Effective doctor-patient communication skills training optimizes functional organization of intrinsic brain architecture:a restingstate functional MRI study

We studied the influence of doctor-patient communication skills training on brain functional architecture using resting-state functional MRI（rs-fMRI） with a regional homogeneity（ReHo） method. Ten medical students participated in the study. A 1-year long doctor-patient communication skills training program was conducted. RsfMRI data were collected at baseline, one month and one year after training. There was a significant increase in the communication skills test average scores between baseline and 1-month duration of training（P〈0.001）. After one month of communication skills training, medical students had decreased ReHo in the right superior temporal gyrus compared with the baseline. After one year of communication skills training, students had increased ReHo in multiple regions and decreased ReHo in several regions（P 〈0.05, Alphasim corrected）. The change of ReHo values in the superior temporal gyrus negatively correlated with the change of communication skills scale score between one month after communication skills training and baseline（r=-0.734, P= 0.036）. The training program we used can be an effective approach of improving doctor-patient communication skills, and the training resulted in functional plasticity of the brain’s architecture toward optimizing locally functional organization.

Research on psychological factors which influence Doctor-Patient communications among outpatients

An Outpatient Department is the first point of contact with the hospital, and good Doctor-Patient communication would improve the service quality of the hospital, so it is important to construct a harmonious Doctor-Patient relationship. This article, from the perspective of psychology, investigates into the common psychological factors which affect the Doctor-Patient communication, the appearance of the communication problem, and make suggestions on possible solutions accordingly.

Functional Health Literacy and Doctor-Patient Communication: Experiences of HIV/AIDS Patients in Homa Bay County, Kenya

Patient involvement in the health care process has been documented as a critical component of successful disease management. However, inadequate functional health literacy among patients is a well-known barrier to effective doctor-patient communication, which has an adverse effect on health outcomes. This study aimed at investigating the association of functional health literacy and doctor-patient communication among HIV/AIDS patients in Homa Bay County, Kenya. It was a cross-sectional hospital-based survey conducted among 362 HIV/AIDS patients receiving care at the eight sub-county hospitals of Homa Bay county. Data was collected using a self-administered structured questionnaire. Cronbach’s alpha and confirmatory factor analysis tests were used to ascertain the reliability and validity of study instruments, while Logistic regression logistic analysis was used to measure the association between functional health literacy and doctor-patient communication. 51% of the respondents were females, and the majority (30.9%) of respondents fell in the age group of 45 years and above. The respondents’ functional health literacy levels were inadequate at weighted means scores of 3.23 [SD 1.31]. The study further established that functional health literacy significantly influenced doctor-patient communication [Nagelkerke R square = 0.318]. There is, therefore, a need to document the determinants of functional health literacy to improve it and make doctor-patient interaction an enjoyable and meaningful experience.

A Study on Doctor-patient Communication under Defler Interaction Process Model

At present,doctor-patient relationship has become a sensitive topic in society,and frequent doctor-patient communication problems have become an important factor affecting the tension of the relationship.From the perspective of communication,this paper analyzes the causes of doctor-patient communication barriers based on the communication mode of interaction process proposed by Deffler and puts forward relevant solutions.

Doctor-patient communication starts from medical students

Currently,with the increasing tensionin doctor-patient relationship and medical disputes,it is of great practical importance to train medical students’communication skills in order to establisha harmonious doctor-patient relationship to improve the quality of clinical teaching.This paper emphasizes the importance of cultivation of communication skills in medical education and suggests ways to improve communication skills among medical students.

Distributed Nash Equilibrium Seeking Strategies Under Quantized Communication

This paper is concerned with distributed Nash equi librium seeking strategies under quantized communication. In the proposed seeking strategy, a projection operator is synthesized with a gradient search method to achieve the optimization o players' objective functions while restricting their actions within required non-empty, convex and compact domains. In addition, a leader-following consensus protocol, in which quantized informa tion flows are utilized, is employed for information sharing among players. More specifically, logarithmic quantizers and uniform quantizers are investigated under both undirected and connected communication graphs and strongly connected digraphs, respec tively. Through Lyapunov stability analysis, it is shown that play ers' actions can be steered to a neighborhood of the Nash equilib rium with logarithmic and uniform quantizers, and the quanti fied convergence error depends on the parameter of the quan tizer for both undirected and directed cases. A numerical exam ple is given to verify the theoretical results.

Communication Resource-Efficient Vehicle Platooning Control With Various Spacing Policies

Platooning represents one of the key features that connected automated vehicles may possess as it allows multiple automated vehicles to be maneuvered cooperatively with small headways on roads. However, a critical challenge in accomplishing automated vehicle platoons is to deal with the effects of intermittent and sporadic vehicle-to-vehicle data transmissions caused by limited wireless communication resources. This paper addresses the co-design problem of dynamic event-triggered communication scheduling and cooperative adaptive cruise control for a convoy of automated vehicles with diverse spacing policies. The central aim is to achieve automated vehicle platooning under various gap references with desired platoon stability and spacing performance requirements, while simultaneously improving communication efficiency. Toward this aim, a dynamic event-triggered scheduling mechanism is developed such that the intervehicle data transmissions are scheduled dynamically and efficiently over time. Then, a tractable co-design criterion on the existence of both the admissible event-driven cooperative adaptive cruise control law and the desired scheduling mechanism is derived. Finally, comparative simulation results are presented to substantiate the effectiveness and merits of the obtained results.

Falcon Optimization Algorithm-Based Energy Efficient Communication Protocol for Cluster-Based Vehicular Networks

Rapid development in Information Technology(IT)has allowed several novel application regions like large outdoor vehicular networks for Vehicle-to-Vehicle(V2V)transmission.Vehicular networks give a safe and more effective driving experience by presenting time-sensitive and location-aware data.The communication occurs directly between V2V and Base Station(BS)units such as the Road Side Unit(RSU),named as a Vehicle to Infrastructure(V2I).However,the frequent topology alterations in VANETs generate several problems with data transmission as the vehicle velocity differs with time.Therefore,the scheme of an effectual routing protocol for reliable and stable communications is significant.Current research demonstrates that clustering is an intelligent method for effectual routing in a mobile environment.Therefore,this article presents a Falcon Optimization Algorithm-based Energy Efficient Communication Protocol for Cluster-based Routing(FOA-EECPCR)technique in VANETS.The FOA-EECPCR technique intends to group the vehicles and determine the shortest route in the VANET.To accomplish this,the FOA-EECPCR technique initially clusters the vehicles using FOA with fitness functions comprising energy,distance,and trust level.For the routing process,the Sparrow Search Algorithm(SSA)is derived with a fitness function that encompasses two variables,namely,energy and distance.A series of experiments have been conducted to exhibit the enhanced performance of the FOA-EECPCR method.The experimental outcomes demonstrate the enhanced performance of the FOA-EECPCR approach over other current methods.

Cooperative User-Scheduling and Resource Allocation Optimization for Intelligent Reflecting Surface Enhanced LEO Satellite Communication

Lower Earth Orbit(LEO) satellite becomes an important part of complementing terrestrial communication due to its lower orbital altitude and smaller propagation delay than Geostationary satellite. However, the LEO satellite communication system cannot meet the requirements of users when the satellite-terrestrial link is blocked by obstacles. To solve this problem, we introduce Intelligent reflect surface(IRS) for improving the achievable rate of terrestrial users in LEO satellite communication. We investigated joint IRS scheduling, user scheduling, power and bandwidth allocation(JIRPB) optimization algorithm for improving LEO satellite system throughput.The optimization problem of joint user scheduling and resource allocation is formulated as a non-convex optimization problem. To cope with this problem, the nonconvex optimization problem is divided into resource allocation optimization sub-problem and scheduling optimization sub-problem firstly. Second, we optimize the resource allocation sub-problem via alternating direction multiplier method(ADMM) and scheduling sub-problem via Lagrangian dual method repeatedly.Third, we prove that the proposed resource allocation algorithm based ADMM approaches sublinear convergence theoretically. Finally, we demonstrate that the proposed JIRPB optimization algorithm improves the LEO satellite communication system throughput.

Cooperative UAV search strategy based on DMPC-AACO algorithm in restricted communication scenarios

Improvement of integrated battlefield situational awareness in complex environments involving dynamic factors such as restricted communications and electromagnetic interference(EMI)has become a contentious research problem.In certain mission environments,due to the impact of many interference sources on real-time communication or mission requirements such as the need to implement communication regulations,the mission stages are represented as a dynamic combination of several communication-available and communication-unavailable stages.Furthermore,the data interaction between unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs)can only be performed in specific communication-available stages.Traditional cooperative search algorithms cannot handle such situations well.To solve this problem,this study constructed a distributed model predictive control(DMPC)architecture for a collaborative control of UAVs and used the Voronoi diagram generation method to re-plan the search areas of all UAVs in real time to avoid repetition of search areas and UAV collisions while improving the search efficiency and safety factor.An attention mechanism ant-colony optimization(AACO)algorithm is proposed for UAV search-control decision planning.The search strategy is adaptively updated by introducing an attention mechanism for regular instruction information,a priori information,and emergent information of the mission to satisfy different search expectations to the maximum extent.Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieves better search performance than traditional algorithms in restricted communication constraint scenarios.

Emotional differences based on comments on doctor-patient disputes with varying levels of severity

BACKGROUND The risks associated with negative doctor-patient relationships have seriously hindered the healthy development of medical and healthcare and aroused wide-spread concern in society.The number of public comments on doctor-patient relationship risk events reflects the degree to which the public pays attention to such events.Thirty incidents of doctor-patient disputes were collected from Weibo and TikTok,and 3655 related comments were extracted.The number of comment sentiment words was extracted,and the comment sentiment value was calculated.The Kruskal-Wallis H test was used to compare differences between each variable group at different levels of incidence.Spearman’s correlation analysis was used to examine associations between variables.Regression analysis was used to explore factors influencing scores of comments on incidents.RESULTS The study results showed that public comments on media reports of doctor-patient disputes at all levels are mainly dominated by“good”and“disgust”emotional states.There was a significant difference in the comment scores and the number of partial emotion words between comments on varying levels of severity of doctor-patient disputes.The comment score was positively correlated with the number of emotion words related to positive,good,and happy)and negatively correlated with the number of emotion words related to negative,anger,disgust,fear,and sadness.CONCLUSION The number of emotion words related to negative,anger,disgust,fear,and sadness directly influences comment scores,and the severity of the incident level indirectly influences comment scores.

A survey on semantic communications:Technologies,solutions,applications and challenges

Semantic Communication(SC)has emerged as a novel communication paradigm that provides a receiver with meaningful information extracted from the source to maximize information transmission throughput in wireless networks,beyond the theoretical capacity limit.Despite the extensive research on SC,there is a lack of comprehensive survey on technologies,solutions,applications,and challenges for SC.In this article,the development of SC is first reviewed and its characteristics,architecture,and advantages are summarized.Next,key technologies such as semantic extraction,semantic encoding,and semantic segmentation are discussed and their corresponding solutions in terms of efficiency,robustness,adaptability,and reliability are summarized.Applications of SC to UAV communication,remote image sensing and fusion,intelligent transportation,and healthcare are also presented and their strategies are summarized.Finally,some challenges and future research directions are presented to provide guidance for further research of SC.

Building Semantic Communication System via Molecules:An End-to-End Training Approach

The concept of semantic communication provides a novel approach for applications in scenarios with limited communication resources.In this paper,we propose an end-to-end(E2E)semantic molecular communication system,aiming to enhance the efficiency of molecular communication systems by reducing the transmitted information.Specifically,following the joint source channel coding paradigm,the network is designed to encode the task-relevant information into the concentration of the information molecules,which is robust to the degradation of the molecular communication channel.Furthermore,we propose a channel network to enable the E2E learning over the non-differentiable molecular channel.Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the semantic molecular communication system over the conventional methods in classification tasks.

Reconfigurable MIMO-based self-powered battery-less light communication system

Simultaneous lightwave information and power transfer (SLIPT), co-existing with optical wireless communication,holds an enormous potential to provide continuous charging to remote Internet of Things (IoT) devices while ensuringconnectivity. Combining SLIPT with an omnidirectional receiver, we can leverage a higher power budget whilemaintaining a stable connection, a major challenge for optical wireless communication systems. Here, we design amultiplexed SLIPT-based system comprising an array of photodetectors (PDs) arranged in a 3 × 3 configuration. Thesystem enables decoding information from multiple light beams while simultaneously harvesting energy. The PDs canswiftly switch between photoconductive and photovoltaic modes to maximize information transfer rates and provideon-demand energy harvesting. Additionally, we investigated the ability to decode information and harvest energywith a particular quadrant set of PDs from the array, allowing beam tracking and spatial diversity. The design wasexplored in a smaller version for higher data rates and a bigger one for higher power harvesting. We report a selfpoweringdevice that can achieve a gross data rate of 25.7 Mbps from a single-input single-output (SISO) and an 85.2Mbps net data rate in a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) configuration. Under a standard AMT1.5 illumination,the device can harvest up to 87.33 mW, around twice the power needed to maintain the entire system. Our workpaves the way for deploying autonomous IoT devices in harsh environments and their potential use in spaceapplications.

Recent Developments in Authentication Schemes Used in Machine-Type Communication Devices in Machine-to-Machine Communication: Issues and Challenges

Machine-to-machine (M2M) communication plays a fundamental role in autonomous IoT (Internet of Things)-based infrastructure, a vital part of the fourth industrial revolution. Machine-type communication devices(MTCDs) regularly share extensive data without human intervention while making all types of decisions. Thesedecisions may involve controlling sensitive ventilation systems maintaining uniform temperature, live heartbeatmonitoring, and several different alert systems. Many of these devices simultaneously share data to form anautomated system. The data shared between machine-type communication devices (MTCDs) is prone to risk dueto limited computational power, internal memory, and energy capacity. Therefore, securing the data and devicesbecomes challenging due to factors such as dynamic operational environments, remoteness, harsh conditions,and areas where human physical access is difficult. One of the crucial parts of securing MTCDs and data isauthentication, where each devicemust be verified before data transmission. SeveralM2Mauthentication schemeshave been proposed in the literature, however, the literature lacks a comprehensive overview of current M2Mauthentication techniques and the challenges associated with them. To utilize a suitable authentication schemefor specific scenarios, it is important to understand the challenges associated with it. Therefore, this article fillsthis gap by reviewing the state-of-the-art research on authentication schemes in MTCDs specifically concerningapplication categories, security provisions, and performance efficiency.

Satellite Communications with 5G, B5G, and 6G: Challenges and Prospects

Satellite communications, pivotal for global connectivity, are increasingly converging with cutting-edge mobile networks, notably 5G, B5G, and 6G. This amalgamation heralds the promise of universal, high-velocity communication, yet it is not without its challenges. Paramount concerns encompass spectrum allocation, the harmonization of network architectures, and inherent latency issues in satellite transmissions. Potential mitigations, such as dynamic spectrum sharing and the deployment of edge computing, are explored as viable solutions. Looking ahead, the advent of quantum communications within satellite frameworks and the integration of AI spotlight promising research trajectories. These advancements aim to foster a seamless and synergistic coexistence between satellite communications and next-gen mobile networks.

Single Photon Detection Technology in Underwater Wireless Optical Communication:Modulation Modes and Error Correction Coding Analysis

This study explores the application of single photon detection(SPD)technology in underwater wireless optical communication(UWOC)and analyzes the influence of different modulation modes and error correction coding types on communication performance.The study investigates the impact of on-off keying(OOK)and 2-pulse-position modulation(2-PPM)on the bit error rate(BER)in single-channel intensity and polarization multiplexing.Furthermore,it compares the error correction performance of low-density parity check(LDPC)and Reed-Solomon(RS)codes across different error correction coding types.The effects of unscattered photon ratio and depolarization ratio on BER are also verified.Finally,a UWOC system based on SPD is constructed,achieving 14.58 Mbps with polarization OOK multiplexing modulation and 4.37 Mbps with polarization 2-PPM multiplexing modulation using LDPC code error correction.

Call for Papers--Feature Topic Vol. 22, No. 3, 2025 Special Issue of China Communications: Convergence of 6G empowered Edge Intelligence and Generative AI: Theories, Algorithms, and Applications

Generative artificial intelligence(AI), as an emerging paradigm in content generation, has demonstrated its great potentials in creating high-fidelity data including images, texts, and videos. Nowadays wireless networks and applications have been rapidly evolving from achieving “connected things” to embracing “connected intelligence”.

INTELLIGENT COVERT COMMUNICATION

As increasing amounts of private and confidential information are transmitted over wireless networks,their openness and broadcast pose significant security risks.In high-security scenarios like healthcare and financial activities,initial exposure of transmitted information can lead to serious threats.Covert communication,or low probability of detection(LPD)communication,has gained attention for its ability to hide transmission behaviors.

Multi-wavelength nanowire micro-LEDs for future high speed optical communication

The future of optoelectronics is directed towards small-area light sources,foremost being microLEDs.However,their use has been inhibited so far primarily due to fabrication and integration challenges,which impair efficiency and yield.Recently,bottom-up nanostructures grown using selective area epitaxy have garnered attention as a solution to the aforementioned issues.Prof.Lan Fu et.al.have used this technique to demonstrate uniform p-i-n core-shell InGaAs/InP nanowire array light emitting diodes.The devices are capable of voltage and geometry-controlled multi-wavelength and high-speed operations.Their publication accentuates the wide capabilities of bottom-up nanostructures to resolve the difficulties of nanoscale optoelectronics.