bases, each containing two antipodal states that encode one binary raw-key value. The enlarged signal set diversifies the physical representation of the key bit and changes the state-discrimination problem faced by an eavesdropper, but it does not increase the raw-key payload beyond one bit per successfully sifted signal. On the receiving side, the system adaptively switches between two measurement techniques based on the prevailing channel conditions. This adaptive detection mechanism enhances reliability and helps maintain low error rates even when the communication channel is affected by noise. We provide an analytical security assessment under the stated collective-attack, source, channel, receiver, and trusted-device assumptions, supplemented by attack-specific analyses of intercept–resend, beam-splitting, source-side multi-photon leakage, and selected implementation-related vulnerabilities. Simulation studies were conducted to examine the physical-layer and post-processing behavior of the proposed protocol under explicitly stated channel, receiver, detector, and finite-sample values. Under the adopted simulation model, ModPhase-8 maintains low error rates in the low- and moderate-noise operating regimes and exhibits favorable receiver-level robustness across the investigated channel conditions. The reported rate values are model-based performance estimates rather than rigorously certified secret-key lower bounds. In particular, Qiskit simulation does not establish a composable security proof or an optimal bound on Eve’s information for the exact eight-state time-bin ensemble. A protocol-specific numerical security analysis incorporating the homodyne–heterodyne measurement operators, post-selection, reconciliation efficiency, finite-size effects, and Eve’s Holevo information remains necessary before definitive rate comparisons can be made. ModPhase-8 should therefore be interpreted as a practically motivated receiver and modulation framework whose security-rate performance remains subject to further protocol-specific analysis. Full article

Background/Objectives: Ibrutinib is an established treatment for chronic lymphocytic leukemia/small lymphocytic lymphoma (CLL/SLL), but its use commonly occurs in older patients with polypharmacy, cardiovascular comorbidity and infection vulnerability. CYP3A-modifying drugs and antithrombotic agents are clinically actionable co-exposure domains because they may alter ibrutinib exposure, bleeding risk or the management of atrial arrhythmia. This study evaluated post-marketing reporting patterns for these co-exposures in FAERS. Methods: Adult FAERS reports through 25Q2 with ibrutinib exposure and CLL/SLL-compatible indications were analyzed after false-positive indication captures were removed. Co-exposures were defined at report level using prespecified drug dictionaries, and grouped adverse-event reporting was evaluated using reporting odds ratio, proportional reporting ratio, chi-square and an information-component-style two-by-two metric. Results: The final cohort comprised 20,878 adult CLL/SLL + ibrutinib reports. CYP3A modifier co-exposure was present in 1373 reports (6.6%), and antithrombotic co-exposure in 3701 reports (17.7%). Antithrombotic exposure increased with age, from 9.8% in reports aged 18–64 years to 23.2% in reports aged ≥75 years. CYP3A modifier exposure was associated with enriched reporting of infection and cytopenia phenotypes, particularly severe infection-like events with CYP3A inhibitors and inducers. Antithrombotic exposure showed consistent reporting enrichment for atrial arrhythmia, bleeding and major bleeding-like events, with the strongest grouped signals among anticoagulant-exposed reports. Overlap analyses showed that the co-exposure domains were not mutually exclusive. Conclusions: These findings should be interpreted as reporting disproportionality rather than incidence or causal risk, but they support prioritizing CYP3A-modifying drugs and antithrombotic therapy during medication reconciliation, interaction screening and risk mitigation in older patients receiving ibrutinib. Full article

Background: Removing explicit protected health information (PHI) does not necessarily make a clinical narrative non-identifiable. Rare diagnoses, social circumstances, locations, temporal patterns, and treatment trajectories may still permit re-identification. Methods: This PRISMA-ScR-informed scoping review combined PubMed/MEDLINE, OpenAlex, and targeted NLP searches with OpenAlex title-and-abstract, Web of Science, and Scopus sensitivity checks. Eligible publications addressed clinical or biomedical text de-identification from 1 January 2018 to 31 March 2026. Results: The searches yielded 275 records and 258 unique records after deduplication. Eligibility assessment produced 110 core records, 11 background or review records, and 22 exclusions. All 143 eligibility-stage records underwent independent double screening and reconciliation; structured extraction covered all 110 core records. Abstract screening of 47 additional Scopus candidates found no task function or implementation paradigm outside the proposed classification. The resulting two-axis framework separates a method’s role in the workflow from its technical implementation. Conclusions: Clinical text de-identification cannot be reduced to named-entity recognition. Local hybrid or transformer pipelines remain the most defensible baseline for routine PHI detection. LLMs are better suited to defined tasks in augmentation, transformation, and assurance, with local validation and explicit control of data exposure. Full article

We study the reconciliation of several biased, partially-overlapping estimators of a latent distribution on the probability simplex (the set of non-negative credit shares summing to one) when no ground truth is available to adjudicate their disagreement—the situation faced when conversion credit is reported by independent commercial attribution sources. We cast this as non-additive information fusion and develop a four-layer fuzzy framework: a reliability-weighted fuzzy representation, an interaction-corrected conflict measure, a Choquet integral with respect to an elicited fuzzy measure (capacity) followed by an $L_1$-closure onto the simplex (a per-cell renormalization returning a valid distribution), and a Mamdani layer producing a conformally calibrated uncertainty band. Our theoretical contributions are (i) a simplex-consistency result—channel-wise Choquet aggregation with $L_1$-closure always returns a valid distribution and reduces to the weighted mean under an additive capacity; (ii) variational and axiomatic characterizations of the operator; (iii) an exact Shapley–disagreement decomposition that quantifies how non-additivity reweights redundant sources; and (iv) a Lipschitz stability bound that guarantees robustness to noisy inputs. The capacity is elicited from observable signals alone, so the method requires no labels. On a firewalled, ten-seed benchmark across eight regimes the framework attains the lowest MAE in five of eight conditions and the lowest KL in six, improving on Dempster–Shafer, correlation-clustering, and reliability-weighted baselines by 1.6–2.3% (MAE) and 3.1–4.4% (KL)—significant in four of its five targeted redundancy- and bias-dominated regimes—with the conformal step attaining nominal coverage. This advantage stems from the elicited capacity rather than the Choquet operator (a simpler ordinal integral matches it on point error); Choquet is retained for its cardinal, calibratable output. An illustrative two-source real-data study exposes a 13.7% cost-per-install distortion in the single-source view, with the (uncalibrated) band widest where the sources disagree most. Full article

Continuous-variable quantum secret sharing (CVQSS) distributes a secret key among multiple players while requiring their cooperation for reconstruction. Its performance deteriorates rapidly in sequential multiparty links because optical loss, excess noise, and receiver noise accumulate with the number of players. We investigate a dealer-side heralded hybrid linear amplifier (HHLA), formed by measurement-based noiseless linear amplification and trusted deterministic preamplification, for mitigating the relative receiver-noise penalty. The accepted data are described by an equivalent Gaussian channel and evaluated with an asymptotic reverse-reconciliation key-rate model against collective Gaussian attacks. We explicitly condition parameter estimation and Eve’s Holevo information on successful heralding, include a cutoff-dependent Gaussian-input estimate of the heralding probability in the rate per transmitted pulse, apply a single calibrated output-quadrature rescaling, and provide parallel heterodyne and homodyne calculations. The homodyne simulation includes detector noise consistently in the mutual information and Holevo bound and enforces the Gaussian-equivalent NLA feasibility constraint. For an excess-noise variance of $0.001$ shot-noise units per player, the constrained homodyne optimization gives maximum reported distances of approximately 108, 42, and $25.5$ km for 5, 50, and 100 players, respectively, at a reporting floor of ${10}^{-6}$ bit/pulse. Composable finite-size security, finite-cutoff non-Gaussian corrections, and active-insider verifiability are left for future work. Full article

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools—including audit data analytics, robotic process automation, machine-learning models, and generative AI—are changing how audit teams identify risks, select procedures, and evaluate evidence. At the same time, Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (the EU AI Act) establishes a risk-based governance architecture built around risk management, data governance, technical documentation, logging, transparency, human oversight, robustness, cybersecurity, and post-market monitoring. The Act is not an auditing standard and does not directly regulate every tool used by audit firms. Nevertheless, its governance logic is relevant where audit firms develop, procure, or rely on AI-enabled systems that process sensitive client data, influence professional judgement, or become part of audit-relevant client systems. This conceptual study uses doctrinal requirements-to-controls mapping and design-oriented analysis to translate selected AI Act governance objectives into firm-level and engagement-level quality-management controls and into criteria for evaluating AI-enabled audit evidence. The paper specifies three modes of AI Act relevance: direct legal relevance where a regulated AI Act role is engaged; indirect relevance where AI compliance documentation becomes audit-relevant information; and benchmark relevance where the Act supplies governance objectives for quality management without creating an audit-law duty. The resulting artefacts are a traceable AI Act/IAASB standards crosswalk, an evidence-risk typology, a quality-management integration model, a documentation and review checklist, and a proportional maturity model. The framework clarifies when AI outputs remain triage or risk-assessment tools, when they provide directional or corroborative evidence, and the narrower conditions under which they may contribute to substantive evidence. It links reliance to data completeness, reconciliation, versioning, validation, false-positive and false-negative behaviour, explainability, logging, source-document corroboration, and reviewer challenge. The contribution is a scalable governance-to-controls framework that supports defensible reliance and inspection readiness without overstating the AI Act’s direct legal applicability. Empirical validation in audit firms remains a priority for future research. It further explains how quantitative risk features and anomaly-detection outputs feed into qualitative audit judgement: models can route attention to unusual transactions or documents, but evidential weight still depends on base-rate-aware error analysis, source-document corroboration, and reviewer challenge. Full article

The fragmentation of clinical information across health systems, community pharmacies, and specialty providers continues to undermine medication safety and emergency care, particularly when patients are unconscious or otherwise unable to communicate their history. The dominant response to this fragmentation has been the construction of a centralized data infrastructure—health information exchanges, prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs), and federated electronic health record (EHR) networks—that aggregates clinical information into institutional databases that are queryable by providers, insurers, regulators, and, in many jurisdictions, law enforcement. This article argues that the same care-coordination problems can be addressed through an architecturally different approach in which the patient, not the institution, holds the integrative artifact. The proposed design, here labeled the Guardian Card (a conceptual architecture, not a commercial product), pairs an HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) clinical payload with the SMART Health Cards verifiable-credential framework and a dual-modality (QR code plus near-field communication) physical carrier. After describing the technical architecture, hardware options, and a five-phase deployment roadmap, the design is situated within the surveillance-critical scholarship that has documented PDMP function creep, third-party doctrine erosion, racial disparities in algorithmic prescribing oversight, and the surveillance-instrumentarian repackaging of nominally de-identified prescription data. The Guardian Card is offered as one operational implementation of a patient-controlled medication-record architecture, with community pharmacy and long-term post-acute care, where the Pharmacist eCare Plan integration is most feasible as a recommended first-deployment venue. Full article

To address the monitoring needs for carbon emissions during the construction phase, this paper proposes an intelligent analysis method based on construction activities. Fine-grained monitoring of construction carbon emissions is achieved through the collaborative application of a carbon emission quantification model, a digital twin monitoring model, and a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) prediction model. Firstly, based on three dimensions—time, space, and elements—the method constructs a quantification model for construction carbon emissions grounded in construction activities. This model accurately captures the dynamic relationships between material transportation losses, construction machinery usage, and carbon emissions. Secondly, leveraging digital twin technology, an integrated monitoring model is established, unifying three dimensions: element information, temporal processes, and model hierarchy. This model enables continuous data acquisition during the construction period. Finally, a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network is introduced to enhance the accuracy of carbon emission predictions. Using a public building in Beijing as a case study, the research demonstrates that, with the traditional inventory method as a baseline (which exhibited a deviation of 18–25% from actual emissions verified through post-construction reconciliation), the proposed activity-based model reduced the calculation deviation for core division works to within 3.2%, an absolute reduction of approximately 15–22% points. The LSTM prediction model achieves an overall short-term prediction accuracy of 89%, with the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) reaching approximately 11% across the full validation set. For a representative two-week forecasting case, the model yields a MAPE of 4.3%, with a deviation of 23 tCO₂e between predicted and actual emissions. This provides a viable technical pathway for carbon emission monitoring during the construction phase of building projects. Full article

Accurate grade estimation in heterogeneous porphyry copper deposits is frequently constrained by spatial non-stationarity and the excessive smoothing inherent in traditional geostatistical methods. This study introduces the Geological Distance Field-Machine Learning (GDF-ML) framework, which transforms raw spatial coordinates into a geological coordinate system defined by the structural architecture. By mapping grade distribution within this geologically informed space, the framework enables machine learning models to discern non-linear mineralizing patterns that are typically obscured in traditional Euclidean 3D space. Functioning as an expert-constrained regression architecture rather than a purely data-driven interpolator, the framework estimates grade distributions conditional upon established metallogenic controls. In this context, the achieved spatial separation cross-validation R² of 0.851 quantifies the proportion of grade variance structurally explainable by the geological architecture, highlighting the workflow’s capacity to distinguish continuous structural trends from localized random variability. Industrial reconciliation against high-density production data confirms this performance, demonstrating an average grade bias of only 0.79%, compared to 9.68% achieved by Ordinary Kriging. Furthermore, SHAP analysis verifies that these predictions are systematically driven by the non-linear relationship between structural proximity and mineralization. Consequently, this study suggests that incorporating structural distance metrics into regression workflows offers an alternative approach to evaluate the geometric constraints of geological features alongside the localized variability of porphyry mineralization. Full article

Background/Objectives: Spinal cord stimulation (SCS) is an established therapy for chronic refractory pain, but its clinical value depends on whether benefit persists beyond the early post-implant period. Although short-term SCS studies are abundant, reports with follow-up of 24 months or longer are dispersed, methodologically heterogeneous, and difficult to interpret across indications and stimulation platforms. This scoping review aimed to map the clinical literature reporting SCS outcomes at ≥24 months, characterize the represented populations and modalities, summarize the long-term outcome domains assessed, and identify major methodological and clinical gaps in the evidence base. Methods: This PRISMA-ScR-informed scoping review applied a Population–Concept–Context framework. PubMed/MEDLINE and Scopus were searched through April 2026, yielding 6866 records before deduplication. Following staged title/abstract screening, iterative full-text retrieval, and the reconciliation of overlapping publications, 292 unique full-text reports were assessed for eligibility. Studies reporting original clinical SCS data with extractable outcomes at ≥24 months were included. No meta-analysis or formal GRADE assessment was undertaken, as the objective was evidence mapping rather than pooled effect estimation. Results: The final evidence map comprised 65 unique reports representing a cumulative report-level population of 11,518 participants across non-overlapping cohorts. The literature was dominated by non-randomized evidence (55 observational reports; 10 randomized or randomized-derived). The most frequent indication was mixed chronic pain (30/65; 46.2%), followed by failed back surgery syndrome/persistent spinal pain syndrome (FBSS/PSPS; 16/65; 24.6%), chronic back and/or leg pain (6/65; 9.2%), complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS; 5/65; 7.7%), and painful diabetic neuropathy (PDN; 4/65; 6.2%). Most reports involved conventional or unspecified SCS (47/65; 72.3%), with smaller contemporary clusters for 10 kHz high-frequency SCS and ECAP-controlled closed-loop SCS. The most frequently reported outcome domains were pain durability, function and quality of life, device-related outcomes, and opioid use. At a descriptive level, the literature more often supported persistence of benefit than complete erosion of effect, particularly in spinal pain populations and in contemporary PDN and closed-loop SCS cohorts. Interpretation was constrained by outcome heterogeneity, cohort overlap, mixed indication categories, and inconsistent opioid and device-maintenance reporting. Conclusions: The long-term SCS literature supports the view that durable benefit is achievable in a substantial patient subset, particularly in FBSS/PSPS populations, and in more recent evidence, in PDN, nonsurgical refractory back pain, and closed-loop SCS cohorts. The evidence base remains heterogeneous and does not support a uniform certainty-ranked estimate across indications and technologies. Future studies should prioritize indication-specific cohorts, standardized multidomain outcome reporting, and transparent separation of unique cohorts from secondary analyses of the same clinical populations. Full article

This work considers the performance and feasibility of a challenge-response pair (CRP)-based key generation method integrated with multi-wavelength Quantum Key Distribution (QKD). In this design, Alice and Bob use independently derived information from the CRP mechanism to encode and recover the key without disclosing helper data. Simulations show that even when up to 40% of the data is corrupted, error-free key recovery is possible with longer response lengths. Another new advantage of this method is that eavesdropper detection is performed using only the statistics of the received quantum stream, as opposed to sacrificing a portion of the key for public comparison, as is required in other QKD schemes. The CRP mechanism and encoding scheme are explained, and the results of key recovery and error detection across various levels of data corruption are presented. The results show that according to the studied conditions, reliable key recovery and eavesdropper detection are possible without publicly comparing the key or using helper data, and it suggests that this approach can reduce classical reconciliation reliance and allow for reliable key recovery in noisy settings without extending security thresholds. Full article

The retrofitting of existing stadiums with retractable roof systems presents a complex interdisciplinary challenge, requiring the reconciliation of aged structural capacity with modern performance demands. This paper investigates the engineering design and analysis of a new retractable roof system for the Ningbo (Yinzhou) Tennis Center, a facility originally completed in 2007 and now requiring an upgrade to host higher-tier WTA 500 events. The retrofit is further complicated by increased seismic design requirements and the need to preserve the existing structure. To address these constraints, this study proposes a novel, structurally independent roof system comprising 12 radially deployable units supported by an external single-layer spatial grid and lambda-shaped columns. A multidisciplinary approach integrates structural engineering, mechanical systems, and architectural technology. Key innovations include (1) the selection and detailed modeling of a rack-and-pinion drive mechanism, with a floating engagement design to accommodate dynamic load transfer; (2) a two-stage analytical framework employing both sub-assembly and integrated assembly finite element models to capture the unique mechanical behavior and coupling effects between the new and existing structures; (3) the strategic implementation of circumferential hoop cables to counteract uplift forces and redirect the internal force distribution in the supporting bifurcated columns; and (4) the validation of structural integrity through comprehensive static, stability, and seismic gap analyses, informed by wind tunnel testing. The results demonstrate that the proposed system satisfies all strength, stiffness, and stability criteria under multiple operational states (open, closed, and transitional) and meets the enhanced seismic fortification standards. This research provides a validated theoretical foundation and practical implementation guidelines for this specific stadium retrofit, demonstrating a viable pathway for extending the service life of aging sports infrastructure, with insights that may inform similar urban renewal projects under comparable conditions. Full article

Theodore R. Weber, founding member and past president of the Society of Christian Ethics, developed a distinctive political theology based on John Wesley’s soteriology. Weber argued that a fully developed concept of the political image of God, which humans reflect in their social and institutional contexts, would move beyond the individualistic focus of Wesley’s ordo salutis, allowing Wesleyans a shared language to talk about political institutions and social ethics distinct from the order of preservation and order of creation approaches. Weber’s understanding of political sanctification, in which individuals and institutions contribute to God’s redemptive work of reconciliation, is a unique contribution to political theology. Weber argued that politics is part of discipleship but cautioned against attempts to Christianize society. His Wesleyan political theology provides parameters for faithful political action in refuting and working against a Christian Nationalist agenda in the United States of America. This article offers an appraisal of Weber’s Wesleyan political theology through an extensive review of his writings on the topic. The method engages in close textual readings of Weber’s publications, providing a clear synthesis of the major themes in his scholarly writings spanning over four decades. The purpose is to provide a cogent overview of Weber’s perspective and approach so that his legacy of writings may continue to inform new scholarly audiences. Full article

Background/Objectives: Accurate drug allergy documentation is essential for patient safety; however, documentation quality remains poor worldwide. In resource-limited settings that rely on paper records, allergy information may become fragmented across multiple forms, and evidence on concordance between paper-based documentation systems is limited. This audit assessed concordance between clinical notes and drug Kardex records, and completeness of drug allergy documentation entries, in a manual hospital system. Methods: This retrospective clinical audit, reported in accordance with SQUIRE 2.0 guidelines, examined 88 randomly selected patient records from 525 consecutive admissions to a general medicine ward in Pakistan during June–July 2024, retrospectively reviewed in August 2024. The audit assessed allergy status documentation in clinical notes and the drug Kardex, evaluated completeness against five internationally recommended elements (drug name, reaction description, severity, date, and treatment), and measured inter-system concordance using McNemar’s test and Cohen’s kappa. Results: Drug allergy status was documented in 25.0% of clinical notes (95% CI: 16.5–35.4%) versus 94.3% of drug Kardex records (95% CI: 87.2–98.1%), representing a 69.3 percentage-point gap (McNemar χ² = 59.06, p < 0.001). Inter-system agreement was poor (κ = 0.0079; 95% CI: −0.046 to 0.062), with an overall concordance of 28.4%. Discordant pairs showed that undocumented allergy status was far more likely in clinical notes than in the drug Kardex (OR = 62.00). Kardex-only documentation occurred in 62 of 88 patients (70.5%). Among nine patients with documented allergy history in at least one source, none met the five-element completeness standards (0%; 95% CI: 0.0–33.6%). Recorded entries were generic statements such as “drug allergy” or “allergic to antibiotics” without clinically actionable details. Conclusions: Drug allergy documentation showed two major quality failures: poor concordance between parallel paper records and lack of actionable detail in recorded entries. The two systems functioned independently rather than as complementary safety checks, with allergy information often present in the drug Kardex but absent from clinical notes. This Kardex-only failure mode may be a practical target for quality improvement through structured five-element templates, prompts for clinicians to review the drug Kardex, and interdisciplinary allergy-reconciliation workflows. These strategies require prospective evaluation in this setting. Full article