Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Temperature dependence of ultrasonic backscattered energy in motion compensated images

Noninvasive temperature imaging would enhance the ability to uniformly heat tumors at therapeutic levels. Ultrasound is an attractive modality for this purpose. Previously, we predicted monotonic changes in backscattered energy (CBE) of ultrasound with temperature for certain subwavelength scatterers. We also measured CBE values similar to our predictions in bovine liver, turkey breast, and pork muscle in one dimension (1-D). Those measurements were corrected manually for changes in the axial position of echo signals with temperature. To investigate the effect of temperature on CBE in 2-D, we imaged 1-cm thick samples of bovine liver, turkey breast, and pork muscle during heating in a water bath. Images were formed by a phased-array imager with a 7 MHz linear probe. Using radio frequency (R-F) signals permitted the use of cross correlation as a similarity measure for automatic tracking of feature displacement as a function of temperature. Feature displacement across the specimen was nonuniform with typical total displacements of 0.5 mm in both axial and lateral directions. Apparent movement in eight image regions in each specimen was tracked from 37 to 50/spl deg/C in 0.5/spl deg/C steps. Envelopes of motion-compensated image regions were found then smoothed with a 3 /spl times/ 3 running average filter before forming the backscattered energy at each pixel. Our measure of CBE compared means of both the positive and negative changes in the backscattered energy (BE) images. CBE was monotonic and differed by about 4 dB at 50/spl deg/C from its value at 37/spl deg/C. Relatively noise-free CBE curves from tissue volumes of less than 1 cm/sup 3/ supports the; use of CBE for temperature estimation.
Sleep and use of electronic devices in adolescence: results from a large population-based study

Objectives Adolescents spend increasingly more time on electronic devices, and sleep deficiency rising in adolescents constitutes a major public health concern. The aim of the present study was to investigate daytime screen use and use of electronic devices before bedtime in relation to sleep. Design A large cross-sectional population-based survey study from 2012, the youth@hordaland study, in Hordaland County in Norway. Setting Cross-sectional general community-based study. Participants 9846 adolescents from three age cohorts aged 16–19. The main independent variables were type and frequency of electronic devices at bedtime and hours of screen-time during leisure time. Outcomes Sleep variables calculated based on self-report including bedtime, rise time, time in bed, sleep duration, sleep onset latency and wake after sleep onset. Results Adolescents spent a large amount of time during the day and at bedtime using electronic devices. Daytime and bedtime use of electronic devices were both related to sleep measures, with an increased risk of short sleep duration, long sleep onset latency and increased sleep deficiency. A dose–response relationship emerged between sleep duration and use of electronic devices, exemplified by the association between PC use and risk of less than 5 h of sleep (OR=2.70, 95% CI 2.14 to 3.39), and comparable lower odds for 7–8 h of sleep (OR=1.64, 95% CI 1.38 to 1.96). Conclusions Use of electronic devices is frequent in adolescence, during the day as well as at bedtime. The results demonstrate a negative relation between use of technology and sleep, suggesting that recommendations on healthy media use could include restrictions on electronic devices.
The Ocean as a Global Reservoir of Antibiotic Resistance Genes

ABSTRACT Recent studies of natural environments have revealed vast genetic reservoirs of antibiotic resistance (AR) genes. Soil bacteria and human pathogens share AR genes, and AR genes have been discovered in a variety of habitats. However, there is little knowledge about the presence and diversity of AR genes in marine environments and which organisms host AR genes. To address this, we identified the diversity of genes conferring resistance to ampicillin, tetracycline, nitrofurantoin, and sulfadimethoxine in diverse marine environments using functional metagenomics (the cloning and screening of random DNA fragments). Marine environments were host to a diversity of AR-conferring genes. Antibiotic-resistant clones were found at all sites, with 28% of the genes identified as known AR genes (encoding beta-lactamases, bicyclomycin resistance pumps, etc.). However, the majority of AR genes were not previously classified as such but had products similar to proteins such as transport pumps, oxidoreductases, and hydrolases. Furthermore, 44% of the genes conferring antibiotic resistance were found in abundant marine taxa (e.g., Pelagibacter, Prochlorococcus, and Vibrio). Therefore, we uncovered a previously unknown diversity of genes that conferred an AR phenotype among marine environments, which makes the ocean a global reservoir of both clinically relevant and potentially novel AR genes.
Retrospective epidemiology of acute rheumatic fever: a 10-year review in the Waikato District Health Board area of New Zealand.

BACKGROUND Acute rheumatic fever (ARF) is a preventable disease which remains a prominent burden of health in New Zealand, with an annual incidence comparable to that of developing countries. AIM The aim of this study was to describe the epidemiology of ARF and recurrent ARF cases in the Waikato District Health Board (DHB) area of New Zealand from 1 January 2002 to 31 December 2011. METHODS A total of 106 cases of ARF and four cases of recurrent ARF were identified through the Public Health Database - EpiSurv and the Hospital coding system, ICD-10. RESULTS The overall Waikato DHB annual incidence of ARF was 3.1 per 100,000 population with Maori children aged 5-14 years experiencing higher rates of 46.1 per 100,000 population. Eighty-five percent of the cases were of Maori ethnicity, and 10% Pacific. Almost three-quarters of all cases lived in areas of the three most deprived deciles as described by the New Zealand Deprivation Index 2006. DISCUSSION The rates of ARF seen in the Waikato DHB are comparable to that seen previously locally and nationally. High risk groups have been identified as children aged 5-14 years, Maori and Pacific ethnicity, and those living in lower socioeconomic areas which could be targeted by the Rheumatic Fever Prevention Programme (RFPP) with the intention to reduce the incidence of ARF nationally to 0.4 cases per 100,000 population by 2017.
Towards the Orwellian Nightmare: Separation of Business and Personal Emails

This paper describes the largest scale annotation project involving the Enron email corpus to date. Over 12,500 emails were classified, by humans, into the categories "Business" and "Personal", and then sub-categorised by type within these categories. The paper quantifies how well humans perform on this task (evaluated by inter-annotator agreement). It presents the problems experienced with the separation of these language types. As a final section, the paper presents preliminary results using a machine to perform this classification task.
New initialization for clustering algorithms combining distance and density

Many clustering techniques are highly dependent on the initialization. The introduction of membership degrees used in fuzzy logic, avoids local minima, however the global minimum is far from satisfactory, especially when dealing with clusters with varying density. Here we propose an initialization method combining distance and density in order to approach as near as possible the final cluster centroids. Comparisons are given with KKZ method.
Passive Sensors for Long Duration Internet of Things Networks

In this work, three different concepts are used to develop a fully passive sensor that is capable of measuring different types of data. The sensor was supplied by Wireless Power Transmission (WPT). Communication between the sensor and reader is established by a backscatter, and to ensure minimum energy consumption, low power techniques are used. In a simplistic way, the process starts by the transmission of two different waves by the reader to the sensor, one of which is used in power transmission and the other of which is used to communicate. Once the sensor is powered, the monitoring process starts. From the monitoring state, results from after processing are used to modulate the incoming wave, which is the information that is sent back from the reader to the tag. This new combination of technologies enables the possibility of using sensors without any cables or batteries to operate 340 cm from the reader. The developed prototype measures acceleration and temperature. However, it is scalable. This system enables a new generation of passive Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
Recognizing Implicit Discourse Relations in the Penn Discourse Treebank

We present an implicit discourse relation classifier in the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB). Our classifier considers the context of the two arguments, word pair information, as well as the arguments' internal constituent and dependency parses. Our results on the PDTB yields a significant 14.1% improvement over the baseline. In our error analysis, we discuss four challenges in recognizing implicit relations in the PDTB.
Suspended SiC particle deposition on plastic mold steel surfaces in powder-mixed electrical discharge machining

The discharge gap phenomena in powder-mixed electrical discharge machining are examined using SiC powder mixing in water dielectric liquid. Surface modifications on machined work materials are investigated by means of optical, scanning electron microscopy and energy-dispersive spectroscopy. The experimental studies revealed that the surface morphology drastically affected the additives as means of secondary discharges and particle migration from dielectric liquid. Such mechanisms do not occur randomly and indicate a robust dependency with respect to powder suspension concentration, pulse on duration and current. The influence on discharge transitivity with respect to suspended particle concentration is noted with pock shape development due to secondary discharges followed by an intermediate stage signifying a sudden increase in particle migration from the dielectric liquid. The particles decomposed on the surface at specific operational conditions demonstrating the possibility of methodical surface alloying using the process. Finally, the mechanisms involved were elaborated with respect to operational parameters and discussed based on the experimental results.
Computational Complexity of Tensor Nuclear Norm

The main result of this paper shows that the weak membership problem in the unit ball of a given norm is NP-hard if and only if the weak membership problem in the unit ball of the dual norm is NP-hard. Equivalently, the approximation of a given norm is polynomial time if and only if the approximation of the dual norm is polynomial time. Using the NP-hardness of the approximation of the spectral norm of tensors we show that the approximation of the nuclear norm is NP-hard. We relate our results to bipartite separable states in quantum mechanics.
A dominant block to HIV-1 replication at reverse transcription in simian cells

Although nonhuman primates are genetically close to humans, their T cells do not support productive replication of HIV-1. In contrast, HIV-1 replicates in activated human CD4+ T cells, monocytes, and metabolically active human cells of a variety of cell types become permissive for HIV-1 replication when transduced to express CD4 and CCR5 or CXCR4. The molecular basis of this species restriction to HIV-1 replication was investigated by using African green monkey and rhesus macaque cell lines that were stably transduced to express human CD4 and CCR5. The cells supported replication of cognate viruses [simian immunodeficiency virus from African green monkeys (SIV-AGM) and macaques (SIVmac239)] but did not support replication of an R5-tropic cytopathic HIV-1. A β-lactamase-based HIV-1 entry assay was used to show that the virus efficiently entered the nonhuman primate cells. Provirus formation was reduced 50-fold compared with similarly infected human cells. Real-time PCR quantitation demonstrated that reverse transcription failed to initiate efficiently in the simian cells. The block to reverse transcription was overridden at multiplicity of infection >1 or by preincubation of the nonhuman primate cells with virus, a feature reminiscent of the Friend virus resistance gene-1 (FV-1), restriction to murine leukemia virus replication in mouse cells. Heterokaryon analysis in which human and simian cells were fused demonstrated that the block was dominant. These findings suggested that the primate cells contain a dominant inhibitor that prevents HIV-1 reverse transcription.
Drug Interaction Potential of 2-((3,4-Dichlorophenethyl)(propyl)amino)-1-(pyridin-3-yl)ethanol (LK-935), the Novel Nonstatin-Type Cholesterol-Lowering Agent

The widely prescribed lipid-lowering statins are considered to be relatively safe drugs. However, the risk of severe myopathy and drug interactions as a consequence of statin therapy provides a challenge for development of novel cholesterol-lowering agents, targeting enzymes other than HMG-CoA reductase. The novel pyridylethanol-(phenylethyl)amine derivative, (2-((3,4-dichlorophenethyl)(propyl)-amino)-1-(pyridin-3-yl)ethanol (LK-935), blocking lanosterol 14α-demethylase, was demonstrated to efficiently reduce cholesterol biosynthesis. The drug interaction potential of LK-935 was investigated and compared with that of atorvastatin and rosuvastatin in primary human hepatocytes. Clear evidence was provided for the induction of CYP3A4 by LK-935. LK-935 was proved to be a potent human pregnane X receptor (hPXR) activator as a prerequisite for the transcriptional activation of CYP3A4 gene; however, the rapid metabolism of LK-935 in primary hepatocytes prevented maximal CYP3A4 induction. Therefore, the induction of CYP3A4 by LK-935 may be prone to mild or negligible drug interactions. However, because CYP3A4 and also CYP2C9 play a significant role in LK-935 metabolism, the inhibition of these cytochromes P450 by coadministered drugs may lead to some increase in the LK-935 concentration required for the potent induction of CYP3A4. Rosuvastatin was found to increase human constitutive androstane receptor (hCAR)-mediated transcription of CYP3A4, CYP2C9, and CYP2B6 genes, predicting the consequent potential for drug interactions with several coadministered drugs. Activation of hCAR and hPXR by atorvastatin and the subsequent induction of not only CYP2B6 and CYP3A4 but also of CYP2C9 present an additional target by which atorvastatin, a widely used cholesterol-lowering drug, can modify the kinetics of numerous drugs.
Twenty-four-hour ambulatory blood pressure measurement in a primigravid population

Objective: To establish the profiles of 24-h non-invasive ambulatory blood pressure measurement (ABPM) during the trimesters of pregnancy and the puerperium in normotensive healthy primigravidae Design: A prospective study in which 24-h ABPM was performed on five occasions in each subject: in the first trimester between 9 and 16 weeks' gestation; in the second trimester between 18 and 24 weeks; in the third trimester between 26 and 32 weeks and between 33 and 40 weeks; and finally at 6 weeks post partum Method: One hundred and six Caucasian primigravid women who were normotensive at their first booking visit were recruited consecutively from the antenatal clinic and had 24-h ABPM performed with the SpaceLabs 90207 ambulatory system Results: Of the 106 women recruited, 98 completed 24-h ABPM on four of the five measurement occasions. Four women delivered prematurely before 33 weeks' gestation, thereby missing one ABPM measurement. Changes during pregnancy and the puerperium were assessed against the ABPM performed in the first trimester. There was no difference for daytime or night-time systolic blood pressure between 9 and 33 weeks, but it rose significantly from 33 to 40 weeks. At 6 weeks post partum, systolic blood pressure was not significantly different from the daytime pressure in the first-trimester ABPM but was raised significantly at night. Diastolic blood pressure decreased significantly between 18 and 24 weeks for both daytime and night-time. From 33 to 40 weeks it increased in parallel with systolic blood pressure, and at 6 weeks post partum it was raised significantly compared with first-trimester values for daytime and night-time. The nocturnal fall in blood pressure was preserved throughout pregnancy with a significant difference between daytime and night-time measurements present on all measurement occasions for systolic, diastolic and mean blood pressures and heart rate. There were significant differences between daytime ABPM and clinic blood pressure for both systolic and diastolic blood pressure up to 33 weeks. From 33 weeks until 6 weeks post partum there was no significant difference between daytime ambulatory and clinic blood pressures Conclusion: This study provides reference values for ABPM in healthy primigravidae with generally uncomplicated pregnancies
Author's Personal Copy Identification of Immunodominant T-cell Epitopes Present in Glycoprotein 5 of the North American Genotype of Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome Virus

In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of the article (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website or institutional repository. Authors requiring further information regarding Elsevier's archiving and manuscript policies are encouraged to visit: a b s t r a c t Ninty-six pentadecapeptides spanning glycoprotein 5 (GP5) of porcine reproductive and respiratory virus (PRRSV) were screened for their ability to elicit a recall interferon-␥ response from peripheral blood mononuclear cells isolated from 22 pigs infected with up to two genetically divergent PRRSV strains. Two distinct regions (amino acid residues 117–131, LAALICFVIRLAKNC, and 149–163, KGRLYRWRSPVII/VEK) appeared to contain immunodominant T-cell epitopes based on their ability to stimulate above average numbers of interferon-␥ secreting cells as compared to other GP5 peptides. A survey of PRRSV isolates indicated that these two sites are relatively conserved with at most a two amino acid variation and thus should be considered for incorporation into a multi-valent vaccine against PRRS.
Effects of LED-backlit computer screen and emotional selfregulation on human melatonin production

Melatonin is a circadian hormone transmitted via suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) in the hypothalamus and sympathetic nervous system to the pineal gland. It is a hormone necessary to many human functions such as immune, cardiovascular, neuron and sleep/awake functions. Since melatonin enhancement or suppression is reported to be closely related to the photic information from retina, in this paper, we aim further to study both the lighting condition and the emotional self-regulation in different lighting conditions together with their effects on the production of human melatonin. In this experiment, five participants are in three light exposure conditions by LED backlit computer screen (No light, Red light (~650 nm) and Blue light (~470 nm)) for 30 minute (8-8:30 pm), then they are collected saliva both before and after the experiments. After the experiment, the participants are also asked to answer the emotional self-regulation questionnaire of PANAS and BRUMS regarding each light exposure condition. These results show that positive mood mean difference of PANAS between no light and red light is significant with p=0.001. Tension, depression, fatigue, confusion and vigor from BRUMS are not significantly changed while we can observe the significant change in anger mood. Finally, we can also report that the blue light of LED-backlit computer screen significantly suppress melatonin production (91%) more than red light (78%) and no light (44%).
A Model Predictive Power Factor Control Scheme With Active Damping Function for Current Source Rectifiers

A model predictive power factor control (MPPFC) scheme is proposed for high-power medium-voltage (MV) current source rectifiers (CSRs). Facing two major issues on input power factor (PF) and LC resonance, the proposed MPPFC uses a novel line reactive power reference estimator to achieve unitary input PF or maximum achievable input PF for a CSR at various operating states, and involves active damping function into itself to mitigate LC resonance at line side. An online capacitance estimation method is associated with the proposed line reactive power reference estimator to guarantee more accurate input PF control, and a novel damping current calculation method, which avoids the use of band-stop filter, is also designed for active damping purpose. In comparison with traditional linear control, the proposed MPPFC not only realizes input PF regulation, but also achieves better steady-state performance on meeting the grid code requirements. In contrast to traditional model predictive control (MPC) for a CSR, the proposed MPPFC achieve more accurate reactive power control. Moreover, it overcomes the challenge on the realization of active damping based on MPC, which extends the application of MPC into high-power MV CSR. Simulation on a high-power CSR (1 MVA/4160 V/139 A) and experiments on a low-power prototype (5 kVA/208 V/13.9 A) are both conducted to verify the effectiveness of MPPFC.
The design of a fuel-cell-based power-quality control center to realize unbundled power-quality supply

The application of a power-quality control center (PQCC) to provide an unbundled quality of electricity supply is examined. The center consists of back-to-back power converters, a dc bus and a solid-oxide fuel-cell distributed generator (SOFCDG). The purpose is to use the flexibility offered by the converters and SOFCDG to realize varied levels of ac supply quality to the loads. Through the concept of a feasible operating area of the SOFCDG, analysis shows that the ability of the PQCC to accommodate instantaneous power demand change is constrained. This is due to limits imposed on the fuel utilization factor of the SOFCDG. A feasible PQCC operating scheme is then proposed. It fully exploits the ability of the converters and the distributed generator to respond to external disturbances. In the event of a system voltage disturbance, the PQCC is to operate in one of two scenarios in accordance to the severity of the disturbance. Based on the dynamic model derived for the power network, a design procedure of the PQCC control system is also described. Simulation results show the efficacy of the proposed scheme.