LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Effect of constraint-induced therapy on upper limb functions: a randomized control trial.

AIMS
Children with congenital hemiparesis have unilateral upper extremity involvement, limiting their ability in unilateral or bilateral manual tasks, thus negatively influencing their participation in daily activities. Constraint-induced movement therapy (CIMT) has been shown to be promising for improving upper-limb functions in children with cerebral palsy. Clinical assessments may be needed to quantify and qualify changes in children's performance following its application.


METHODS
This study investigated the effectiveness of a child-friendly form of CIMT to improve upper extremity functional performance. Thirty congenitally hemiparetic children aged 4-8 years were randomly assigned to receive either a CIMT program (study group) or a conventional non-structured therapy program (control group). The programs were applied for both groups for six hours daily, five days weekly for four successive weeks. The Pediatric Arm Function Test, Quality of Upper Extremity Skills Test, and isokinetic muscular performances of shoulder flexors, extensors, and abductors expressed as peak torque were used to evaluate immediate and long-lasting efficacy of CIMT.


RESULTS
The results showed improvement in the involved upper extremity performances in different evaluated tasks immediately post-CIMT program application compared with the control group. These improvements continued three months later.


CONCLUSION
Pediatric CIMT with shaping produced considerable and sustained improvement in the involved upper extremity movements and functions in children with congenital hemiparesis.
Sex, clinical presentation, and outcome in patients with acute coronary syndromes. Global Use of Strategies to Open Occluded Coronary Arteries in Acute Coronary Syndromes IIb Investigators.

BACKGROUND
Studies have reported that women with acute myocardial infarction have in-hospital and long-term outcomes that are worse than those of men.


METHODS
To assess sex-based differences in presentation and outcome, we examined data from the Global Use of Strategies to Open Occluded Coronary Arteries in Acute Coronary Syndromes IIb study, which enrolled 12,142 patients (3662 women and 8480 men) with acute coronary syndromes, including infarction with ST-segment elevation, infarction with no ST-segment elevation, and unstable angina.


RESULTS
Overall, the women were older than the men, and had significantly higher rates of diabetes, hypertension, and prior congestive heart failure. They had significantly lower rates of prior myocardial infarction and were less likely ever to have smoked. A smaller percentage of women than men had infarction with ST elevation (27.2 percent vs. 37.0 percent, P<0.001), and of the patients who presented with no ST elevation (those with myocardial infarction or unstable angina), fewer women than men had myocardial infarction (36.6 percent vs. 47.6 percent, P<0.001). Women had more complications than men during hospitalization and a higher mortality rate at 30 days (6.0 percent vs. 4.0 percent, P<0.001) but had similar rates of reinfarction at 30 days after presentation. However, there was a significant interaction between sex and the type of coronary syndrome at presentation (P=0.001). After stratification according to coronary syndrome and adjustment for base-line variables, there was a nonsignificant trend toward an increased risk of death or reinfarction among women as compared with men only in the group with infarction and ST elevation (odds ratio, 1.27; 95 percent confidence interval, 0.98 to 1.63; P=0.07). Among patients with unstable angina, female sex was associated with an independent protective effect (odds ratio for infarction or death, 0.65; 95 percent confidence interval, 0.49 to 0.87; P=0.003).


CONCLUSIONS
Women and men with acute coronary syndromes had different clinical profiles, presentation, and outcomes. These differences could not be entirely accounted for by differences in base-line characteristics and may reflect pathophysiologic and anatomical differences between men and women.
Torque and slip behavior of single-phase induction motors driven from variable frequency supplies

Adjustable-frequency drives have not been widely used with single-phase induction motors. Computations show that, unlike the three-phase induction motor, the single-phase induction motor's slip is not constant with changes in frequency at a constant load torque. A constant volts-per-hertz law is found to provide nearly rated torque over a portion of the upper speed range, but the maximum available torque decays rapidly below about 50% of the base frequency. The behavior of the single-phase induction motor under variable-frequency operation is studied, providing insights to possible scalar control laws for optimizing performance at all speeds. Several possible open-loop control strategies are examined using computer simulations on a 0.5-hp single-phase induction motor. Experimental results show excellent agreement with the analysis and simulation. These experiments provide proof that an adjustable-frequency power supply can be used for speed control of the single-phase induction motor if the motor's unique operating characteristics are accounted for.<<ETX>>
Power Management Strategy for Solar Stand-alone Hybrid Energy System

This paper presents a simulation and mathematical model of stand-alone solar-wind-diesel based (HES). A power management system is designed for multiple energy resources in a stand-alone hybrid energy system. Both Solar photovoltaic and wind energy conversion system consists maximum power point tracking (MPPT), voltage regulatio basic power electronic interfaces. An additional diesel generator is included to support and improve the reliability of stand when renewable energy sources are not available. A power management strategy is introduced to distribute the ge among resistive load banks. The frequency regulation is developed with conventional phase locked loop (PLL) system. The power management algorithm was applied in Matlab the results. Keywords—Solar photovoltaic, wind en hybrid energy system, power management, frequency and voltage regulation.
The Internet of Things: Challenges & security issues

Propelled by large-scale advances in wireless technologies, sensing technologies and communication technologies, the transformation of the Internet into an integrated network of things termed as Internet of Things is rapidly unfolding. The Internet of Things enabled by Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and RFID sensors finds a plethora of applications in almost all the fields such as health, education, transportation and agriculture. This paper briefs the idea of Internet of Things (IoT) and the challenges to its future growth. Also, this paper describes the general layered architecture of IoT along with its constituent elements. Further, the paper provides for a secure construction of the IoT architecture, by tackling security issues at each layer of the architecture. The paper concludes by mentioning the potential applications of the IoT technologies in fields ranging from intelligent transportation to smart home to e-health care and green agriculture.
Global Structure Optimization of Quadrilateral Meshes

We introduce a fully automatic algorithm which optimizes the high-level structure of a given quadrilateral mesh to achieve a coarser quadrangular base complex. Such a topological optimization is highly desirable, since stateof-the-art quadrangulation techniques lead to meshes which have an appropriate singularity distribution and an anisotropic element alignment, but usually they are still far away from the high-level structure which is typical for carefully designed meshes manually created by specialists and used e.g. in animation or simulation. In this paper we show that the quality of the high-level structure is negatively affected by helical configurations within the quadrilateral mesh. Consequently we present an algorithm which detects helices and is able to remove most of them by applying a novel grid preserving simplification operator (GP-operator) which is guaranteed to maintain an all-quadrilateral mesh. Additionally it preserves the given singularity distribution and in particular does not introduce new singularities. For each helix we construct a directed graph in which cycles through the start vertex encode operations to remove the corresponding helix. Therefore a simple graph search algorithm can be performed iteratively to remove as many helices as possible and thus improve the high-level structure in a greedy fashion. We demonstrate the usefulness of our automatic structure optimization technique by showing several examples with varying complexity.
Image Enhancement Using Adaptive Filtering

In this paper, we develop an image enhancement algorithm that modifies the local luminance mean of an image and controls the local contrast as a function of the local luminance mean of the image. The algorithm first separates an image into its lows (low pass filtered form) and highs (high pass filtered form) components. The lows component then controls the amplitude of the highs component to increase the local contrast. The lows component is then subjected to a non linearity to modify the local luminance mean of the image and is combined with the processed highs component. The performance of this algorithm when applied to enhance typical undegraded images, images with large shaded areas, and also images degraded by cloud cover will be illustrated by way of examples. Keywords— Image enhancement, Low pass filter, Contrast, NonLinearity, Adaptive Filter.
IP-Geolocation Mapping for Moderately Connected Internet Regions

Most IP-geolocation mapping schemes [14], [16], [17], [18] take delay-measurement approach, based on the assumption of a strong correlation between networking delay and geographical distance between the targeted client and the landmarks. In this paper, however, we investigate a large region of moderately connected Internet and find the delay-distance correlation is weak. But we discover a more probable rule - with high probability the shortest delay comes from the closest distance. Based on this closest-shortest rule, we develop a simple and novel IP-geolocation mapping scheme for moderately connected Internet regions, called GeoGet. In GeoGet, we take a large number of webservers as passive landmarks and map a targeted client to the geolocation of the landmark that has the shortest delay. We further use JavaScript at targeted clients to generate HTTP/Get probing for delay measurement. To control the measurement cost, we adopt a multistep probing method to refine the geolocation of a targeted client, finally to city level. The evaluation results show that when probing about 100 landmarks, GeoGet correctly maps 35.4 percent clients to city level, which outperforms current schemes such as GeoLim [16] and GeoPing [14] by 270 and 239 percent, respectively, and the median error distance in GeoGet is around 120 km, outperforming GeoLim and GeoPing by 37 and 70 percent, respectively.
Differences in the Serum Nonesterified Fatty Acid Profile of Young Women Associated with a Recent History of Gestational Diabetes and Overweight/Obesity

BACKGROUND
Nonesterified fatty acids (NEFA) play pathophysiological roles in metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes (T2D). In this study, we analyzed the fasting NEFA profiles of normoglycemic individuals at risk for T2D (women with a recent history of gestational diabetes (GDM)) in comparison to controls (women after a normoglycemic pregnancy). We also examined the associations of NEFA species with overweight/obesity, body fat distribution and insulin sensitivity.


SUBJECTS AND METHODS
Using LC-MS/MS, we analyzed 41 NEFA species in the fasting sera of 111 women (62 post-GDM, 49 controls). Clinical characterization included a five-point oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT), biomarkers and anthropometrics, magnetic resonance imaging (n = 62) and a food frequency questionnaire. Nonparametric tests with Bonferroni correction, binary logistic regression analyses and rank correlations were used for statistical analysis.


RESULTS
Women after GDM had a lower molar percentage of total saturated fatty acids (SFA; 38.55% vs. 40.32%, p = 0.0002) than controls. At an explorative level of significance several NEFA species were associated with post-GDM status (with and without adjustment for body mass index (BMI) and HbA1c): The molar percentages of 14:0, 16:0, 18:0 and 18:4 were reduced, whereas those of 18:1, 18:2, 20:2, 24:4, monounsaturated fatty acids (MUFA), polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) and total n-6 NEFA were increased. BMI and the amount of body fat correlated inversely with several SFA and MUFA and positively with various PUFA species over the whole study cohort (abs(ρ)≥0.3 for all). 14:0 was inversely and BMI-independently associated with abdominal visceral adiposity. We saw no correlations of NEFA species with insulin sensitivity and the total NEFA concentration was similar in the post-GDM and the control group.


CONCLUSION
In conclusion, we found alterations in the fasting NEFA profile associated with a recent history of gestational diabetes, a risk marker for T2D. NEFA composition also varied with overweight/obesity and with body fat distribution, but not with insulin sensitivity.
Tooling Framework for Instantiating Natural Language Querying System

Recent times have seen a growing demand for natural language querying (NLQ) interfaces to retrieve information from the structured data sources such as knowledge bases. Using this interface, business users can directly interact with a database without the knowledge of the query language or the data schema. Our earlier work describes a natural language query engine called ATHENA which has several shortcoming around ease of use and compatibility with data stores, formats and flows. In this demonstration paper, we present a tooling framework to address these challenges so that one can instantiate an NLQ system with utmost ease. Our framework makes it easy and practically applicable to all NLIDB scenarios involving different sources of structured data, file formats, and ontologies to enable natural language querying on top of them with minimal human configuration. We present the tool design and the solution to the challenges towards building such a system and demonstrate its applicability in the medical domain. PVLDB Reference Format: Manasa Jammi, Jaydeep Sen, Ashish Mittal, Sagar Verma, Vardaan Pahuja, Rema Ananthanarayanan, Pranay Lohia, Hima Karanam, Diptikalyan Saha, Karthik Sankaranarayanan. Tooling Framework for Instantiating Natural Language Querying System. PVLDB, 11 (12): 2014-2017, 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14778/3229863.3236248
Mindfulness Therapy and its Effects on Working Memory and Prospective Memory By

Purpose: Mindfulness therapy is an increasingly popular practice that involves acute awareness of the present moment (Fletcher & Hayes, 2005). Recent research has also shown that practitioners show improvements in a range of cognitive skills (Mrazek, Franklin, Phillips, Baird, & Schooler, 2013). In particular, individuals in past literature have shown significant benefits in their working memory when practicing (Mrazek et al., 2013). Working memory is a cognitive ability that has also been correlated with an individual’s prospective memory during high stress situations (Jha, Stanley, Kiyonaga, Wong, & Gelfand, 2010). This raises the question; can mindfulness therapy impact both your working memory and prospective memory? Searching this can lead to potential benefits in aiding individuals with memory deficits. In particular, elders who suffer from dementia are more prone to prospective memory loss (Zimmermann & Meier, 2006). Therefore, if benefits of mindfulness therapy are supported in this study, further research could be performed for the elder population. Methods: Participants were 65 undergraduate students from the University of MichiganDearborn. The students were evaluated for their level of mindfulness practice by a survey followed by three computerized exams. All individuals received two lexical decision tasks in randomized order, followed by the automated operation span task. These tasks measured the individuals’ ability to briefly retain information (working memory capacity) as well as completing a future task (prospective memory). Results: Results from this study showed support for previous working memory research suggesting that mindfulness therapy has a significant correlation with higher working memory (Mrazek et al., 2013). The research also showed that regular engagement in mindfulness also results in notable changes in how we complete future intentions, prospective memory. In particular it was displayed that individuals who practice specifically meditation have an improved focal prospective memory and a reduced ability in nonfocal prospective memory. Conclusion: All individuals who practice mindfulness displayed a better working memory compared to those who do not. Individuals who explicitly practice meditation also have a change in their prospective memory. Those who practice meditation showed an improvement in their focal cues but a noteworthy impairment in their nonfocal cues. This suggests that those who practice meditation are so focused on the present that it impacts their ability to perform certain nonfocal future tasks. These findings are discussed in a larger framework of applications to individuals with declining cognitive abilities and/or high prospective memory demands. (e.g., medication adherence. MINDFULNESS THERAPY AND ITS EFFECTS ON MEMORY 1 Chapter
Achieving Holistic Health for the Individual through Person-Centered Collaborative Care Supported by Informatics

OBJECTIVES
This article seeks to describe the current state of informatics supported collaborative care and to point out areas of future research in this highly interdisciplinary field.


METHODS
In this article, person-centered collaborative care is seen as a concept addressing both the provision of care over organizational borders between health and social care, and within care teams as well as the changed patient/client-care provider relationship characterized by increased patient/client involvement.


RESULTS
From a health systems perspective, there are several attempts to describe the conceptual and theoretical basis for collaborative care indicating that agreement on core concepts and terminology is difficult. From an informatics perspective, focus is on standardization of clinical content models and terminology to achieve interoperability of information technology systems and to support standardized care pathways. Few examples look into how ad-hoc collaborative care processes can be supported using information technology and informatics standards. Nevertheless, promising examples do exist showing that integrational Information Communication Technology services can be supportive for collaborative care developments. However, the current landscape consists of many fragmented, often technology-driven eHealth solutions targeting specific diagnostic groups in geographically and/or organizationally restricted settings.


CONCLUSIONS
A systematic approach incorporating organizational, clinical, informatics and social science knowledge is needed to perform further research in areas such as virtual team partnerships, new paradigms of care delivery, data and knowledge management as well as its secure sharing. Also organizational and legal aspects need to be further researched in order to facilitate the coordinated provision of health and social care to citizens including self-management, utilizing informatics support in a societal context.
Intracranial aneurysms: midterm outcome of pipeline embolization device--a prospective study in 143 patients with 178 aneurysms.

PURPOSE
To evaluate the midterm clinical and angiographic outcomes after pipeline embolization device (PED) placement for treatment of intracranial aneurysms.


MATERIALS AND METHODS
This prospective nonrandomized multicenter study was approved by the review boards of all involved centers; informed consent was obtained. Patients (143 patients, 178 aneurysms) with unruptured saccular or fusiform aneurysms or recurrent aneurysms after previous treatment were included and observed angiographically for up to 18 months and clinically for up to 3 years. Study endpoints included complete aneurysm occlusion; neurologic complications within 30 days and up to 3 years; clinical outcome of cranial nerve palsy after PED placement; angiographic evidence of occlusion or stenosis of parent artery and that of occlusion of covered side branches at 6, 12, and 18 months; and clinical and computed tomographic evidence of perforator infarction.


RESULTS
There were five (3.5%) cases of periprocedural death or major stroke (modified Rankin Scale [mRS] > 3) (95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.3%, 8.4%), including two posttreatment delayed ruptures, two intracerebral hemorrhages, and one thromboembolism. Five (3.5%) patients had minor neurologic complications within 30 days (mRS = 1) (95% CI: 1.3%, 8.4%), including transient ischemic attack (n = 2), small cerebral infarction (n = 2), and cranial nerve palsy (n = 1). Beyond 30 days, there was one fatal intracerebral hemorrhage and one transient ischemic attack. Ten of 13 patients (95% CI: 46%, 93.8%) completely recovered from symptoms of cranial nerve palsy within a median of 3.5 months. Angiographic results at 18 months revealed a complete aneurysm occlusion rate of 84% (49 of 58; 95% CI: 72.1%, 92.2%), with no cases of parent artery occlusion, parent artery stenosis (<50%) in three patients, and occlusion of a covered side branch in two cases (posterior communicating arteries). Perforator infarction did not occur.


CONCLUSION
PED placement is a reasonably safe and effective treatment for intracranial aneurysms. The treatment is promising for aneurysms of unfavorable morphologic features, such as wide neck, large size, fusiform morphology, incorporation of side branches, and posttreatment recanalization, and should be considered a first choice for treating unruptured aneurysms and recurrent aneurysms after previous treatments.


SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL
http://radiology.rsna.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1148/radiol.12120422/-/DC1.
Examination of ossification of the distal radial epiphysis using magnetic resonance imaging. New insights for age estimation in young footballers in FIFA tournaments.

Alongside a variety of clinical and forensic issues, age determination in living persons also plays a decisive role in the field of professional sport. Only methods of determining skeletal age which do not expose individuals to ionizing radiation are suitable for this purpose. The present study examines whether MRI diagnosis of the distal radial epiphysis can be utilised to monitor internationally relevant age limits in professional football. The wrist area of 152 male footballers aged 18 to 22 years belonging to regional clubs was prospectively examined using MRI. The ossification stage of the distal radial epiphysis was subsequently determined on the basis of established criteria used in determining the maturity of the medial clavicular epiphysis. For the first time, we ascertained evidence of an increase in the prevalence of the phenomenon of threefold linear stratification (hypointense line, hyperintense line, and hypointense line) in the representation of the fused epiphyseal plate of the radius using magnetic resonance imaging with increasing chronological age. Within our study population, test persons with an ossified epiphyseal plate without any verifiable epiphyseal scar were not represented. The presumably high minimum age of entry into this final stage of development (>22 years) must be verified in the course of further studies. According to the results of the present study, the fused epiphyseal plate of the distal radius provides potential maturation criteria which appear suitable for reliable monitoring of all relevant age limits in international football with the aid of magnetic resonance imaging.