Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reconstruction of Signals Drawn from a Gaussian Mixture from Noisy Compressive Measurements: MMSE Phase Transitions and Beyond

This paper determines to within a single measurement the minimum number of measurements required to successfully reconstruct a signal drawn from a Gaussian mixture model in the low noise regime. The method is to develop upper and lower bounds that are a function of the maximum dimension of the linear subspaces spanned by the Gaussian mixture components. It is shown that an n-dimensional signal that is s-sparse with non-zero components drawn independent identically distributed (i.i.d.) from a Gaussian mixture distribution can be reconstructed perfectly in the low-noise regime with exactly s+1 measurements. This estimate is tighter and sharper than standard bounds on the minimum number of measurements needed to recover sparse signals associated with a union of subspaces model. It shows that it is possible to achieve the performance of intractable `0pseudonorm recovery algorithms using the optimal closed-form conditional mean estimator within the Bayesian (Compressive Sensing) CS paradigm. The method not only reveals the existence or absence of a minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) error floor (phase transition) but also provides insight into the MMSE decay via multivariate generalizations of the MMSE dimension and the MMSE power offset that are a function of the interaction between the geometrical properties of the kernel and the Gaussian mixture. These results apply not only to standard linear random Gaussian measurements but also to linear kernels that minimize the MMSE. It is shown that optimal kernels do not change the number of measurements associated with the MMSE phase transition, rather they affect the sensed power required to achieve a target MMSE in the low-noise regime.
Comparison of tension free Desarda technique with Lichtenstein for inguinal hernia repair

Background: Inguinal hernia is common surgical problem for which mesh based technique, particularly Lichtenstein repair is considered gold standard. However it has its own limitation such as foreign body sensation, wound infection, cord fibrosis, chronic pain, etc. Desarda technique for hernia repair is emerging technique for inguinal hernia repair known for its low cost procedure, less recurrence rate and feasibility of the procedure. The objective of the study was to compare treatment of primary inguinal hernia repair with these methods in terms of various operative and post-operative parameters.Methods: 64 patients included in the study and operated after randomization. Intra-operative time, local complication, return to everyday activity, post-operative pain, foreign body sensation and early recurrence were analysed.Results: 51 patients were analysed with a minimum follow up period of 3 months and rest were lost on follow up. Operative time was less in Desarda’s repair (28.24 vs. 30.88 min). Desarda repair was cost effective, return to everyday activity was early in Desarda group, there was significantly (p<0.001) less post-operative pain measured on VAS on 2nd POD, 7th POD and 1 month. No recurrence observed.Conclusions: Desarda repair is easy to perform and takes less time to perform, it is also cost effective. Desarda repair when compared with Lichtenstein was superior in terms of postoperative pain, return to everyday activity and no foreign body sensation. Desarda repair is superior to mesh based technique in terms of outcome.
The destruction by tyrosinase of the irritant principles of poison ivy and related toxicants.

Purified mushroom tyrosinase catalyzes the oxidation of the toxic principles of a large number of different commercial poison ivy concentrates, as well as extracts of related materials from poison oak, Japanese lac and cashew nut shell liquid. It has a similar action upon the purified toxicants: urushiol, 3-geranyl catechol, anacardol, tetrahydro-anacardol, anacardic acid, tetrahydro-anacardic acid and cardanol. These irritant materials slowly autoxidize, even in the absence of tyrosinase. The action of tyrosinase in the oxidation of the phenolic groups of these toxicants has been studied by oxygen consumption measured manometrically, by a darkening in color during oxidation and by a disappearance of phenolic groups reactive with ferric chloride. Accompanying the oxidation of these toxic materials by tyrosinase there is an appreciable decrease in the dermatitis-producing properties as measured by using both human and guinea pig skin patch tests. Tyrosinase is effective in the inactivation of the toxicants not only in vitro but also when applied to the human skin simultaneously with the toxicants or a few hours after they have penetrated into the skin. The use of tyrosinase in the treatment of poison ivy dermatitis in its early stages is suggested, although no information is as yet available concerning the utilization of this enzyme for the inactivation of the toxicants in the more advanced stages of the dermatitis.
Tip-Growing Cells of the Moss Ceratodon purpureus Are Gravitropic in High-Density Media1

Gravity sensing in plants and algae is hypothesized to rely upon either the mass of the entire cell or that of sedimenting organelles (statoliths). Protonemata of the moss Ceratodon purpureus show upward gravitropism and contain amyloplasts that sediment. If moss sensing were whole-cell based, then media denser than the cell should prevent gravitropism or reverse its direction. Cells that were inverted or reoriented to the horizontal displayed distinct negative gravitropism in solutions of iodixanol with densities of 1.052 to 1.320 as well as in bovine serum albumin solutions with densities of 1.037 to 1.184 g cm−3. Studies using tagged molecules of different sizes and calculations of diffusion times suggest that both types of media penetrate through the apical cell wall. Estimates of the density of the apical cell range from 1.004 to 1.085. Because protonemata grow upward when the cells have a density that is lower than the surrounding medium, gravitropic sensing probably utilizes an intracellular mass in moss protonemata. These data provide additional support for the idea that sedimenting amyloplasts function as statoliths in gravitropism.
Decorin‐binding adhesins from Borrelia burgdorferi

Lyme disease is a tick‐transmitted infection caused by the spirochete Borrelia burgdorferi. Ticks deposit B. burgdorferi into the dermis of the host, where they eventually become associated with collagen fibres. We demonstrated previously that B. burgdorferi is unable to bind collagen, but can bind the collagen‐associated proteoglycan decorin and expresses decorin‐binding proteins (Dbps). We have now cloned and sequenced two genes encoding the proteins, DbpA and DbpB, which have a similar structure, as revealed by circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy of recombinant proteins. Competition experiments revealed a difference in binding specificity between DbpA and DbpB. Western blot analysis of proteinase K‐treated intact B. burgdorferi and transmission electron microscopy studies using antibodies raised against recombinant Dbps demonstrated that these proteins are surface exposed. DbpA effectively inhibits the attachment of B. burgdorferi to a decorin substrate, whereas DbpB had a marginal effect, suggesting a difference in substrate specificity between the two Dbps. Polystyrene beads coated with DbpA adhered to a decorin‐containing extracellular matrix produced by cultured skin fibroblasts, whereas beads coated with OspC did not. Taken together, these data suggest that Dbps are adhesins of the MSCRAMM (microbial surface component‐recognizing adhesive matrix molecule) family, which mediate B. burgdorferi attachment to the extracellular matrix of the host.
Related Factors and Osteoporosis Health Beliefs and Self-Efficacy of Women

Objective: This study was conducted to determine osteoporosis health beliefs and self-efficacy of Turkish women and to investigate the relationship between women’s characteristics with osteoporosis health beliefs and self-efficacy. Methods: The study was planned as descriptive and cross-sectional study design. A convenience sample of 296 volunteer women who applied to the outpatient clinic of one public hospital was recruited. Data were collected via a questionnaire form, the Osteoporosis Health Belief Scale (OHBS) and the Osteoporosis Self-Efficacy Scale (OSES). The questionnaire form and scales were completed by the participants. Since the scales used self-reports, the inclusion criteria of this study required participants to be primary school graduates and being 18 age. Results: The participants’ OHBS subscales average scores were susceptibility,18.53±4.74; seriousness,14.68±4.46; benefits of exercise, 23.82±5.06; benefits of calcium intake, 22.12±4.63; barriers to exercise, 16.15±4.75; barriers to calcium intake,14.68±4.46; health motivation, 22.80±4.7. The total OHBS average score was 138.27±17.93. It was determined that the women’s total OSES average score was 790.64±260.96. The subscales of OSES; OSE-Exercise Scale average score was 361.38±162.72, and the OSE-Calcium Scale average score was 429.25±147.57. Conclusion: The levels of health beliefs and self-efficacy regarding osteoporosis of women were low. Nevertheless, women’s perceived benefits scores were found higher than perceived barriers. Nursing can take part in providing education to the public about life-long bone health, and they can also provide information about how to prevent osteoporosis and fracture risk.
Vulvar pain: a phenomenological study of couples in search of effective diagnosis and treatment.

Vulvar vestibulitis syndrome (VVS), a vulvar pain disorder, continues to puzzle medical and mental health professionals due to its unknown etiology and lack of effective treatment. This study used transcendental phenomenology methodology to explore the experiences of couples in which the woman has a diagnosis of VVS. Sixteen in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with 13 heterosexual couples and 3 women. Four essences emerged: (1) In search of . the medical journey required extensive searching for knowledgeable and respectful practitioners to provide treatment. (2) The process of developing a personal understanding of this disorder led many couples to question their role in causing and maintaining VVS. (3) Developing strategies for coping with painful intercourse led to three strategies: becoming non-sexual, using alternatives to vaginal sex, and altering or enduring painful intercourse. (4) Feelings of isolation were experienced as adapting to this chronic pain syndrome was often a lonely process. Clinical suggestions included: treating the couple, not just the woman with VVS; encouraging couples to broaden definitions about the importance and primacy of vaginal intercourse and suggest alternative sexual activities less likely to cause vulvar pain; developing shared meaning as a couple, and assisting couples in locating physicians and resources. Suggestions are relevant for couples with VVS and those with chronic health problems affecting sexual relationships.
Neural responses to happy facial expressions in major depression following antidepressant treatment.

OBJECTIVE Processing affective facial expressions is an important component of interpersonal relationships. However, depressed patients show impairments in this system. The present study investigated the neural correlates of implicit processing of happy facial expressions in depression and identified regions affected by antidepressant therapy. METHOD Two groups of subjects participated in a prospective study with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The patients were 19 medication-free subjects (mean age, 43.2 years) with major depression, acute depressive episode, unipolar subtype. The comparison group contained 19 matched healthy volunteers (mean age, 42.8 years). Both groups underwent fMRI scans at baseline (week 0) and at 8 weeks. Following the baseline scan, the patients received treatment with fluoxetine, 20 mg daily. The fMRI task was implicit affect recognition with standard facial stimuli morphed to display varying intensities of happiness. The fMRI data were analyzed to estimate the average activation (overall capacity) and differential response to variable intensity (dynamic range) in brain systems involved in processing facial affect. RESULTS An attenuated dynamic range of response in limbic-subcortical and extrastriate visual regions was evident in the depressed patients, relative to the comparison subjects. The attenuated extrastriate cortical activation at baseline was increased following antidepressant treatment, and symptomatic improvement was associated with greater overall capacity in the hippocampal and extrastriate regions. CONCLUSIONS Impairments in the neural processing of happy facial expressions in depression were evident in the core regions of affective facial processing, which were reversed following treatment. These data complement the neural effects observed with negative affective stimuli.
Risks of beryllium disease related to work processes at a metal, alloy, and oxide production plant.

OBJECTIVES: To describe relative hazards in sectors of the beryllium industry, risk factors of beryllium disease and sensitisation related to work process were sought in a beryllium manufacturing plant producing pure metal, oxide, alloys, and ceramics. METHODS: All 646 active employees were interviewed; beryllium sensitisation was ascertained with the beryllium lymphocyte proliferation blood test on 627 employees; clinical evaluation and bronchoscopy were offered to people with abnormal test results; and industrial hygiene measurements related to work processes taken in 1984-93 were reviewed. RESULTS: 59 employees (9.4%) had abnormal blood tests, 47 of whom underwent bronchoscopy. 24 new cases of beryllium disease were identified, resulting in a beryllium disease prevalence of 4.6%, including five known cases (29/632). Employees who had worked in ceramics had the highest prevalence of beryllium disease (9.0%). Employees in the pebble plant (producing beryllium metal) who had been employed after 1983 also had increased risk, with a prevalence of beryllium disease of 6.4%, compared with 1.3% of other workers hired in the same period, and a prevalence of abnormal blood tests of 19.2%. Logistic regression modelling confirmed these two risk factors for beryllium disease related to work processes and the dependence on time of the risk at the pebble plant. The pebble plant was not associated with the highest gravimetric industrial hygiene measurements available since 1984. CONCLUSION: Further characterisation of exposures in beryllium metal production may be important to understanding how beryllium exposures confer high contemporary risk of beryllium disease.
Evaluation of fault-tolerant mobile agents in distributed systems

The secure execution of a mobile agent is a very important design issue in building a mobile agent system and many fault-tolerant schemes have been proposed so far. Mobile agents are no longer a theoretical issue since different architectures for their realization have been proposed . In the context of e-commerce, execution atomicity is an important property for mobile agents. A mobile agent executes atomically, if either all its operations succeed, or none at all. This requires to solve an instance of the atomic commitment problem. However, it is important that failures (e.g., of machines or agents) do not lead to blocking of transactional mobile agents, i.e., agents that execute as a transaction. In this paper, we give a novel specification of non-blocking atomic commitment in the context of mobile agent execution. Fault tolerance for mobile agent systems is an unsolved topic, to which more importance should be attached. Besides the security problems by intended attacks it is very important to realize that an agent can simply get lost by errors of the network or the hosts. We then show how transactional mobile agent execution can be built on top of earlier work on fault-tolerant mobile agent execution and give preliminary performance results
Side Effect Mitigation Methods for Closed-Loop Deep Brain Stimulation

Side Effect Mitigation Methods for Closed-Loop Deep Brain Stimulation Margaret C. Thompson Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Dr. Howard J. Chizeck Electrical Engineering Advances in deep brain stimulation, such as the development of closed-loop algorithms that sense and respond to patient symptoms in real time, promise to deliver therapy that is increasingly tailored to individual patients and their day-to-day variations in symptoms. However, while the potential for better side-effect management through closed-loop deep brain stimulation (CLDBS) has been recognized, the majority of CLDBS research to date has focused only on tradeoffs between power savings and symptom reduction with little consideration for side-effects. Given that side-effects, when present, can be inconvenient for some patients and have a severe impact on well-being for others, developing a better understanding of side-effects and creating CLDBS algorithms for side-effect mitigation could greatly improve outcomes for recipients of DBS therapy. This dissertation describes research investigating two novel approaches to side effect mitigation for individuals with neurological movement disorders: first, the identification and use of involuntary neural biomarkers of sideeffects as triggers for changes in stimulation; and second, the use of voluntarily-controlled, brain-computer interface (BCI) methods to give patients the ability to consciously adjust stimulation parameters to balance trade-offs (such as those between symptom reduction and side effect mitigation). These approaches were designed and tested with two groups of human subjects: Parkinsons disease patients at University of California, San Francisco and essential tremor patients at University of Washington. In addition to piloting new approaches to CLDBS therapy, this research demonstrates the importance of such systems as investigative tools to better understand the underlying neuroscience of these disorders. In addition to presenting contributions to side-effect mitigation in CLDBS, this dissertation explores certain neuroethical challenges that arose within the aforementioned neural engineering research. The concept of BCI illiteracy is critiqued as a framework that is commonly used in BCI research that is intellectually and ethically problematic. Lastly, the structure and function of an ongoing ethics collaboration conducted during this research is described and recommendations are compiled for future neural engineering research teams who are considering ways to apply ethics considerations to their research projects. This research in neuroethics provides new insight into existing neural engineering topics such as BCI illiteracy; it also has potential to enable future science and engineering researchers to better approach neuroethics in their own areas of expertise.
Human vocal tract growth: a longitudinal study of the development of various anatomical structures

The growth of the head and neck and its components, including that of the vocal tract, is not homothetic but appears rather as an anamorphosis. The growth of various structures presents a phenomenon of heterochrony. Another important issue in vocal tract growth is sexual dimorphism. It was first claimed that sexual dimorphism appears at puberty, but a recent study has suggested that some prepubertal differences exist. To study these two phenomena, we used longitudinal radiographic data of sixty-eight typical subjects (966 radiographs, taken from 1 month to 25 years) and twelve fetuses (anatomical sections). In this study, we analyzed the growth curves and growth types of the hard and soft palate, the pharyngeal cavity and the estimated length of the whole vocal tract using non-linear mixed-effect models, in order to take advantage of our unique longitudinal dataset. Results indicate that most of the structures follow a neural/somatic growth type, while the pharyngeal cavity follows a more somatic growth type. As concerns sexual dimor-phism, no prepubertal differences were found, suggesting that the sexual dimorphism is likely to begin at puberty. These results have implications for the acoustics of speech production during development and should lead to improvements in vocal tract growth modeling.
Dendritic cells differentiated in the presence of IFN‐β and IL‐3 are potent inducers of an antigen‐specific CD8+ T cell response

Dendritic cells (DC) are professional antigen‐presenting cells that are used in vaccine approaches to cancer. Classically, mature monocyte‐derived DC are generated in vitro in the presence of interleukin (IL)‐4, granulocyte macrophage‐colony stimulating factor, and inflammatory cytokines (G4‐DC). Recently, it has been described that DC can also be generated in the presence of IL‐3 and interferon (IFN)‐β and that these DC are efficiently matured using polyriboinosinic polyribocytidylic acid (I3‐DC). In this study, a series of in vitro experiments was performed to compare side‐by‐side I3‐DC and G4‐DC as vaccine adjuvants. Phenotypic characterization of the DC revealed differences in the expression of the monocyte marker CD14 and the maturation marker CD83. Low expression of CD14 and high expression of CD83 characterized G4‐DC, whereas I3‐DC displayed intermediate expression of CD14 and CD83. Both types of DC were as potent in the induction of allogeneic T cell proliferation. Upon CD40 ligation, G4‐DC produced lower amounts of IFN‐α and pulmonary and activation‐regulated chemokine, similar amounts of IL‐6, macrophage‐inflammatory protein (MIP)‐1α, and MIP‐1β, and higher amounts of IL‐12 p70, tumor necrosis factor α, and MIP‐3β than I3‐DC. We further evaluated whether the DC could be frozen/thawed without loss of cell number, viability, phenotype, and function. After freezing/thawing, 56.0% ± 9.0% of I3‐DC and 77.0% ± 3.0% of G4‐DC (n=9) were recovered as viable cells, displaying the same phenotype as their fresh counterparts. Finally, in vitro stimulations showed that fresh and frozen peptide‐loaded I3‐DC are more potent inducers of Melan‐A‐specific CD8+ T cell responses than G4‐DC. The antigen‐specific T cells were functional as shown in cytotoxicity and IFN‐γ secretion assay.
Integration of fuzzy CMAC and BELC networks for uncertain nonlinear system control

This paper develops a fuzzy adaptive control system consisting of a new type of fuzzy neural network and a robust controller for uncertain nonlinear systems. The new designed neural network contains the key mechanisms of a typical fuzzy CMAC network and a brain emotional learning controller network. First, the input values of the new network are delivered to a receptive field structure that is inspired from the fuzzy CMAC. Then, the values are divided into a sensory and an emotional channels; and the two channels interact with each other to generate the final outputs of the proposed network. The parameters of the proposed network are on-line tuned by the brain emotional learning rules; in addition, stability analysis theory is used to guaranty the proposed controller's convergence. In the experimentation, a “Duffing-Holmes” chaotic system and a simulated mobile robot are applied to verify the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed control system. By comparing with the performances of other neural network based control systems, we believe our proposed network is capable of producing better control performances of complex uncertain nonlinear systems control.