LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Image-guided radiofrequency ablation of renal cell carcinoma

The incidence of renal cell carcinoma is rising with the increased number of incidental detection of small tumours. During the past few years, percutaneous imaging-guided radiofrequency ablation has evolved as a minimally invasive treatment of small unresectable renal tumours offering reduced patient morbidity and overall health care costs. In radiofrequency ablation, thermal energy is deposited into a targeted tumour by means of a radiofrequency applicator. In recent studies, radiofrequency ablation was shown to be an effective and safe modality for local destruction of renal cell carcinoma. Radiofrequency applicator navigation can be performed via ultrasound, computed tomography or magnetic resonance guidance; however, ultrasound seems less favourable because of the absence of monitoring capabilities during ablation. On-line monitoring of treatment outcome can only be performed with magnetic resonance imaging giving the possibility of eventual applicator repositioning to ablate visible residual tumour tissue. Long-term follow-up is crucial to assess completeness of tumour ablation. New developments in ablation technology and radiological equipment will further increase the indication field for radiofrequency ablation of renal cell carcinoma. Altogether, radiofrequency ablation seems to be a promising new modality for the minimally invasive treatment of renal cell carcinoma, which was demonstrated to exhibit high short-term effectiveness.
The 2016 IEEE National Symposium of New Technologies [Chapter News]

March 2017 • IEEE rOBOTIcS & aUTOMaTION MaGaZINE • was to provide New Zealand re ­ searchers, scientists, and engineers with a forum to present their latest research findings and participate in discussions in an informal setting. The one­day workshop featured speakers from both industry and ac­ ademia and live demonstrations and exhibits of various mobile robotic systems and devices. The workshop was cochaired by Prof. XiaoQi Chen (Chapter chair) and Dr. Khaled Goher. Ten invited speakers covered a broad range of topics, including agricultural robots, autonomous ground mapping, bio­ mimetic robots, micro robots, prod­ uct design, cloud computing, and assistive robotics. Among the exhib­ its and live demonstrations, a wall­ climbing robot ( Figure 2), a snake robot, and an unmanned aerial vehi­ cle drew keen interest from the attendees and stimulated the discus­ sion between academic researchers and industry experts. Chapter members met during the lunch break and elect­ ed Prof. Peter Xu as their new Chapter chair (2017–2018). Figure 2. A demonstration of a wall-climbing robot by Invert Robotics.
Safety and effect of high dose allopurinol in patients with severe left ventricular systolic dysfunction

Introduction: Allopurinol used in the treatment of gout has been shown to improve the vascular endothelial dysfunction and reduce the dysfunction of the failing heart. This study was done to evaluate the effect and safety of allopurinol in non-hyperuricemic patients with chronic severe left ventricular (LV) dysfunction. Methods: In this study, 35 consecutive cases of non-hyperuricemic patients with chronic heart failure who had severe LV systolic dysfunction (ejection fraction of less than 35%) and were on optimal guideline directed medical therapies for at least 3 months were included. Allopurinol was administered with the dose of 300 mg po daily for 1 week and then it was up-titrated to a dose of 600 mg po daily for 3 months. Six minute walk test, strain imaging, laboratory testing were done for every patient at baseline and after 3 months treatment with allopurinol. Results: In this study 30 heart failure (HF) patients with a mean age of 49.3 ± 14.4 years old were evaluated. No adverse effects were reported except for one case of skin rash after 4 days treatment which was excluded from the study. Study showed significant improvement of six minute walk test of the patients from 384.5 ± 81.5 meters to 402.8 ± 89.6 meters and the global longitudinal peak strain (P < 0.001). There was also significant decrease in the level of erythrocyte sedimentation rate and N-terminal pro-brain natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP) after 3 months. Conclusion: Allopurinol could be of benefit in non-hyperuricemic patients with severe LV systolic dysfunction without significant adverse effects. Randomized clinical trials are needed in future to confirm the results.
Sputum eosinophilia and the short term response to inhaled mometasone in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

BACKGROUND
An association between the sputum eosinophil count and the response to a 2 week course of prednisolone has previously been reported in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Whether the response to inhaled corticosteroids is related to the presence of eosinophilic inflammation is unclear.


METHODS
A randomised, double blind, crossover trial of placebo and mometasone furoate (800 microg/day), each given for 6 weeks with a 4 week washout period, was performed in subjects with COPD treated with bronchodilator therapy only. Spirometric tests, symptom scores, chronic respiratory disease questionnaire (CRQ), and induced sputum were performed before and after each treatment phase.


RESULTS
Ninety five patients were recruited of which 60 were randomised. Overall there were no treatment associated changes in forced expiratory volume in 1 second (FEV(1)), total CRQ, or sputum characteristics. After stratification into tertiles by baseline eosinophil count, the net improvement in post-bronchodilator FEV(1) increased with mometasone compared with placebo progressively from the least to the most eosinophilic tertile. The mean change in post-bronchodilator FEV(1) with mometasone compared with placebo in the highest tertile was 0.11 l (95% CI 0.03 to 0.19). This improvement was not associated with a fall in the sputum eosinophil count.


CONCLUSIONS
An increased sputum eosinophil count is related to an improvement in post-bronchodilator FEV(1) following treatment with inhaled mometasone in COPD, but the improvement is not associated with a reduction in the sputum eosinophil count.
Long-term outcome according to renal histological lesions in 118 patients with monoclonal gammopathies.

BACKGROUND
The prognosis of monoclonal gammopathies with multiple myeloma and renal involvement is poor, and the indication for renal replacement therapy is controversial. Few studies address the value of renal histology for determining prognosis according to initial pathology findings.


METHODS
We studied the course of 118 patients with multiple myeloma according to renal biopsy lesions. The monoclonal component was identified and quantified in serum and urine. Tumor cell mass was classified as stage 1, 2 or 3, according to Durie and Salmon. End-points were death, or survival on dialysis, or serum creatinine level at last examination.


RESULTS
Renal biopsy showed myeloma kidney in 48 cases (41%), AL-amyloidosis in 35 (30%), light chain deposit disease in 22 (19%), chronic tubulointerstitial nephritis in 12 (10%) and cryoglobulinaemic kidney with multiple myeloma in 1. Maintenance haemodialysis was required in 46 patients (39%), earlier (P<0.0001) in myeloma kidney (mean: 3 months after diagnosis) than in AL-amyloidosis (mean: 15 months) and light chain deposit disease (mean: 18 months). Median survival was 12 months in myeloma kidney, 24 months in AL-amyloidosis and 48 months in light chain deposit disease. Dialysis increased survival in light chain deposit disease, in contrast with myeloma kidney and AL-amyloidosis patients whose survival was shorter when dialysed. The main cause of death during first year of dialysis was cardiac involvement in AL-amyloidosis, and sepsis or cardiac insufficiency in myeloma kidney. There was a trend to increased survival with multidrug chemotherapy which seemed to slow progression to end-stage renal failure. At last follow-up (median: 12 months, range 1-297), 65 (55%) patients had died. By multivariate analysis, independent predictors of survival were: age < 70, serum creatinine < or = 300 micromol/l, and serum calcium < or = 2.5 mmol/l.


CONCLUSIONS
Initial renal biopsy helps predict prognosis in patients with multiple myeloma and renal involvement. Maintenance haemodialysis is a reasonable indication in light chain deposit disease and AL-amyloidosis, especially in patients aged < 70. Multidrug therapy tends to prolong survival and slow progression to end-stage renal disease.
MobileCDP: A mobile framework for the consumer decision process

............................................................................................................. iii ÖZ ............................................................................................................................ iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................ vi TABLE OF CONTENTS .......................................................................................... vii LIST OF TABLES ................................................................................................... xii LIST OF FIGURES ................................................................................................ xiii ABBREVIATIONS ................................................................................................... xv
Development of Electric Propulsion Systems for Light Electric Vehicles

This paper presents two light electric vehicles (LEVs) with a electric propulsion system developed at an academic laboratory. One LEV is an electric city scooter powered by a lithium-ion battery pack and propelled by a wheel motor drive. The other LEV is an electric bicycle powered by a fuel cell system with the assistance of a supercapacitor bank. Power and energy design of the electric propulsion systems of the two LEVs as well as characterization of the energetic devices are illustrated.
Does quality of life of COPD patients as measured by the generic EuroQol five-dimension questionnaire differentiate between COPD severity stages?

OBJECTIVE
To assess the discriminative properties of the EuroQol five-dimension questionnaire (EQ-5D) with respect to COPD severity according to Global Initiative for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease (GOLD) criteria in a large multinational study.


METHODS
Baseline EQ-5D visual analog scale (VAS) scores, EQ-5D utility scores, and St. George Respiratory Questionnaire scores were obtained from a subset of patients in the Understanding the Potential Long-term Impact on Function with Tiotropium trial, which was a 4-year placebo-controlled trial designed to assess the effect of tiotropium on the rate of decline in FEV(1) in COPD patients aged > or = 40 years, an FEV(1) of < 70% predicted, an FEV(1)/FVC ratio of < or = 70%, and a smoking history of >/= 10 pack-years.


RESULTS
A total of 1,235 patients (mean post bronchodilator FEV(1), 48.8% predicted) from 13 countries completed the EQ-5D. The EQ-5D VAS and utility scores differed significantly among patients in GOLD stages 2, 3, and 4, also after correction for age, sex, smoking, body mass index (BMI), and comorbidity (p < 0.001). The mean EQ-5D VAS scores for patients in GOLD stages 2, 3, and 4 were 68 (SD, 16), 62 (SD, 17), and 58 (SD, 16), respectively. The mean utility scores were 0.79 (SD, 0.20) for patients in GOLD stage 2, 0.75 (SD, 0.21) for patients in GOLD stage 3, and 0.65 (SD, 0.23) for patients in GOLD stage 4. Effect sizes for the difference in utility scores between patients in GOLD stages 3 and 4 were more than twice as high as those for the difference between patients in GOLD stages 2 and 3. Gender, postbronchodilator FEV(1) percent predicted, the number of hospital admissions and emergency department visits in the year prior to baseline measurements, measures of comorbidity, and BMI were independently associated with EQ-5D utility. EQ-5D utility scores also differed between patients from different countries. French patients especially had lower utility scores than US patients. Utility scores calculated with the US value set were on average 5% higher than those calculated with the UK value set.


CONCLUSIONS
Increasing severity of COPD was associated with a significant decline in EQ-5D VAS scores and utility scores. These results demonstrate that a generic instrument can assess COPD impact on quality of life and that the scores discriminate between patient groups of known severity. These utility scores will be useful in cost-effectiveness assessments.
Deconvolutional Networks for Feature Learning

Introduction Building robust low-level image representations, beyond edge primitives, is a long-standing goal in vision. In its most basic form, an image is a matrix of intensities. How we should progress from this matrix to stable mid-level representations, useful for high-level vision tasks, remains unclear. Popular feature representations such as SIFT or HOG spatially pool edge information to form descriptors that are invariant to local transformations. However, in doing so important cues such as edge intersections, grouping, parallelism and symmetry are lost. (a)
An i-vector Extractor Suitable for Speaker Recognition with both Microphone and Telephone Speech

It is widely believed that speaker verification systems perform better when there is sufficient background training data to deal with nuisance effects of transmission channels. It is also known that these systems perform at their best when the sound environment of the training data is similar to that of the context of use (test context). For some applications however, training data from the same type of sound environment is scarce, whereas a considerable amount of data from a different type of environment is available. In this paper, we propose a new architecture for text-independent speaker verification systems that are satisfactorily trained by virtue of a limited amount of application-specific data, supplemented with a sufficient amount of training data from some other context. This architecture is based on the extraction of parameters (i-vectors) from a low-dimensional space (total variability space) proposed by Dehak [1]. Our aim is to extend Dehak’s work to speaker recognition on sparse data, namely microphone speech. The main challenge is to overcome the fact that insufficient application-specific data is available to accurately estimate the total variability covariance matrix. We propose a method based on Joint Factor Analysis (JFA) to estimate microphone eigenchannels (sparse data) with telephone eigenchannels (sufficient data). For classification, we experimented with the following two approaches: Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Cosine Distance Scoring (CDS) classifier, based on cosine distances. We present recognition results for the part of female voices in the interview data of the NIST 2008 SRE. The best performance is obtained when our system is fused with the state-of-the-art JFA. We achieve 13% relative improvement on equal error rate and the minimum value of detection cost function decreases from 0.0219 to 0.0164.
Systems biology approach reveals that overflow metabolism of acetate in Escherichia coli is triggered by carbon catabolite repression of acetyl-CoA synthetase

The biotechnology industry has extensively exploited Escherichia coli for producing recombinant proteins, biofuels etc. However, high growth rate aerobic E. coli cultivations are accompanied by acetate excretion i.e. overflow metabolism which is harmful as it inhibits growth, diverts valuable carbon from biomass formation and is detrimental for target product synthesis. Although overflow metabolism has been studied for decades, its regulation mechanisms still remain unclear. In the current work, growth rate dependent acetate overflow metabolism of E. coli was continuously monitored using advanced continuous cultivation methods (A-stat and D-stat). The first step in acetate overflow switch (at μ = 0.27 ± 0.02 h-1) is the repression of acetyl-CoA synthethase (Acs) activity triggered by carbon catabolite repression resulting in decreased assimilation of acetate produced by phosphotransacetylase (Pta), and disruption of the PTA-ACS node. This was indicated by acetate synthesis pathways PTA-ACKA and POXB component expression down-regulation before the overflow switch at μ = 0.27 ± 0.02 h-1 with concurrent 5-fold stronger repression of acetate-consuming Acs. This in turn suggests insufficient Acs activity for consuming all the acetate produced by Pta, leading to disruption of the acetate cycling process in PTA-ACS node where constant acetyl phosphate or acetate regeneration is essential for E. coli chemotaxis, proteolysis, pathogenesis etc. regulation. In addition, two-substrate A-stat and D-stat experiments showed that acetate consumption capability of E. coli decreased drastically, just as Acs expression, before the start of overflow metabolism. The second step in overflow switch is the sharp decline in cAMP production at μ = 0.45 h-1 leading to total Acs inhibition and fast accumulation of acetate. This study is an example of how a systems biology approach allowed to propose a new regulation mechanism for overflow metabolism in E. coli shown by proteomic, transcriptomic and metabolomic levels coupled to two-phase acetate accumulation: acetate overflow metabolism in E. coli is triggered by Acs down-regulation resulting in decreased assimilation of acetic acid produced by Pta, and disruption of the PTA-ACS node.
Neoadjuvant treatment for unresectable rectal cancer: an interim analysis of a multicentre randomized study.

PURPOSE
To present an interim analysis of the trial comparing two neoadjuvant therapies for unresectable rectal cancer.


METHODS
Patients with fixed cT3 or cT4 or locally recurrent rectal cancer without distant metastases were randomized to either 5 × 5 Gy and 3 courses of FOLFOX4 (schedule I) or 50.4 Gy delivered in 28 fractions given simultaneously with 5-Fu, leucovorin and oxaliplatin (schedule II). Surgery in both groups was performed 12 weeks after the beginning of radiation and 6 weeks after neoadjuvant treatment.


RESULTS
49 patients were treated according to schedule I and 48 according to schedule II. Grade III+ acute toxicity was observed in 26% of patients in group I and in 25% in group II. There were two toxic deaths, both in group II. The microscopically radical resection (primary endpoint) rate was 73% in group I and 71% in group II. Overall and severe postoperative complications were recorded in 27% and 9% of patients vs. 16% and 7%, respectively. Pathological complete response was observed in 21% of the patients in group I and in 9% in group II.


CONCLUSIONS
The interim analysis revealed no major differences in acute toxicity and local efficacy between the two evaluated strategies.
Regional variability in food availability for Arctic marine mammals.

This review provides an overview of prey preferences of seven core Arctic marine mammal species (AMM) and four non-core species on a pan-Arctic scale with regional examples. Arctic marine mammal species exploit prey resources close to the sea ice, in the water column, and at the sea floor, including lipid-rich pelagic and benthic crustaceans and pelagic and ice-associated schooling fishes such as capelin and Arctic cod. Prey preferred by individual species range from cephalopods and benthic bivalves to Greenland halibut. A few AMM are very prey-, habitat-, and/or depth-specific (e.g., walrus, polar bear), while others are rather opportunistic and, therefore, likely less vulnerable to change (e.g., beluga, bearded seal). In the second section, we review prey distribution patterns and current biomass hotspots in the three major physical realms (sea ice, water column, and seafloor), highlighting relations to environmental parameters such as advection patterns and the sea ice regime. The third part of the contribution presents examples of documented changes in AMM prey distribution and biomass and, subsequently, suggests three potential scenarios of large-scale biotic change, based on published observations and predictions of environmental change. These scenarios discuss (1) increased pelagic primary and, hence, secondary production, particularly in the central Arctic, during open-water conditions in the summer (based on surplus nutrients currently unutilized); (2) reduced benthic and pelagic biomass in coastal/shelf areas (due to increased river runoff and, hence, changed salinity and turbidity conditions); and (3) increased pelagic grazing and recycling in open-water conditions at the expense of the current tight benthic-pelagic coupling in part of the ice-covered shelf regions (due to increased pelagic consumption vs. vertical flux). Should those scenarios hold true, pelagic-feeding and generalist AMM might be advantaged, while the range for benthic shelf-feeding, ice-dependent AMM such as walrus would decrease. New pelagic feeding grounds may open up to AMM and subarctic marine mammal species in the High Arctic basins while nearshore waters might provide less abundant food in the future.
Survey on Content Based Image Retrieval

Invention of digital technology has lead to increase in the number of images that can be stored in digital format. So searching and retrieving images in large image databases has become more challenging. From the last few years, Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) gained increasing attention from researcher. CBIR is a system which uses visual features of image to search user required image from large image database and user’s requests in the form of a query image. Important features of images are colour, texture and shape which give detailed information about the image. CBIR techniques using different feature extraction techniques are discussed in this paper.
The Austrian eID Ecosystem in the Public Cloud: How to Obtain Privacy While Preserving Practicality

The Austrian eID system constitutes a main pillar within the Austrian eGovernment strategy. The eID system ensures unique identification and secure authentication for citizens protecting access to applications where sensitive and personal data is involved. In particular, the Austrian eID system supports three main use cases: Identification and authentication of Austrian citizens, electronic representation, and foreign citizen authentication at Austrian public sector applications. For supporting all these use cases, several components – either locally deployed in the applications’ domain or centrally deployed – need to communicate with each other. While local deployments have some advantages in terms of scalability, still a central deployment of all involved components would be advantageous, e.g. due to less maintenance efforts. However, a central deployment can easily lead to load bottlenecks because theoretically the whole Austrian population as well as – for foreign citizens – the whole EU population could use the provided services. To mitigate the issue on scalability, in this paper we propose the migration of main components of the ecosystem into a public cloud. However, a move of trusted services into a public cloud brings up new obstacles, particular with respect to privacy. To bypass the issue on privacy, in this paper we propose an approach on how the complete Austrian eID ecosystem can be moved into a public cloud in a privacy-preserving manner by applying selected cryptographic technologies (in particular using proxy ∗Corresponding author Email address: bernd.zwattendorfer@iaik.tugraz.at (Bernd Zwattendorfer) Preprint submitted to Journal of Information Security and Applications October 1, 2015 c ©2015 This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ ar X iv :1 60 1. 03 53 3v 1 [ cs .C R ] 1 4 Ja n 20 16 re-encryption and redactable signatures). Applying this approach, no sensitive data will be disclosed to a public cloud provider by still supporting all three main eID system use cases. We finally discuss our approach based on selected criteria.