Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improving Health-Related Quality of Life of Patients With an Ostomy Using a Novel Digital Wearable Device: Protocol for a Pilot Study

Background Ostomy surgeries involving the placement of an ostomy bag (eg, colostomy, ileostomy, urostomy, etc) have been shown to have a negative impact on health-related quality of life. To date, no studies have been conducted examining what impact, if any, wearable biosensors have on the health-related quality of life of ostomy patients. Objective In the present study, we plan to assess the quality of life of ostomy patients using the Ostom-i alert sensor, a portable, wearable, Bluetooth-linked biosensor that facilitates easier ostomy bag output measurements. We hypothesize that using the Ostom-i alert sensor will result in an improved, ostomy-specific, health-related quality of life as compared to baseline measurement before the use of the sensor. Methods A total of 20 ostomy patients will be screened and recruited to participate in this prospective, observational, cross-over pilot study using an Ostom-i alert sensor for one month. The primary outcome of this study will compare ostomy-specific, health-related quality of life at baseline (prior to Ostom-i alert sensor use) to ostomy-specific, health-related quality of life after 2 and 4 weeks of Ostom-i use by utilizing the City of Hope Quality of Life Questionnaire for Patients with an Ostomy. Secondary outcomes of general health-related quality of life and adjustment to ostomy will be evaluated using the Medical Outcomes Study 36-item short form health survey and the Olbrisch Ostomy Adjustment Scale Short Form 2. Results The project was funded by the Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine. Enrollment is currently underway and data analysis is expected to be completed in 2018. Conclusions Proposed benefits of mobile, internet-linked personal health monitors, such as the Ostom-i, include a reduction in the cost of care by reducing resource utilization and infection rates, improving patient-provider communication, reducing time spent as an inpatient as well as improved quality of life. Prior studies have demonstrated decreased health-related quality of life in patients with an ostomy bag. We aim to examine the extent to which the Ostom-i alert sensor affects the health-related quality of life of its users. The Ostom-i alert sensor has the potential to improve quality of life of users by giving them the freedom and confidence to partake in daily activities with the knowledge that they can check how full their ostomy bag is in a private, discrete manner. Trial Registration ClinicalTrials.gov NCT02319434; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02319434 (Archived at WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6xhFDThmq)
Comparative Antennal and Behavioral Responses of Summer and Winter Morph Drosophila suzukii (Diptera: Drosophilidae) to Ecologically Relevant Volatiles

Abstract Drosophila suzukii (Matsumura) (Diptera: Drosophilidae) is a devastating global pest of berry crops and cherries. Little is understood about its biology during the winter in northern temperate regions, including potential resources that it may utilize during this period. In this study, olfactory and behavioral responses of female D. suzukii to six volatiles (methionol, acetic acid, linalool, bornyl acetate, isoamyl acetate, and geosmin) were evaluated separately for electroantennogram (EAG) and behavioral assays between summer and winter morphs. Results of EAG indicated that isoamyl acetate, acetic acid, and geosmin elicited significantly higher olfactory responses from the antennae of female summer morph D. suzukii compared with those of female winter morph D. suzukii. Winter morph D. suzukii showed reduced antennal response to the volatiles overall. Geosmin and bornyl acetate elicited significantly different behavioral responses from the two morphs in no-choice laboratory behavioral assays. T-maze behavioral assays with geosmin further revealed that summer morphs had a significant aversion, while winter morphs showed no significant aversion to geosmin. Overall, we demonstrate that responses of the two seasonally induced morphs to environmental stimuli are different, and future studies are justified to further understand how these physiological and behavioral differences may contribute to improved pest management of D. suzukii.
Relationship between Neural Crest Cells and Cranial Mesoderm during Head Muscle Development

Background In vertebrates, the skeletal elements of the jaw, together with the connective tissues and tendons, originate from neural crest cells, while the associated muscles derive mainly from cranial mesoderm. Previous studies have shown that neural crest cells migrate in close association with cranial mesoderm and then circumscribe but do not penetrate the core of muscle precursor cells of the branchial arches at early stages of development, thus defining a sharp boundary between neural crest cells and mesodermal muscle progenitor cells. Tendons constitute one of the neural crest derivatives likely to interact with muscle formation. However, head tendon formation has not been studied, nor have tendon and muscle interactions in the head. Methodology/Principal Findings Reinvestigation of the relationship between cranial neural crest cells and muscle precursor cells during development of the first branchial arch, using quail/chick chimeras and molecular markers revealed several novel features concerning the interface between neural crest cells and mesoderm. We observed that neural crest cells migrate into the cephalic mesoderm containing myogenic precursor cells, leading to the presence of neural crest cells inside the mesodermal core of the first branchial arch. We have also established that all the forming tendons associated with branchiomeric and eye muscles are of neural crest origin and express the Scleraxis marker in chick and mouse embryos. Moreover, analysis of Scleraxis expression in the absence of branchiomeric muscles in Tbx1−/− mutant mice, showed that muscles are not necessary for the initiation of tendon formation but are required for further tendon development. Conclusions/Significance This results show that neural crest cells and muscle progenitor cells are more extensively mixed than previously believed during arch development. In addition, our results show that interactions between muscles and tendons during craniofacial development are similar to those observed in the limb, despite the distinct embryological origin of these cell types in the head.
Automatic Detection of Cry Sounds in Neonatal Intensive Care Units by Using Deep Learning and Acoustic Scene Simulation

Cry detection is an important facility in both residential and public environments, which can answer to different needs of both private and professional users. In this paper, we investigate the problem of cry detection in professional environments, such as Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICUs). The aim of our work is to propose a cry detection method based on deep neural networks (DNNs) and also to evaluate whether a properly designed synthetic dataset can replace on-field acquired data for training the DNN-based cry detector. In this way, a massive data collection campaign in NICUs can be avoided, and the cry detector can be easily retargeted to different NICUs. The paper presents different solutions based on single-channel and multi-channel DNNs. The experimental evaluation is conducted on the synthetic dataset created by simulating the acoustic scene of a real NICU, and on a real dataset containing audio acquired on the same NICU. The evaluation revealed that using real data in the training phase allows achieving the overall highest performance, with an Area Under Precision-Recall Curve (PRC-AUC) equal to 87.28%, when signals are processed with a beamformer and a post-filter and a single-channel DNN is used. The same method, however, reduces the performance to 70.61% when training is performed on the synthetic dataset. On the contrary, under the same conditions, the new single-channel architecture introduced in this paper achieves the highest performance with a PRC-AUC equal to 80.48%, thus proving that the acoustic scene simulation strategy can be used to train a cry detection method with positive results.
Estimation of 2017 Iran’s Presidential Election Using Sentiment Analysis on Social Media

Nowadays with growth of social media, they become a part of every man’s life; so, they can be used in analysis and prediction tasks. People share their feelings, opinion and viewpoints on these media. One of the most important uses of social media is in national elections. In days near the election, people share their opinions, candidates share their plans and channels try to broadcast election events. So, data scientists can analyze these widely broadcasting messages to predict the election results. In this paper, we propose using both text and meta data analysis methods including sentiment analysis of hashtags and messages, time and reputation analysis to predict Iran’s 2017 presidential election. We used sentiment analysis of messages on words with positive and negative polarities for text analysis and hashtags to determine the polarity of messages for metadata analysis. In addition, we used time analysis to weight messages score by their closeness to the election. Finally, we used reputation analysis of messages to calculate the impact of messages on people’s opinion. For doing so, we used the number of views on telegram messages and numbers of members of the channels to weight messages by an appropriate weight. Our experiments on twits and telegram data show that the proposed model achieved 97.3% accuracy compares to the real results of the election.
Frequency Domain Analysis of Lossy and Non-Uniform Twisted Wire Pair

In the study of the frequency domain crosstalk for twisted pair, the traditional alternating inversion model is often built under the ideal condition of lossless and uniform media, ignoring the length of the twisted section. This paper focuses on the impact of these non-ideal conditions on crosstalk, applying the cascaded transmission line theory of Paul and McKnight to predict near-end crosstalk (NEXT) of two pairs of twisted wire pair (TWP) which are placed above a perfectly conducting ground or in a cylindrical ideal conductive shell. This paper put forward the non-uniform-media layered connection method (NLCM) to solve the parasitic parameter matrix, taking two layers as an example. Based on the deduced chain parameter matrix and boundary conditions, the exact crosstalk solution is obtained. All theories in this paper are of great significance to the EMC design of high-speed data transmission systems, providing the theoretical support for predicting NEXT within each device or system.
Cancer-related information needs and treatment decision-making experiences of people with dementia in England: a multiple perspective qualitative study

Objectives Little is known about the cancer experience and support needs of people with dementia. In particular, no evidence currently exists to demonstrate the likely complex decision-making processes for this patient group and the oncology healthcare professionals (HCP) involved in their care. The aim of this study was to explore the cancer-related information needs and decision-making experiences of patients with cancer and comorbid dementia, their informal caregivers and oncology HCPs. Design Cross-sectional qualitative study. Semistructured interviews were conducted face to face with participants. Interviews were audio recorded and transcribed prior to thematic analysis. Setting Patients with a diagnosis of cancer and dementia, their informal caregivers and oncology HCPs involved in their care, all recruited from a regional treatment cancer centre. Participants Purposeful sample of 10 patients with a diagnosis of cancer–dementia, informal caregivers (n=9) and oncology HCPs (n=12). Results Four themes were identified: (1) leading to the initial consultation—HCPs require more detailed information on the functional impact of dementia and how it may influence cancer treatment options prior to meeting the patient; (2) communicating clinically relevant information—informal caregivers are relied on to provide patient information, advocate for the patient and support decision-making; (3) adjustments to cancer care—patients with dementia get through treatment with the help of their family and (4) following completion of cancer treatment—there are continuing information needs. Oncology HCPs discussed their need to consult specialists in dementia care to support treatment decision-making. Conclusions Although patients with cancer–dementia are involved in their treatment decision-making, informal caregivers are generally crucial in supporting this process. Individual patient needs and circumstances related to their cancer must be considered in the context of dementia prognosis highlighting complexities of decision-making in this population. Oncology teams should strive to involve healthcare staff with dementia expertise as early as possible in the cancer pathway.
Multi-Fault Diagnosis of Rolling Bearings via Adaptive Projection Intrinsically Transformed Multivariate Empirical Mode Decomposition and High Order Singular Value Decomposition

Rolling bearings are important components in rotary machinery systems. In the field of multi-fault diagnosis of rolling bearings, the vibration signal collected from single channels tends to miss some fault characteristic information. Using multiple sensors to collect signals at different locations on the machine to obtain multivariate signal can remedy this problem. The adverse effect of a power imbalance between the various channels is inevitable, and unfavorable for multivariate signal processing. As a useful, multivariate signal processing method, Adaptive-projection has intrinsically transformed multivariate empirical mode decomposition (APIT-MEMD), and exhibits better performance than MEMD by adopting adaptive projection strategy in order to alleviate power imbalances. The filter bank properties of APIT-MEMD are also adopted to enable more accurate and stable intrinsic mode functions (IMFs), and to ease mode mixing problems in multi-fault frequency extractions. By aligning IMF sets into a third order tensor, high order singular value decomposition (HOSVD) can be employed to estimate the fault number. The fault correlation factor (FCF) analysis is used to conduct correlation analysis, in order to determine effective IMFs; the characteristic frequencies of multi-faults can then be extracted. Numerical simulations and the application of multi-fault situation can demonstrate that the proposed method is promising in multi-fault diagnoses of multivariate rolling bearing signal.
Construction and application of a Xanthomonas campestris CGMCC15155 strain that produces white xanthan gum

In the industrial production of xanthan gum using Xanthomonas campestris CGMCC15155, large amounts of ethanol are required to extract xanthan gum from the fermentation broth and remove xanthomonadin impurities. To reduce the amount of ethanol and the overall production cost of xanthan gum, a xanthomonadin‐deficient strain of CGMCC15155 was constructed by inserting the Vitreoscilla globin (vgb) gene, under the control of the LacZ promoter, into the region of the pigA gene, which is involved in xanthomonadin synthesis. The insertion of vgb inactivated pigA, resulting in the production of white xanthan gum. The lack of xanthomonadins resulted in a decreased yield of xanthan gum. However, the expression product of vgb gene, VHb, could increase the metabolism of X. campestris, which allowed the production of xanthan gum to reach wild‐type levels in the engineered strain. The yield, molecular weight, and rheological properties of the xanthan gum synthesized by the engineered and wild‐type bacteria were essentially the same. When the same volume of ethanol was used, the whiteness values of the xanthan gum extracted from engineered and wild‐type bacteria were 65.20 and 38.17, respectively. To extract xanthan gum with the same whiteness, three and seven times the fermentation volume of ethanol was required for the engineered and wild‐type strains, respectively. Thus, the engineered train reduced the requirement for ethanol in xanthan gum production by 133.3%. The results demonstrated that the engineered bacteria used less ethanol, thus reducing the downstream processing cost in xanthan gum production.
Clinical findings and diagnostic procedures in 270 small ruminants with obstructive urolithiasis

Background Details of the clinical signs of obstructive urolithiasis in male small ruminants have not been documented in a large population. Objective To describe the clinical presentation and diagnostic procedures in a large group of small ruminants with urolithiasis. Animals Two hundred and seventy small ruminants (158 sheep and 112 goats). Methods Retrospective study of 270 cases identified based on clinical records. Results 81.2% affected goats were castrated and 91.7% sheep were intact males; 65.5% of the animals had been sick ≤2 days before referral. Common abnormalities included dysuria (93.6%), indigestion (84.4%), reduced general state of health (79.5%), signs of pain (73%), increased heart and respiratory rates (53.6% and 39.1%), and azotemia (89.4%). Blood urea nitrogen (BUN) and creatinine concentrations were strongly correlated (r 2 = 0.81). Hypochloremia (52.2%), hyponatremia (43.3%), hypophosphatemia (52.4%), and abnormal potassium concentrations (26.2% hypokalemia and 24.5% hyperkalemia) were the most common serum electrolyte imbalances. Packed cell volume (PCV), plasma proteins, potassium, BUN, and creatinine concentrations were significantly increased in animals with uroperitoneum. Ultrasonography allowed for confirmation of diagnosis in 83.9% of the cases (135/161 with sufficient available information), uroliths were visible on 34 of 56 plain radiographs. Conclusions and Clinical Importance Our study confirmed that clinical and ultrasonographic examinations are sufficient to diagnose urolithiasis. Clinical signs can be divided into an early stage with discrete unspecific clinical signs, a painful stage with frequent straining, expression of pain and moderately reduced general condition, and an advanced stage with a markedly reduced general condition and eventually recumbency.
Effects of the distant population density on spatial patterns of demographic dynamics

Spatio-temporal patterns of population changes within and across countries have various implications. Different geographical, demographic and econo-societal factors seem to contribute to migratory decisions made by individual inhabitants. Focusing on internal (i.e. domestic) migration, we ask whether individuals may take into account the information on the population density in distant locations to make migratory decisions. We analyse population census data in Japan recorded with a high spatial resolution (i.e. cells of size 500×500 m) for the entirety of the country, and simulate demographic dynamics induced by the gravity model and its variants. We show that, in the census data, the population growth rate in a cell is positively correlated with the population density in nearby cells up to a distance of 20 km as well as that of the focal cell. The ordinary gravity model does not capture this empirical observation. We then show that the empirical observation is better accounted for by extensions of the gravity model such that individuals are assumed to perceive the attractiveness, approximated by the population density, of the source or destination cell of migration as the spatial average over a circle of radius ≈1 km.
Resistant Dextrins as Prebiotic

In current days, the way each of human beings live indicates his or her health in the future time. Many factors determine the risk of illnesses, or reversibly, the possibility of being healthy. Being physically active and consumption of appropriate diet are examples of daily routines that may influence the condition of an organism. Lack of physical activity, particularly if associated with over consumption, increases the risk of development of nutrition related chronic diseases, such as obesity, hypertension, cardiovascular diseases, osteoporosis, type II diabetes, and several cancers. Over the last decade, drastic changes have taken place in the image and assessment of the importance of the daily diet. Foods are no longer judged in terms of taste and immediate nutritional needs, but also in terms of their ability to improve the health and well-being of consumers. The role of diet in human health has led to the recent development of the so-called functional food concept. A functional food is dietary ingredient, that has cellular or physiological effects above the normal nutritional value. Functional food can contain probiotics and/or prebiotics.
Intrusion Detection and Response System Inspired by the Defense Mechanism of Plants

The security of resources in a corporate network is always important to the organization. For this reason, different techniques, such as firewall and intrusion detection systems, are important. Years of long research have resulted in the contribution of different advancements in these techniques. Artificial intelligence, machine learning techniques, soft computing techniques, and bio-inspired techniques have been efficient in detecting advanced network attacks. However, very often, different new attacks are most successful in breaching these detection techniques. This very reason has been a motivation for us to explore the biological aspects and its defense mechanisms for designing a secure network model. After much study, we have identified that plants have a very well-established and evolved detection and a response mechanism to pathogens. In this paper, we have proposed and implemented a network attack detection and a response model inspired by plants. It is a three-layered model in analogy to the three-layer defense mechanism of plants to pathogens. We have further tested the proposed model to different network attacks and have compared the results to the open-source intrusion detection system, Snort. The experimental results also establish that the model is competent to detect and trigger an automated response whenever required.
Development of walking analysis system consisting of mobile force plate and motion sensor

In walking analysis, which is one useful method for efficient physical rehabilitation, the ground reaction force, the center of pressure, and the body orientation data are measured during walking. In the past, these data were measured by a 3D motion analysis system consisting of high-speed cameras and force plates, which must be installed in the floor. However, a conventional 3D motion analysis system can measure the ground reaction force and the center of pressure just on force plates during a few steps. In addition, the subjects' stride lengths are limited because they have to walk on the center of the force plate. These problems can be resolved by converting conventional devices into wearable devices. We used a measuring device consisting of portable force plates and motion sensors. We developed a walking analysis system that calculates the ground reaction force, the center of pressure, and the body orientations and measured a walking subject to estimate this system. We simultaneously used a conventional 3D motion analysis system to compare with our development system and showed its validity for measurements of ground reaction force and the center of pressure.