Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Body Mass Index and Mortality From Cardiovascular Disease Among Japanese Men and Women: The JACC Study

Background and Purpose— Although overweight is an important risk factor for cardiovascular disease in Western countries, the impact of overweight has not been well elucidated in Japan, where its prevalence is low. Methods— A total of 104 928 Japanese (43 889 men and 61 039 women) aged 40 to 79 years, free of stroke, coronary heart disease, and cancer at entry participated in the Japan Collaborative Cohort Study for Evaluation of Cancer Risk Sponsored by Monbusho (JACC Study) between 1988 and 1990. Systematic surveillance was completed until the end of 1999, with 1 042 835 person years of follow-up, and the underlying causes of death were determined based on the International Classification of Diseases. Results— There were 765 total strokes (191 intraparenchymal hemorrhages), 379 coronary heart diseases, and 1707 total cardiovascular diseases for men; and for women, there were 685 (145), 256, and 1432, respectively. Compared with persons with body mass index (BMI) 23.0 to 24.9, those with BMI ≥27.0 kg/m2 had a higher risk of coronary heart disease; for men and women, the respective multivariate relative risk (95% CI) was 2.05 (1.35 to 3.13) and 1.58 (0.95 to 2.62). Persons with BMI <18.5 kg/m2 had higher risk of total stroke and intraparenchymal hemorrhage, for men and women, the respective multivariate relative risk was 1.29 (1.01 to 1.49) and 1.92 (1.49 to 2.47) for total stroke and 1.96 (1.16 to 3.31) and 2.32 (1.36 to 3.97) for intraparenchymal hemorrhage. These excess risks did not alter materially when deaths within 5 years were excluded or when smoking status was taken into account. Conclusions— For Japanese men and women, high BMI was associated with increased risk of coronary heart disease, whereas low BMI was associated with intraparenchymal hemorrhage.
Phonology in Swedish-speaking 5-year-olds born with unilateral cleft lip and palate and the relationship with consonant production at 3 years of age

Abstract Purpose: At ∼3 years of age ∼50% of the children born with cleft palate present with phonological/articulatory difficulties. Differences between children with and without cleft palate have been reported to decline with age; however, the phonology in children with cleft palate at pre-school age/early school age has rarely been explored. The purpose of this study was to assess phonology in children with unilateral cleft lip and palate (UCLP) at age 5 and its relationship with performances at 3 years of age. Method: The study included 29 children with UCLP and 20 without UCLP. Percentage correct consonants adjusted for age (PCC-A) and number of consistent phonological simplification processes were assessed from phonetic transcriptions. In addition, a descriptive analysis of phonological/articulatory processes was performed. Result: The children with UCLP displayed significantly lower PCC-A and more phonological processes at age 5 years than peers without UCLP. The correlations between the outcomes at 3 and 5 years of age were significant. Conclusion: Still at 5 years of age many children with cleft palate have phonological problems and it is possible to identify children at risk for impaired phonology at earlier age.
Interactionist model 1 Intergenerational Transmission of Adaptive Functioning : A Test of the Interactionist Model of SES and Human Development

The Interactionist Model of human development (Conger & Donellan, 2007) proposes that the association between socioeconomic status (SES) and human development involves a dynamic interplay that includes both social causation (SES influences human development) and social selection (individual characteristics affect SES). Using a multigenerational dataset involving 271 families, the current study finds empirical support for the Interactionist Model. Adolescent personality characteristics indicative of social competence, goal-setting, hard work, and emotional stability predicted later SES, parenting, and family characteristics that were related to the positive development of a third generation child. Processes of both social selection and social causation appear to account for the association between SES and dimensions of human development indicative of healthy functioning across multiple generations.
Demographics, Clinical Course, and Outcomes of Children with Status Asthmaticus Treated in a Pediatric Intensive Care Unit: 8-Year Review

Objective. This study was done to understand the demographics, clinical course, and outcomes of children with status asthmaticus treated in a tertiary care pediatric intensive care unit (PICU). Methods. The medical charts of all patients above 5 years of age admitted to the PICU at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, Columbus, OH, USA, with status asthmaticus from 2000 to 2007 were reviewed retrospectively. Data from 222 encounters by 183 children were analyzed. Results. The mean age at admission in years was 11 ± 3.8. The median PICU stay was 1 day (range, 1–12 days) and median hospital stay was 3 days. The ventilated group (n = 17) stayed a median of 2 days longer in the PICU and hospital. Nearly half of the children (n = 91; 50%) did not receive daily controller asthma medications. Adherence to asthma medications was reported in 125 patient charts of whom 43 (34%) were compliant. Exposure to smoking was reported in 167 of whom 70 (42%) were exposed. Among patients receiving metered dose inhaler (MDI), only 39 (18%) were using it with a spacer. Among 105 patient charts asthma severity data were available, of them 21 (20%) were labeled as mild intermittent, 29 (28%) were mild persistent, 26 (25%) were moderate persistent, and 29 (28%) were severe persistent. Compared to children with only one PICU admission during the study period (n = 161), children who had multiple PICU admissions (n = 22) experienced more prior emergency department visits and hospitalizations for asthma symptoms. There were no fatalities. Conclusion. Asthmatics with any disease severity are at risk for life-threatening asthma exacerbations requiring PICU stay, especially those who are not adherent with their daily medications.
Context-Aware Hard and Slow Fall Detection

Fall is one of the main causes of injuries for the elderly and fall detection (FD) for senior monitoring has received considerable attention from both the academic community and healthcare industries. In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in using wearable sensors, such as accelerometers to monitor the subject's body movement and apply Machine Learning (ML) methods to detect and prevent falls. Since it is extremely difficult to collect accelerometer data of real falls during activities of daily living (ADL), researchers tended to rely on simulating falls in well-protected environments. They collect ADL separately, applied ML algorithms to classify falls and ADL, and reported very high FD accuracy rates. However, these studies cannot be applied in a real fall context. In this paper, instead of classifying ADL and fall online, we propose to incorporate fall data within ADL data to obtain more realistic datasets and apply ML to detect falls online. Several ML algorithms including CatBoost (CB), Decision Tree (DT), Random Forest (RF), and XGBoost (XGB), were applied to the datasets. Experimental results show a fall detection accuracy of 88.70 %. We also extend our work to cover slow falls which, to the best of our knowledge, was not extensively addressed in previous works.
Evaluation of the Potential for Direct-Fed Microbials to Enhance Utilization of Phosphorus in Broiler Chickens

EVALUATION OF THE POTENTIAL FOR DIRECT-FED MICROBIALS TO ENHANCE UTILIZATION OF PHOSPHORUS IN BROILER CHICKENS December 2017 Joseph Donkor Tennessee State University Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. Samuel Nahashon Feed accounts for about 60-68% of the total cost of poultry production. Chicken cannot efficiently absorb organic or phytin-bound phosphorus, thus about 70-80% of dietary or plant based phosphorus is excreted in the manure of broiler chickens. The goal of this research was to identify microbes with the potential to improve utilization of a plant source of phosphorus in the gastrointestinal tract (GIT) of broilers. A total of 8,082 sequences were obtained using a metagenomic approach, with 61% of those sequences representing 5,030 species of various bacterial organisms. The highest proportion of bacteria was Massilia which represented 46% of the total dominant microbial population, Bacteroides (9%), Streptomyces (6%), Bacillus (6%), and 18 different species each constituting less than 5% of these dominant microbes. Three microbes Lactobacillus, Enterococcus, and Bifidobacterium (LEB) with the potential to hydrolyze free phosphorus were isolated and characterized. The isolated microorganisms maintained the ability to grow at all the different pH ranges (1-5), and bile concentrations of 0-3.5%. Also, the ability of the bacteria to hydrolyze free phosphorus was evaluated
Continuous Evaluation of Cloud Profiles in Seven Operational Models Using Ground-Based Observations

883 JUNE 2007 AMERICAN METEOROLOGICAL SOCIETY | T he aim of Cloudnet is to provide a systematic evaluation of clouds in forecast models. Clouds and their associated microphysical processes strongly regulate radiative transfer and the hydrological cycle, and are often themselves important for end users of weather forecasts, who may be interested not only in cloud cover, but in other variables determined by cloud properties, such as surface precipitation, temperatures, or shortwave/ultraviolet radiation. In order to provide these variables, accurate prediction of the vertical and horizontal distribution of cloud ice and liquid water contents is necessary. The effort to improve clouds in forecast models has been hampered by the difficulty of making accurate observations. In situ aircraft measurements reveal the macroscopic structure and typical cloud water contents of clouds and the habits of cloud ice crystals (e.g., Korolev et al. 2000), but suffer from sampling problems, providing 1D cloud snapshots. Projects such as Cliwanet (Crewell et al. 2004) combined aircraft CLOUDNET Continuous Evaluation of Cloud Profiles in Seven Operational Models Using Ground-Based Observations
Sentiment Analysis on Smart City Mobile Platform Based on Lexicon

This study investigates the analysis of social media data from platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and application reviews, with a focus on Smart City mobile platforms. While the availability of public service-related data presents a promising opportunity for analysis, the complexities and nuances of language pose significant challenges. To overcome this, the study employs lexicon-based analysis and machine learning-based classifiers to examine sentiment on Smart City platforms using data from reviews on the Tangerang Live application. The results demonstrate that lexicon-based analysis accurately describes the weighting of each word, enabling a clear portrayal of sentiment distribution. Furthermore, sentiment results can serve as a foundation for labeling, as evidenced by the high accuracy of the random forest, k-nearest neighbors, and naive Bayes classifiers, achieving 84%, 72%, and 64% accuracy, respectively. Overall, this study offers valuable insights into sentiment analysis on Smart City platforms, which can inform future research in this area.
Newspapers vs. Blogs: Who Gets the Scoop?

Blogs and formal news sources both monitor the events of the day, but with substantially different frames of reference. In this paper, we report on experiments comparing over 500,000 blog postings with the contents of 66 daily newspapers over the same six week period. We compare the prevalence of popular topics in the blogspace and news, and in particular analyze lead/lag relationships in frequency time series of 197 entities in the two corpora. The correlation between news and blog references proved substantially higher when adjusting for lead/lag shifts, although the direction of these shifts varied for different entities.
Wearable Device With Speech and Voice Recognition for Hearing-Impaired People

Hearing impairment is a widespread health condition that affects millions of people worldwide. It refers to the lack of or low functionality of the hearing organs, resulting in difficulties in effective communication and participation in everyday conversations. This limitation can negatively impact various aspects of the social and personal lives of the hearing-impaired individuals. Moreover, the high cost and limited availability of assistive devices further restrict accessibility for those with limited financial resources. To address these challenges, this study develops an affordable wearable device equipped with speech and voice recognition technologies to enhance the accessibility of spoken language for individuals with hearing impairment. OpenAI Whisper is employed for real-time conversion of spoken words into written text. Voice recognition, utilizing Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) and Random Forest (RF) classifier, identifies and distinguishes speakers within the user's family and friends zone. The recognized spoken words from the speech recognition process and the speaker's identity from the voice recognition process are combined and displayed on a screen to the hearing impaired. By combining speech and voice recognition technologies, the proposed device breaks communication barriers for individuals with hearing impairment and enhance their overall communication experience.
Attention U-Net Model for Accurate Thoracic Disease Detection, Segmentation and Localization

Lung cancer, pneumonia, and other chest disorders including TB continue to be major global public health issues. For prompt and successful treatment, it is essential to identify these disorders early and accurately in medical imaging, particularly in chest X-rays. Deep learning approaches have produced encouraging outcomes in medical image processing applications in recent years. To enhance chest disease identification and segmentation, this research study presents a novel method that combines the strength of the U-Net layout with attention processes. The Attention U-Net model takes advantage of both feature extraction and attention processes to draw attention to key areas in the pictures, improving task performance for segmenting and identifying chest diseases. The suggested Attention U-Net model's design, implementation details, evaluation criteria, and experimental findings are presented in this work, along with the localization of the boundary regions of the chest disease. It has good generalizability to CXR images from unknown datasets with various patients.
A screening program for trisomy 21 at 10–14 weeks using fetal nuchal translucency, maternal serum free β‐human chorionic gonadotropin and pregnancy‐associated plasma protein‐A

To examine the potential impact of combining maternal age with fetal nuchal translucency thickness and maternal serum free β‐human chorionic gonadotropin (β‐hCG) and pregnancy‐associated plasma protein‐A (PAPP‐A) in screening for trisomy 21 at 10–14 weeks of gestation.
Multiple Relationship Types in Online Communities and Social Networks

Online social networking is increasingly popular and is a feature of many websites. Providing multiple types of relationship, such as friend, fan or colleague, can enhance the significance of the networks. We present an empirical study of an online political forum where users engage in content creation, voting, and discussion. The users also make explicit connections via three relationship types, forming three distinct networks. We establish a strong correlation between network participation and site activity and show that users stayed faithful to the relationship semantics, in aggregate. Moreover, we demonstrate significant structural differences among the networks, indicating different uses for each. Social networking features may help spread the word about new content, but we show that the networks played a surprisingly moderate role in this respect. Usage and social networking patterns were typical of many web communities, suggesting that multiple relationship types could be successfully featured in other such communities.
Ensemble Learning for Vietnamese Scene Text Spotting in Urban Environments

This paper presents a simple yet efficient ensemble learning framework for Vietnamese scene text spotting. Leveraging the power of ensemble learning, which combines multiple models to yield more accurate predictions, our approach aims to significantly enhance the performance of scene text spotting in challenging urban settings. Through experimental evaluations on the VinText dataset, our proposed method achieves a significant improvement in accuracy compared to existing methods with an impressive accuracy of 5%. These results unequivocally demonstrate the efficacy of ensemble learning in the context of Vietnamese scene text spotting in urban environments, highlighting its potential for real-world applications, such as text detection and recognition in urban signage, advertisements, and various text-rich urban scenes.
Total Antioxidant Capacity and Lipid Peroxidation in Semen of Patient with Hyperviscosity

Semen hyperviscosity (SHV) is one of the factors involved in deficiency in sperm function. This research aimed to evaluate seminal plasma total antioxidant capacity (TAC) and malondialdehyde (MDA) levels in infertile patients with hyperviscous and non-hyperviscous semen samples to understand whether hyperviscous semen is associated with oxidative damage in infertile subjects. In this cross sectional study, 59 semen samples were provided by fertile (n=12) individuals as control, infertile patients with normal viscosity (n=25) and infertile patients with hyperviscosity (n=22). After semen parameters examination, semen viscosity was studied by glass pipettes. Seminal plasma TAC and MDA levels were measured by ferric reducing of antioxidant power (FRAP) and thiobarbituric acid reaction (TBAR) methods, respectively. A probability less than 0.05 was considered statistically significant throughout the article. The mean of sperm parameters including: counts, motility and normal morphology in patients with hyperviscosity were significantly lower than those in non-hyperviscosity patients (p<0.05, p<0.01 and p<0.001, respectively). The mean of seminal plasma TAC value in seminal plasma of non-hyperviscosity patients (1710.31 ± 458.67 µmol/l) was significantly (p<0.01) higher than that of hyperviscosity group (1230.25 ± 352 µmol/l). A trend toward a higher mean of seminal plasma MDA value was estimated for hyperviscous group compared with non-hyperviscous (1.01 ± 0.41 nmol/ml vs. 0.94 ± 0.28 nmol/l); however, it was nonsignificant. Hyperviscous semen impairs seminal plasma TAC which is eventually associated with sperm membrane lipid peroxidation.
Neural coding of spatial phase in V1 of the macaque monkey.

We examine the responses of single neurons and pairs of neurons, simultaneously recorded with a single tetrode in the primary visual cortex of the anesthetized macaque monkey, to transient presentations of stationary gratings of varying spatial phase. Such simultaneously recorded neurons tended to have similar tuning to the phase of the grating. To determine the response features that reliably discriminate these stimuli, we use the metric-space approach extended to pairs of neurons. We find that paying attention to the times of individual spikes, at a resolution of approximately 30 ms, and keeping track of which neuron fires which spike rather than just the summed local activity contribute substantially to phase coding. The contribution is both quantitative (increasing the fidelity of phase coding) and qualitative (enabling a 2-dimensional "response space" that corresponds to the spatial phase cycle). We use a novel approach, the extraction of "temporal profiles" from the metric space analysis, to interpret and compare temporal coding across neurons. Temporal profiles were remarkably consistent across a large subset of neurons. This consistency indicates that simple mechanisms (e.g., comparing the size of the transient and sustained components of the response) allow the temporal contribution to phase coding to be decoded.
Contamination Indices and Heavy Metal Concentrations in Soils in Okpoko and Environs, Southeastern Nigeria

This study is carried out to assess the soil and ground water quality in Okpoko and Environs in Anambra State. Fifteen soil and groundwater samples were collected and analyzed for physico-chemical, heavy metals and hydrocarbon content. Soils were sampled at 15cm and 30 cm depth. Heavy metals in soil and groundwater were analyzed using Atomic Absorption Spectrometer. Grain size analysis shows that top-soils (0-15 cm) and sub-soils (15-30 cm) in the area are predominantly sands (>70%), and soil classification scheme based on SAR ( 4 μS/cm) shows that the soils are saline. Apart from Ni, all the other metals show concentrations that decrease with depth. Total Petroleum Hydrocarbons (TPH) ranges from 109.43 to 2112.64 mg/kg and 105.57 to 1747.82 mg/kg in topsoil and sub-soils in the area. The average TPH content is 654.01 ± 582.12 and 568.27 ± 502.11 mg/kg in topsoil and sub-soils respectively, and 54.43 and 16.63 mg/kg at control site. The TOC content is higher in the vicinity of the fuel filling and service station than at the control site which is an indication of anthropogenic influences. The TPH content generally decreases with depth and is lower at the control than at the vicinity of the fuel filling and service station. Apart from Fe and Mn, all other metal concentration exceeds those of the control. The metal concentrations were within DPR regulatory limits for safe agricultural soils. Assessment of anthropogenic influences on the soil quality in the area with the control site as baseline was accomplished using soil quality models including: Contamination Index (CI), Pollution Load Index (PLI), Modified Contamination Degree (mCD), Geo-accumulation Index (Igeo), and Nemerov Integrated Pollution Index (NIPI) which shows that the soils are heavily polluted from the activities at the fuel filling and service stations in the area. Regular soil and groundwater assessment is recommended to monitor the contamination potential in the area.
Multifunctional chitosan implants for controllable protein release

Regeneration and reconnection of the injured nerves are still challenging tasks despite the stunning progress in both material development and micro-surgical procedures. Ideal implant should provide complex regenerative assistance, including physical guidance for axon outgrowth; be a reservoir for factors attracting/inducing stem cells as well as the tissue-forming factors; provide a matrix for cell attachment; be traceable; and disintegrate when the regeneration is complete. Here we are demonstrating the assembly from the set of the functional materials with defined nano- and macro-properties into the tubular implant structures called the protoconduits. These structures are well tolerated on both cell and tissue levels, slowly releasing their macromolecular cargo, traceable by MRI, and mechanically sound.
Observer Behavior in Evaluating Images with Region-Specific Distortions: Subjective Scores, Response Time, and Fixation Distribution

In this study, we aim to investigate whether observers follow a specific pattern when evaluating images that have been distorted at various levels in different areas of the image. In our experiments, three aspects of the rating experience are considered: the subjective score, the response time, and the fixation distribution. Our findings suggest that with the increase in the quality of an image, observers tend to spend more time evaluating their quality. When it comes to images distorted by more than one level of distortion, more than 50% of observers spend more time evaluating the less distorted region of the image, while others do not show any particular bias when performing image quality assessment.