Yan Zhang

• Chinese PLA General Hospital (301 Hospital)

Background Gallbladder cancer is a rare and fatal malignant tumor, and difficult to be found in time due to the atypical symptoms. Early detection and treatment of gallbladder cancer is essential. Methods By evaluating the relationship between clinical features and contrast-enhanced ultrasound nature of 237 cases of gallbladder lesions, the preope...

This paper proposes a new combinatorial auction framework for local energy flexibility markets, which addresses the issue of prosumers' inability to bundle multiple flexibility time intervals. To solve the underlying NP-complete winner determination problems, we present a simple yet powerful heterogeneous tri-partite graph representation and design...

Explainability of AI models is an important topic that can have a significant impact in all domains and applications from autonomous driving to healthcare. The existing approaches to explainable AI (XAI) are mainly limited to simple machine learning algorithms, and the research regarding the explainability-accuracy tradeoff is still in its infancy...

Objectives To investigate the pattern of change over time and predictors for metastasis in indeterminate lymph nodes (LNs) among patients with thyroid cancer post-ablation. Methods We enrolled patients who developed new cervical LNs after papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC) ablation. Changes in the ultrasound characteristics of the indeterminate LN...

Background The presence of cervical lymph node (LN) metastases (LNMs) affects clinical staging and prognosis of thyroid cancer, but the role of conventional B-mode US is limited for preoperative diagnosis of LNMs. The diagnostic value of lymphatic contrast-enhanced US (LCEUS) in thyroid cancer is still being explored. Purpose To explore the diagnos...

Objectives: To evaluate the 5-year follow-up results of radiofrequency ablation (RFA) for benign thyroid nodules (BTNs), and construct pre- and postablation nomogram models to predict regrowth in BTNs undergoing RFA. Methods: According to the occurrence of regrowth, BTNs were divided into two subgroups, the regrowth group and the nonregrowth gro...

Purpose Papillary thyroid cancer (PTC) is often accompanied by cervical lymph node metastases (LNM). This study compared the diagnostic performance of fine needle aspiration (FNA), the combination of FNA and thyroglobulin measurement in the washout (FNA-Tg), and core needle biopsy(CNB) in order to determine the optimal method in detecting cervical...

This study assessed the incidence of mild, moderate and severe adverse events (AEs) and examined their association with age, sex, body region examined, time to event and duration of the AE(s) in a large cohort of patients who underwent contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) with Lumason/SonoVue. In this retrospective observational study, 49,100 patien...

Background To assess the diagnostic efficacy of the computer-aided ultrasonic diagnosis system (CAD system) in differentiating benign and malignant thyroid nodules. Methods The images of 296 thyroid nodules were included in validation sets. The diagnostic efficacy of the CAD system was compared with that of junior physicians and senior physicians,...

Purpose Papillary thyroid cancer (PTC) is often accompanied by cervical lymph node metastases (LNM). This study compared the diagnostic performance of fine needle aspiration (FNA), the combination of FNA and thyroglobulin measurement in the washout (FNA-Tg), and core needle biopsy(CNB) in order to determine the optimal method in detecting cervical...

Purpose To evaluate the efficacy and safety of radiofrequency ablation (RFA) for treating calcified benign thyroid nodules (CBTNs). Methods Fifty-two patients with 52 CBTNs who underwent RFA in our hospital were included in this retrospective study. According to the size of calcifications, CBTNs were divided into two groups: the punctate echogenic...

Objective To evaluate the efficacy of ultrasound and computed tomography (CT) in diagnosing cervical lymph node metastasis (CLNM) of papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC). Methods The patients with PTC treated by surgery in the Chinese PLA General Hospital from January 2016 to January 2021 were selected for analysis.All the patients underwent preoperat...

Objectives Lymph node metastases (LNMs) could be stratified into clinical N1 (cN1) and microscopic pN1 (pathological N1), which bear different biological behavior and prognosis. Our study aimed to investigate the associations between LNMs and primary tumor’s US (ultrasound) and CEUS (contrast-enhanced ultrasound) characteristics based on the strati...

Objective To establish an artificial intelligence model based on B-mode thyroid ultrasound images to predict central compartment lymph node metastasis(CLNM)in patients with papillary thyroid carcinoma(PTC). Methods We retrieved the clinical manifestations and ultrasound images of the tumors in 309 patients with surgical histologically confirmed PTC...

Energy saving for mobile devices is considered to be one of prospective benefits of mobile edge computing (MEC) networks, where computation-intensive tasks can be offloaded from the mobile devices to their associated MEC servers for execution. Extra energy consumption for data migration should therefore be less than the energy consumption for local...

Background To evaluate the correlation and agreement between superb micro-vascular imaging (SMI) mode and the contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) mode for the ablative completeness and the volumes of ablation lesions to determine the clinical application value of SMI in follow-up after radiofrequency ablation. Methods From April 2020 to June 2020,...

Objective Ultrasonography-guided radiofrequency ablation (RFA) is used to treat small low-risk papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC), and has achieved favorable results. However, few studies have compared the outcomes of T1aN0M0 and T1bN0M0 PTC treated with ultrasonography-guided RFA. The objective of this study was to compare the outcomes of patients...

In smart grids, the large-scale integration of distributed renewable energy resources has enabled the provisioning of alternative sources of supply. Peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading among local households is becoming an emerging technique that benefits both energy prosumers and operators. Since conventional energy supply is still needed to help fi...

Purpose We aimed to compare the efficacy and safety of radiofrequency ablation (RFA) to that of surgical resection (SR) in patients with T1bN0M0 papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC) in different age groups. Methods Totally, 204 patients with an isolated, solitary, intrathyroidal T1bN0M0 PTC, who underwent either RFA (n=94) or SR (n=110) between April...

Integrating mobile edge computing (MEC) with small cell networks has been conceived as a promising solution to provide pervasive computing services. However, the interactions among small cells due to inter-cell interference, the diverse application-specific requirements, as well as the highly dynamic wireless environment make it challenging to desi...

Purpose To report a new feature of contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) and its diagnostic performance for the prediction of papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC). Methods This retrospective study was conducted from October 2018 to March 2019, including 276 patients with 308 thyroid nodules who underwent CEUS examinations prior to surgery (90 patients,...

Objective To establish a prediction model for the short-term efficacy of percutaneous ultrasound-guided radiofrequency ablation(RFA)in the treatment of papillary thyroid microcarcinoma(PTMC). Methods We retrospectively analyzed the preoperative and follow-up data of 159 patients with PTMC who underwent percutaneous ultrasound-guided RFA treatment i...

Objective To explore the value of trans-lymphatic contrast-enhanced ultrasound(CEUS)in the diagnosis of cervical lymph node metastasis of thyroid cancer. Methods The patients with suspected thyroid cancer underwent conventional ultrasound and trans-lymphatic CEUS examinations before the biopsy.The differences in ultrasound and CEUS characteristics...

Objective To explore the association between contrast-enhanced ultrasound and risk of tumor recurrence in papillary thyroid carcinoma(PTC). Methods A total of 287 PTCs in 287 patients who underwent surgery,conventional ultrasound,and contrast-enhanced ultrasound(CEUS)were enrolled in this study.According to 2015 American Thyroid Association(ATA)Mod...

Objective To compare the health-related quality of life(HRQoL)of patients with papillary thyroid microcarcinoma(PTMC)treated by different modalities. Methods The PTMC patients after treatment who came to our department for follow-up from October to December in 2019 were enrolled and assigned into three groups according to treatment modalities:radio...

Purpose Differentiation between follicular thyroid carcinomas (FTCs) and follicular thyroid adenomas (FTAs) is difficult and the sonographic features of FTC are not yet fully established. The purpose of this study is to explore the sonographic features of FTC and the value of sonography in differentiating FTCs from FTAs. Patients and Methods A tot...

The distributed and heterogeneous framework in 5G heterogeneous networks (HetNet) makes it vulnerable to attacks of different kinds. Nodes for improving the network security are therefore important to eliminate such critical threats. Without cooperation or with limited cooperation, these nodes are substantially restricted in their protecting capaci...

Blockchain is a promising emerging technology that is envisioned to play a key role in establishing secure and reliable Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems without the involvement of any third party. Hyperledger Fabric, a permissioned blockchain system that can yield high throughput and low consensus delay, has shown its capability in enhancing sec...

Objectives To evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of preoperative contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) to detect extracapsular extension (ECE) and identify the relationship between ECE and nodule enhancement patterns in patients with papillary thyroid cancer (PTC).Methods Patients with suspected thyroid cancer underwent ultrasound (US) and CEUS examina...

Purpose To evaluate the efficacy and safety of ultrasonography (US)-guided radiofrequency ablation (RFA) for treating T2N0M0 papillary thyroid cancer (PTC). Methods This retrospective study was approved by the ethics committee of Chinese PLA General Hospital (S2019-211-01). Twelve patients with T2N0M0 PTC (five men and seven women with a mean age...

Purpose To evaluate the efficacy and safety of radiofrequency ablation for low-risk papillary thyroid microcarcinoma (PTMC) in patients aged 55 years or older. Methods This retrospective study included 95 patients aged 55 years or older who underwent radiofrequency ablation (RFA) for PTMCs between June 2014 and January 2019. Incidence and duration...

Objectives To construct a prognostic nomogram to predict the involution of the ablation zone for patients with low-risk papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC) who underwent radiofrequency ablation (RFA) treatment. Methods Data from 204 patients with low-risk PTC without extrathyroidal extension or cervical lymph node or distant metastasis who underwent...

The increasing penetration of renewable energy sources and electric vehicles (EVs) poses a significant challenge for the power grid operator in terms of increasing peak load and power quality reduction. Moreover, there is a growing demand for fast charging services in smart grids. Addressing the growing demand from fast charging services is challen...

In peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading, the incorporation of distributed energy resources with unprotected data, originating from sources such as home energy management systems that are connected through the Internet, provokes vulnerabilities that can manifest security breaches. In this article, two threat scenarios based on a novel false data inject...

Objective To investigate the short-term outcome of T1bN0M0 papillary thyroid cancer after ultrasonography-guided radiofrequency ablation(RFA). Methods Eighty-nine patients with T1bN0M0 papillary thyroid cancer who were treated with ultrasonography-guided RFA in our center from April 2014 to January 2019 were retrospectively analyzed.Trans-isthmus a...

Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) objective is to disaggregate the total power consumption of a building into individual appliance-level profiles. This gives insights to consumers to efficiently use energy and realizes smart grid efficiency outcomes. While many studies focus on achieving accurate models, few of them address the models generaliza...

In unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks, UAVsassisted wireless power transfer is a promising approach to charge low-power smart devices for energy replenishment. However, security and privacy concerns associated with the energy micro-transactions in untrusted wireless trading environment present serious challenges. In this paper, we exploit Direc...

Objective Ultrasonography‐guided radiofrequency ablation (RFA) has been used to treat low risk small papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC), and yielded promising results. However, little research has been performed on the application of RFA for the management of T1bN0M0 PTC. Therefore, This study was to compare the mid‐term outcome of RFA with that of...

Objective To establish a predictive model for central compartment lymph node metastasis (CLNM) in patients with papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC).Methods We retrospectively evaluated patients with histologically confirmed PTC treated in Chinese PLA General Hospital between January 2018 and January 2019.Totally 855 patients undergoing thyroidectomy...

Objective To evaluate the diagnostic value of contrast-enhanced ultrasound(CEUS)in thyroid extrathyroidal extension(ETE)of papillary thyroid carcinoma(PTC).Methods Totally 172 PTC patients(184 thyroid nodules)were examined by conventional ultrasound(US)and CEUS before operation.Sonographic features of thyroid nodules and the relationship between no...

Uncoordinated charging of a rapidly growing number of electric vehicles (EVs) and the uncertainty associated with renewable energy resources may constitute a critical issue for the electric mobility (E-Mobility) in the transportation system especially during peak hours. To overcome this dire scenario, we introduce a stochastic game to study the com...

Objectives To develop a nomogram based on postoperative clinical and ultrasound findings to quantify the probability of central compartment lymph node metastases (CLNM).MethodsA total of 952 patients with histologically confirmed papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC) were included in this retrospective study and assigned to three groups based on sex an...

Wind power is a clean and widely deployed alternative to reducing our dependence on fossil fuel power generation. Under this trend, more turbines will be installed in wind farms. However, the inspection of the turbines in an offshore wind farm is a challenging task because of the harsh environment (e.g., rough sea, strong wind, and so on) that lead...

Background: Papillary thyroid micro-carcinoma (PTMC) typically carries an excellent prognosis regardless of the treatment option pursued. Radiofrequency ablation (RFA) for thyroid disease has been utilized for benign lesions and in patients who are poor surgical candidates for thyroid cancers with compression symptoms, but the efficacy and limitat...

Purpose To evaluate the efficacy and safety of ultrasonography (US)-guided radiofrequency ablation (RFA) for treating low-risk T1bN0M0 papillary thyroid cancer (PTC). Methods This retrospective study was approved by the ethics committee of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army General Hospital (S2019-211-01). Sixty-six patients with T1bN0M0 PTC (14...

Purpose To explore the association of demographic characteristics, clinical symptoms and the fear of the disease progression factors with the physical and mental summary components of the health-related of life (HRQoL) of the papillary thyroid microcarcinoma (PTMC) patients undergoing radiofrequency ablation (RFA). Methods 123 PTMC survivors under...

To analyze the potential associations of ultrasound-guided fine-needle aspiration(FNA),BRAF V600E gene mutation detection,and the combination of these two techniques with the clinicopathological features of papillary thyroid cancer(PTC). Methods Patients with PTC confirmed by surgery from April 2016 to July 2017 were included in this study.The rela...

Background: Chronic lymphocytic thyroiditis (CLT) is an autoimmune disease commonly associated with papillary thyroid carcinoma characterized by a smaller primary tumor size at presentation. The efficacy and safety of ultrasound-guided radiofrequency ablation (RFA) for papillary thyroid microcarcinoma (PTMC) coexisting with CLT is still unknown....

Objective To compare the values of elasticity imaging(EI)and Virtual Touch TM tissue imaging and quantification(VTIQ)in diagnosing thyroid nodules and explore the factors influencing the accuracy of these two techniques.Methods Totally 62 patients who were planned to receive surgery for thyroid nodules underwent conventional ultrasound,EI,and VTIQ...

In recent years, green energy management systems (smart grid, smart buildings, and so on) have received huge research and industrial attention with the explosive development of smart cities. By introducing Internet of Things (IoT) technology, smart cities are able to achieve exquisite energy management by ubiquitous monitoring and reliable communic...

Background Contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) scanning can detect differences between thyroid tumors and surrounding tissues. However, enhancement patterns within nodules are insufficient for the diagnosis of thyroid carcinomas. The peripheral enhancement patterns of nodules may provide useful diagnostic information. The objective of this study wa...

Pancreatic trauma (PT) is a severe abdominal injury that is often combined with multiple organ injury. It is a severe disease that is difficult to diagnose and has a high mortality rate, particularly for grade III PT. The pathogenesis, disease progress and complications have not been fully investigated due to the lack of a reliable animal model. To...

Energy hub integrates various energy conversion and storage technologies, which can yield complementarity among multiple energy and provide consumers with stable energy services, such as electricity, heating, and cooling. This enables energy hub to be an ideal energy system design for smart and green buildings. This paper proposes a distributed auc...

Objective To assess the effectiveness and safety of ultrasound-guided percutaneous radiofrequency ablation (RFA) for nonsurgical treatment of metastatic lymph nodes (LNs) in the neck from papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC). Methods Totally 45 PTC patients who had been treated with total thyroidectomy and radioiodine therapy were enrolled in this ret...

This study aimed to evaluate the feasibility and repeatability of the flash-replenishment method in contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) perfusion imaging and assess quantitatively microvascular perfusion in the liver. Twenty healthy New Zealand rabbits were submitted to CEUS perfusion imaging with continuous intravenous infusion. Using flash-replen...

The aim of this study was to evaluate microvascular perfusion after liver ischemia-reperfusion injury (IRI) in rabbits using the "flash-replenishment" method of contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) perfusion imaging. Twenty-eight rabbits underwent either 30, 60 or 90 min of ischemia and 120 min of reperfusion. CEUS perfusion imaging was performed us...

Analysis of Internet of Things (IoT) sensor data is a key for achieving city smartness. In this paper a multi-tier fog computing model with large-scale data analytics service is proposed for smart cities applications. The multi-tier fog is consisted of ad-hoc fogs and dedicated fogs with opportunistic and dedicated computing resources, respectively...

We propose a localized Peer-to-Peer (P2P) electricity trading model for locally buying and selling electricity among Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs) in smart grids. Unlike traditional schemes, that transport electricity over long distances and through complex electricity transportation meshes, our proposed model achieves demand response by...

Cyber social computing has brought great changes and potential intelligent technologies for wireless networks. Among these technologies, information caching strategies are promising approaches to achieving lower delay, higher throughput and energy efficiency (EE) of user equipment (UE) in 5G wireless networks, by deploying intelligent caching and c...

Cloud-based vehicular networks are a promising paradigm to improve vehicular services through distributing computation tasks between remote clouds and local vehicular terminals. To further reduce the latency and the transmission cost of the computation off-loading, we propose a cloud-based mobileedge computing (MEC) off-loading framework in vehicul...

Multimedia crowdsourcing possesses a huge potential to actualize many new applications that are expected to yield tremendous benefits in diverse fields including environment monitoring, emergency rescues during natural catastrophes, online education, sports and entertainment. Nonetheless, multimedia crowdsourcing unfolds new challenges such as big...

Cloud-assisted cognitive machine-to-machine co- mmunications (CM2M) is a new paradigm to improve the mobile services, which have drawn considerable attention in industry and academia. In this paper, we consider the quality of protection (QoP) of information transmission in cloud-assisted CM2M communications. In such an environment, the secondary M2...

Energy Internet is a vision of future power systems, which will achieve highly efcient interconnection among various types of energy resources, storage, and loads, and enable P2P energy delivery on a large scale. To enhance the flexibility and efciency of Energy Internet, this article employs the methodology of SDN in Energy Internet and proposes a...

Demand response (DR) plays a significant role in enhancing the reliability of future smart grids. Electric vehicles (EVs) can be exploited to facilitate DR because their batteries, as a form of flexible energy storage, can be controlled to consume energy from or feed energy back to the grid depending on user needs. However, EVs’ mobility is inheren...

A dedicated spectrum portion at 5 GHz is available to provide services in vehicular environments (e.g., road safety, traffic efficiency, comfort and infotainment services). The multitude of non-safety critical services offered by roadside and mobile providers can be accessed by vehicles under radio coverage if they listen to the advertisement messa...

Cognitive radio is a promising technology for next-generation wireless networks in order to efficiently utilize the limited spectrum resources and satisfy the rapidly increasing demand for wireless applications and services. Security is a very important but not well addressed issue in CR networks. In this article we focus on security problems arisi...

The densification of small cells (SCs) and caching at the edge are two promising approaches to improve the network throughput, reduce end-to-end delay and backhaul cost in future 5G wireless networks. However, current analysis and design only focus on the system state at a certain time, neglecting the temporal-spatial fluctuation of traffic and the...

Vehicular networks are expected to accommodate a large number of data-heavy mobile devices and multiapplication services, whereas it faces a significant challenge when we need to deal with the ever-increasing demand of mobile traffic. In this paper, we present a new paradigm of fifth-generation (5G)-enabled vehicular networks to improve network cap...

The FGIR calls for reliable, flexible, and green industrial networks to support intelligent manufacturing. This article proposes a new architecture of SDIN and then presents the related key technologies. The proposed architecture adopts an all-IP-based flat structure, and can adaptively reconfigure networks according to the dynamic change of produc...

As one of the promising branches of the Internet of Things, the cloud-enabled Internet of Vehicles (CE-IoV) is envisioned to serve as an essential data sensing, exchanging, and processing platform with powerful computing and storage capabilities for future intelligent transportation systems. The CE-IoV shows great promise for various emerging appli...

Mobile big data contains vast statistical features in various dimensions, including spatial, temporal, and the underlying social domain. Understanding and exploiting the features of mobile data from a social network perspective will be extremely beneficial to wireless networks, from planning, operation, and maintenance to optimization and marketing...

Frequency, time and places of charging and discharging have critical impact on the Quality of Experience (QoE) of using Electric Vehicles (EVs). EV charging and discharging scheduling schemes should consider both the QoE of using EV and the load capacity of the power grid. In this paper, we design a traveling plan-aware scheduling scheme for EV cha...

In battery-powered Cognitive Machine-to-Machine Communications (CM2M), the energy consumption, opportunis-tic data access capacity and interference to the licensed system need to be optimized simultaneously. We consider this as joint cooperative spectrum sensing and power allocation, and model this as a constraint multiobjective optimization proble...

Mobile big data contains vast statistical features in various dimensions, including spatial, temporal, and the underlying social domain. Understanding and exploiting the features of mobile data from a social network perspective will be extremely beneficial to wireless networks, from planning, operation, and maintenance to optimization and marketing...

With ever increasing demands for local area services in 5G cellular networks, solutions are necessary to deliver local area data in a spectrum-and energy-efficient manner. In this article we propose a new cellular communication architecture that integrates energy harvesting technologies and social networking characteristics into D2D communications...

Research on the smart grid is being given enormous supports worldwide due to its great significance in solving environmental and energy crises. Electric vehicles (EVs), which are powered by clean energy, are adopted increasingly year by year. It is predictable that the huge charge load caused by high EV penetration will have a considerable impact o...

The smart grid is widely considered as an efficient and intelligent power system. With the aid of communication technologies, the smart grid can enhance the efficiency and reliability of the grid system through intelligent energy management. However, with the development of new energy sources, storage and transmission technologies together with the...

Recently, machine-to-machine (M2M) communications become an emerging paradigm that provides ubiquitous connectivity among numerous devices to support diverse communication applications. To address crucial issues in M2M networks: spectrum scarcity, massive access, low-power and reliable communication, cognitive radio technology is promised and integ...

The vehicular cloud is a promising new paradigm where vehicular networking and mobile cloud computing are elaborately integrated to enhance the quality of vehicular information services. Pseudonym is a resource for vehicles to protect their location privacy, which should be efficiently utilized to secure vehicular clouds. However, only a few existi...

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is a promising paradigm to provide cloud-computing capabilities in close proximity to mobile devices in fifth-generation (5G) networks. In this paper, we study energy-efficient computation offloading mechanisms for MEC in 5G heterogeneous networks. We formulate an optimization problem to minimize the energy consumption o...

To economically monitor the primary spectrum usage in the urban area scenario, an optimal density deployment of collaborating battery-powered sensors are deployed to carry cooperative spectrum sensing. These sensors consume energy for spectrum sensing and therefore deplete their lifetime , thus we study the key issue in minimizing the sensing energ...

Cloud-enabled vehicular networks are a new paradigm to improve the quality of vehicular services, which have drawn considerable attention in industry and academia. In this paper, we consider the resource management and sharing problem for bandwidth and computing resources to support mobile applications in cloud-enabled vehicular networks. In such a...

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) can provide safety and nonsafety applications to improve passenger safety and comfort. Grouping vehicles into platoons in VANETs can improve road safety and reduce fuel consumption. It is critical to design an efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol for platoon-based VANETs. Moreover, because of the space a...

This paper proposes a joint mode selection and resource block (RB) allocation for the direct device-to-device (D2D) communication underlying cellular network. Universal-filtered multi-carrier (UFMC) technique which is considered as a potential candidate for the future communication systems due to its robustness against inter-carrier interference (I...