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Achieving reliable acoustic wireless video transmissions in the extreme and uncertain underwater environment is a challenge due to the limited bandwidth and the error-prone nature of the channel. Aiming at optimizing the received video quality and the user's experience, an adaptive solution for underwater video transmissions is proposed that is specifically designed for Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO -based Software-Defined Acoustic Modems (SDAMs . To keep the video distortion under an acceptable threshold and to keep the Physical-Layer Throughput (PLT high, cross-layer techniques utilizing diversity-spatial multiplexing and Unequal Error Protection (UEP are presented along with the scalable video compression at the application layer. Specifically, the scalability of the utilized SDAM with high processing capabilities is exploited in the proposed structure along with the temporal, spatial, and quality scalability of the Scalable Video Coding (SVC H.264/MPEG-4 AVC compression standard. The transmitter broadcasts one video stream and realizes multicasting at different users. Experimental results at the Sonny Werblin Recreation Center, Rutgers University-NJ, are presented. Several scenarios for unknown channels at the transmitter are experimentally considered when the hydrophones are placed in different locations in the pool to achieve the required SVC-based video Quality of Service (QoS and Quality of Experience (QoE given the channel state information and the robustness of different SVC scalability. The video quality level is determined by the best communication link while the transmission scheme is decided based on the worst communication link, which guarantees that each user is able to receive the video with appropriate quality. 

Abstract Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs), which migrate from original sites in a body to distant organs through blood, are a key factor in cancer detection. Emerging Label-free techniques owing to their inherent advantage to preserve characteristics of sorted cells and low consumption of samples can be promising to the prediction of cancer progression and metastasis research. Deterministic Lateral Displacement (DLD) is one of the label-free separation techniques employing a specific arrangement of micro-posts for continuous separation of suspended cells in a buffer based on the size of cells. Separation based solely on size is challenging since the size distributions of CTCs might overlap with those of normal blood cells. To address this problem, DLD can be combined with dielectrophoresis (DEP) technique which is the phenomenon of particle movement in a non-uniform electric field owing to the polarization effect. Although, DLD devices employ the laminar flow in low Reynolds number (Re) fluid flow due to predictability of such flow regimes, they should be improved to work in higher Re flow regime so as to attain high throughput devices. In this paper, a particle tracing simulation is developed to study the effects of different post shapes, shift fraction of micropost arrays, and dielectrophoresis forces on separation of CTCs from peripheral blood cells. Our numerical model and results provide a groundwork for design and fabrication of high-throughput DLD-DEP devices for improvement of CTC separation.