LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
A prototype of an adjustable advanced reciprocating gait orthosis (ARGO) for spinal cord injury (SCI)

Objective: To develop a reciprocating gait orthosis which could be used in different sized patients.Design: Clinical trial and orthotic development.Setting: A large rehabilitation hospital in Rome, ItalyPatients and methods: To carry out this project normal reciprocating gait orthosis parts were used. The device was modified to adjust the hip–ankle height, and the hip–hip distance. It was tested, by five patients already walking with standard ARGO, to evaluate the performances of the orthosis. The device has been tested on seven newly injured patients fulfilling specific criteria of different height and weight.Main outcome measures: Prototype suitability; patients appreciation.Results: The device can be used for persons between 1.60 m and 1.85 m tall, weighing up to 100 kg. The orthosis allows an upright position without the use of the hands, and walking with a walker or with two canes. The foot orthosis cover sizes 36–40 (British 3–7) and 41–45 (British 7–11). With the exception of donning, doffing and lifting, the walking performances of the prototype and the general appreciation is comparable with those of a standard device. After a short period of training all seven patients were able to walk in the parallel bars. All of them expressed general appreciation for the device; despite this only four patients wanted the orthosis, two refused it and one has not decided yet.Conclusions: The prototype allows the same standing and walking performances of normal ARGO. It could be used in spinal cord injury patients to let them test the potential of the device and thus be useful in the effort to reduce the percentage of ARGO rejection.
Effects of telmisartan on insulin resistance and visceral fat distribution in Chinese hypertensive patients with obesity.

OBJECTIVE
To investigate the effects of telmisartan on body fat distribution and insulin sensitivity in patients with hypertension and obesity.


METHODS
In this prospective, randomized study, outpatients from the Sixth People's Hospital affiliated to Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai, China were treated with telmisartan (n=23), or losartan (n=22) for 16 weeks between December 2009 to January 2011. Parameters such as waist and hip circumference, body mass index, fasting blood glucose, insulin, lipids, serum adiponectin, and tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-alpha) were measured before and after treatment. The abdominal visceral fat area (VFA) and subcutaneous fat area (SFA) were determined by magnetic resonance imaging. Insulin sensitivity was estimated by homeostasis model assessment (HOMA-IR).


RESULTS
Compared with baseline, the systolic and diastolic blood pressure decreased significantly in both groups. However, the levels of HOMA-IR, serum adiponectin, and TNF-alpha only improved in the telmisartan group. Similarly, the VFA was reduced in the telmisartan group, while the SFA did not change in either group.


CONCLUSION
Telmisartan improves both hemodynamic and metabolic abnormalities found in hypertensive patients with obesity. The additional benefits may be partly due to visceral fat remodeling.
A singular-value-based semi-fragile watermarking scheme for image content authentication with tamper localization

This paper presents a singular-value-based semi-fragile watermarking scheme for image content authentication. The proposed scheme generates secure watermark by performing a logical operation on content-dependent watermark generated by a singular-value-based sequence and contentindependent watermark generated by a private-key-based sequence. It next employs the adaptive quantization method to embed secure watermark in approximation subband of each 4 4 block to generate the watermarked image. The watermark extraction process then extracts watermark using the parity of quantization results from the probe image. The authentication process starts with regenerating secure watermark following the same process. It then constructs error maps to compute five authentication measures and performs a three-level process to authenticate image content and localize tampered areas. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed scheme outperforms five peer schemes and its two variant systems and is capable of identifying intentional tampering, incidental modification, and localizing tampered regions under mild to severe content-preserving modifications. 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Atrophic gastritis and Helicobacter pylori infection in outpatients referred for gastroscopy.

BACKGROUND
Atrophic gastritis has been shown to be one of the long term sequelae of Helicobacter pylori infection.


AIMS
To determine the prevalence of atrophic gastritis in outpatients, to study the accuracy of serological methods for revealing atrophy, and to define the association of H pylori infection with atrophic gastritis in these patients.


PATIENTS/METHODS
A total of 207 consecutive outpatients referred for gastroscopy were included. Biopsy specimens from the antrum and corpus were assessed histologically according to the Sydney system. Serum samples were studied for H pylori IgG and IgA antibodies by enzyme immunoassay, CagA antibodies by immunoblot, pepsinogen I by an immunoenzymometric assay, gastrin by radioimmunoassay, and parietal cell antibodies by indirect immunofluorescence.


RESULTS
Histological examination revealed atrophic gastritis in 52 (25%) of 207 patients. H pylori and CagA antibodies were strongly associated with atrophic antral gastritis but poorly associated with atrophic corpus gastritis. Low serum pepsinogen I was the most sensitive and specific indicator of moderate and severe atrophic corpus gastritis. All six patients with moderate atrophic corpus gastritis had H pylori infection but eight of 10 patients with severe atrophic corpus had increased parietal cell antibodies and nine had no signs of H pylori infection.


CONCLUSIONS
Atrophic antral gastritis was strongly associated with CagA positive H pylori infection. Severe atrophic corpus gastritis was not determined by H pylori tests but low serum pepsinogen I, high gastrin, and parietal cell antibodies may be valuable in detecting these changes.
Towards autonomous neuroprosthetic control using Hebbian reinforcement learning.

OBJECTIVE
Our goal was to design an adaptive neuroprosthetic controller that could learn the mapping from neural states to prosthetic actions and automatically adjust adaptation using only a binary evaluative feedback as a measure of desirability/undesirability of performance.


APPROACH
Hebbian reinforcement learning (HRL) in a connectionist network was used for the design of the adaptive controller. The method combines the efficiency of supervised learning with the generality of reinforcement learning. The convergence properties of this approach were studied using both closed-loop control simulations and open-loop simulations that used primate neural data from robot-assisted reaching tasks.


MAIN RESULTS
The HRL controller was able to perform classification and regression tasks using its episodic and sequential learning modes, respectively. In our experiments, the HRL controller quickly achieved convergence to an effective control policy, followed by robust performance. The controller also automatically stopped adapting the parameters after converging to a satisfactory control policy. Additionally, when the input neural vector was reorganized, the controller resumed adaptation to maintain performance.


SIGNIFICANCE
By estimating an evaluative feedback directly from the user, the HRL control algorithm may provide an efficient method for autonomous adaptation of neuroprosthetic systems. This method may enable the user to teach the controller the desired behavior using only a simple feedback signal.
Outcomes and cost of coronary artery bypass graft surgery in the United States and Canada.

BACKGROUND
We sought to determine whether there is a difference in in-hospital outcomes and costs for coronary artery bypass graft surgery (CABG) between the United States and Canada.


METHODS
We compared the outcomes and costs of treating 12 017 consecutive patients (4698 US and 7319 Canadian patients) undergoing CABG at 5 US and 4 Canadian hospitals. Participating hospitals used the same cost accounting system to provide patient-level clinical, resource utilization, and cost-of-treatment data (excluding physicians' fees). Canadian costs were converted to US dollars using purchasing power parities.


RESULTS
Compared with Canadian patients, US patients were older (mean +/- SD age, 68.0 +/- 10.4 vs 63.7 +/- 9.8 years [P<.001]), more likely to be female (27.4% vs 21.8% [P<.001]), and discharged from the hospital sooner (mean +/- SD length of stay, 8.7 +/- 0.1 vs 9.5 +/- 0.1 days [P<.001]). In-hospital costs of treatment were substantially higher in the United States than in Canada (mean +/- SD cost, dollar 20,673 +/- dollar 241 vs dollar 10,373 +/- dollar 123 [P<.001]; median, dollar 16,036 vs dollar 7880). After controlling for demographic and clinical differences, length of stay in Canada was 16.8% longer than in the United States; there was no difference in in-hospital mortality; and the cost in the United States was 82.5% higher than in Canada (P<.001).


CONCLUSIONS
The in-hospital cost of CABG in the United States is substantially higher than in Canada. This difference is due to higher direct and overhead costs in US hospitals, is not explained by demographic or clinical differences, and does not lead to superior clinical outcomes.
An Investigation of the Challenges Facing Implementation of Performance Appraisal Systems in Kenyan Public Service in the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports in Gatanga District

The application of Performance Appraisal Systems as a technique of contemporary public sector reforms has in the recent past gained prominence in most countries. These reforms usually encompass profound restructuring so as to provide improved services with few resources. For effective development and utilization of the human talent, performance appraisal plays a key role since it enables an organization to objectively identify the employee's strengths and weaknesses. The organization will then counsel the employees to improve on the weak areas in order to positively contribute in the attainment of organizational goals and objectives. However, since performance appraisal is considered to be a controversial management practice, the successful implementation of such a system faces numerous handles and challenges. The purpose of this study was to investigate the challenges facing implementation of performance appraisal systems in Kenyan Public Service in the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports in Gatanga District. The objectives of the study were to establish if: Performance standards are a challenge facing implementation of the performance appraisal system in Kenyan public service; appraisal techniques are a challenge facing implementation of the performance appraisal system in Kenyan public service; leadership is a challenge facing implementation of the performance appraisal system in Kenyan public service, communication and feedback is a challenge facing implementation of the performance appraisal system in Kenyan public service and motivation and rewards is a challenge facing implementation of the performance appraisal system in Kenyan public service. The findings of the study will be useful to governmental policy makers in identifying the shortcomings of performance appraisal systems and finding-out ways of improving it. This study adopted descriptive research design. The study was conducted in Gatanga District, Central Kenya which was the locale of the study. The study population was all the employees of the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports in Gatanga district. Data was collected using a questionnaire. Qualitative data was analyzed using content analysis whereas quantitative data was analysed using descriptive statistics and regression analysis. Data collected was presented using tables, charts and graphs. The findings from the study established that a large number of employees felt that the performance appraisal system was not fair in measuring performance. They also had the opinion that goals, objectives and targets set during the appraisal process do not motivate employees to perform better. Conclusively, because the performance appraisal systems used in the public service are not effective and that they exist just as a matter of formalities, it is important to institute reforms geared towards improvement of the system. The pay system for example, badly needs to be reviewed to reflect individual performance and hence encourage better performance .
Reducing the Risks of Relief--The CDC Opioid-Prescribing Guideline.

of opioid prescribing, which propelled a tightly correlated epidemic of addiction, overdose, and death from prescription opioids that is now further evolving to include increasing use and overdoses of heroin and illicitly produced fentanyl. The pendulum of opioid use in pain management has swung back and forth several times over the past 100 years. Beginning in the 1990s, efforts to improve treatment of pain failed to adequately take into account opioids’ addictiveness, low therapeutic ratio, and lack of documented effectiveness in the treatment of chronic pain. Increased prescribing was also fueled by aggressive and sometimes misleading marketing of long-acting opioids to physicians.1 It has become increasingly clear that opioids carry substantial risks and uncertain benefits, especially as compared with other treatments for chronic pain. On March 15, 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a “Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain” to chart a safer, more effective course.2 The guideline is designed to support clinicians caring for patients outside the context of active cancer treatment or palliative or end-of-life care. More research is needed to fill in critical evidence gaps regarding the effectiveness, safety, and economic efficiency of longterm opioid therapy. However, given what we know about the risks associated with long-term opioid therapy and the availability of effective nonpharmacologic and nonopioid pharmacologic treatment options, the guideline uses the best available scientific data to provide information and recommendations to support patients and clinicians in balancing the risks of addiction and overdose with the limited evidence of benefits of opioids for the treatment of chronic pain. Most placebo-controlled, randomized trials of opioids have lasted 6 weeks or less, and we are aware of no study that has compared opioid therapy with other treatments in terms of long-term (more than 1 year) outcomes related to pain, function, or quality of life.2 The few randomized trials to evaluate opioid efficacy for Reducing the Risks of Relief — The CDC Opioid-Prescribing Guideline
The relation between work-family balance and quality of life

We examined the relation between work–family balance and quality of life among professionals employed in public accounting. Three components of work–family balance were assessed: time balance (equal time devoted to work and family), involvement balance (equal involvement in work and family), and satisfaction balance (equal satisfaction with work and family). For individuals who invested substantial time in their combined work and family roles, those who spent more time on family than work experienced a higher quality of life than balanced individuals who, in turn, experienced a higher quality of life than those who spent more time on work than family. We observed similar findings for involvement and satisfaction. We identified the contributions of the study to the work–family balance literature and discussed the implications of the findings for future research. 2002 Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved.
Extended Unemployment Benefits and Early Retirement: Program Complementarity and Program Substitution

This paper explores how extended unemployment insurance (UI) benefits targeted to older workers affect early retirement and social welfare. The trade-off of optimal UI between consumption smoothing and moral hazard requires accounting for the entire early retirement system, which often includes extended UI and relaxed access to disability insurance (DI). We argue that extended UI generates program complementarity (increased take-up of UI followed by DI and/or regular retirement benefits) and program substitution (increased take-up of UI instead of DI). Exploiting Austria’s regional extended benefit program, which extended regular UI benefits to up to 4 years, we find: (i) program complementarity is quantitatively important for workers aged 50+; and (ii) program substitution is quantitatively relevant for workers aged 55+. We derive a simple rule for optimal UI that accounts for program complementarity and program substitution. Using the sufficient statistics approach, we conclude that UI for older workers was too generous and the regional extended benefit program was a suboptimal policy.
Retinal vessel classification: Sorting arteries and veins

For the discovery of biomarkers in the retinal vasculature it is essential to classify vessels into arteries and veins. We automatically classify retinal vessels as arteries or veins based on colour features using a Gaussian Mixture Model, an Expectation-Maximization (GMM-EM) unsupervised classifier, and a quadrant-pairwise approach. Classification is performed on illumination-corrected images. 406 vessels from 35 images were processed resulting in 92% correct classification (when unlabelled vessels are not taken into account) as compared to 87.6%, 90.08%, and 88.28% reported in [12] [14] and [15]. The classifier results were compared against two trained human graders to establish performance parameters to validate the success of classification method. The proposed system results in specificity of (0.8978, 0.9591) and precision (positive predicted value) of (0.9045, 0.9408) as compared to specificity of (0.8920, 0.7918) and precision of (0.8802, 0.8118) for (arteries, veins) respectively as reported in [13]. The classification accuracy was found to be 0.8719 and 0.8547 for veins and arteries, respectively.
PennCOSYVIO: A challenging Visual Inertial Odometry benchmark

We present PennCOSYVIO, a new challenging Visual Inertial Odometry (VIO) benchmark with synchronized data from a VI-sensor (stereo camera and IMU), two Project Tango hand-held devices, and three GoPro Hero 4 cameras. Recorded at UPenn's Singh center, the 150m long path of the hand-held rig crosses from outdoors to indoors and includes rapid rotations, thereby testing the abilities of VIO and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithms to handle changes in lighting, different textures, repetitive structures, and large glass surfaces. All sensors are synchronized and intrinsically and extrinsically calibrated. We demonstrate the accuracy with which ground-truth poses can be obtained via optic localization off of fiducial markers. The data set can be found at https://daniilidis-group.github.io/penncosyvio/.
Perceiving temporal regularity in music

We address how listeners perceive temporal regularity in music performances, which are rich in temporal irregularities. A computational model is described in which a small system of internal self-sustained oscillations, operating at different periods with specific phase and period relations, entrains to the rhythms of music performances. Based on temporal expectancies embodied by the oscillations, the model predicts the categorization of temporally changing event intervals into discrete metrical categories, as well as the perceptual salience of deviations from these categories. The model’s predictions are tested in two experiments using piano performances of the same music with different phrase structure interpretations (Experiment 1) or different melodic interpretations (Experiment 2). The model successfully tracked temporal regularity amidst the temporal fluctuations found in the performances. The model’s sensitivity to performed deviations from its temporal expectations compared favorably with the performers’ structural (phrasal and melodic) intentions. Furthermore, the model tracked normal performances (with increased temporal variability) better than performances in which temporal fluctuations associated with individual voices were removed (with decreased variability). The small, systematic temporal irregularities characteristic of human performances (chord asynchronies) improved tracking, but randomly generated temporal irregularities did not. These findings suggest that perception of temporal regularity in complex musical sequences is based on temporal expectancies that adapt in response to temporally fluctuating input. © 2002 Cognitive Science Society, Inc. All rights reserved.
Extraction of near-surface properties for a lossy layered medium using the propagator matrix

S U M M A R Y Near-surface properties play an important role in advancing earthquake hazard assessment. Other areas where near-surface properties are crucial include civil engineering and detection and delineation of potable groundwater. From an exploration point of view, near-surface properties are needed for wavefield separation and correcting for the local near-receiver structure. It has been shown that these properties can be estimated for a lossless homogeneous medium using the propagator matrix. To estimate the near-surface properties, we apply deconvolution to passive borehole recordings of waves excited by an earthquake. Deconvolution of these incoherent waveforms recorded by the sensors at different depths in the borehole with the recording at the surface results in waves that propagate upwards and downwards along the array. These waves, obtained by deconvolution, can be used to estimate the Pand S-wave velocities near the surface. As opposed to waves obtained by cross-correlation that represent filtered version of the sum of causal and acausal Green’s function between the two receivers, the waves obtained by deconvolution represent the elements of the propagator matrix. Finally, we show analytically the extension of the propagator matrix analysis to a lossy layered medium for a special case of normal incidence.