An apparatus and method for treating obesity and for delivering time-released medicaments is described and which includes a plurality of space-filling portions which are sized to be received within a human patient’s body and which come together in a patient’s body to form a structure which provides therapeutic benefit to the patient. Every now and than a video frame is encoded in intra mode in order to limit error propagation and to enable access points for starting decoding of the video sequence. Signal activity from a given terminal on a particular branch can be identified and that information can be used to selectively block or filter the signal noise contributed by the other branches to an aggregation point.