Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A comparison of blood vessel features and local binary patterns for colorectal polyp classification

Colorectal cancer is the third leading cause of cancer deaths in the United States of America for both women and men. By means of early detection, the five year survival rate can be up to 90%. Polyps can to be grouped into three different classes: hyperplastic, adenomatous, and carcinomatous polyps. Hyperplastic polyps are benign and are not likely to develop into cancer. Adenomas, on the other hand, are known to grow into cancer (adenoma-carcinoma sequence). Carcinomas are fully developed cancers and can be easily distinguished from adenomas and hyperplastic polyps. A recent narrow band imaging (NBI) study by Tischendorf et al. has shown that hyperplastic polyps and adenomas can be discriminated by their blood vessel structure. We designed a computer-aided system for the differentiation between hyperplastic and adenomatous polyps. Our development aim is to provide the medical practitioner with an additional objective interpretation of the available image data as well as a confidence measure for the classification. We propose classification features calculated on the basis of the extracted blood vessel structure. We use the combined length of the detected blood vessels, the average perimeter of the vessels and their average gray level value. We achieve a successful classification rate of more than 90% on 102 polyps from our polyp data base. The classification results based on these features are compared to the results of Local Binary Patterns (LBP). The results indicate that the implemented features are superior to LBP.
Fermionic Linear Optics and Matchgates

Fermionic linear optics is efficiently classically simulatable. Here it is shown that the set of states achievable with fermionic linear optics and particle measurements is the closure of a low dimensional Lie group. The weakness of fermionic linear optics and measurements can therefore be explained and contrasted with the strength of bosonic linear optics with particle measurements. An analysis of fermionic linear optics is used to show that the two-qubit matchgates and the simulatable matchcircuits introduced by Valiant generate a monoid of extended fermionic linear optics operators. A useful interpretation of efficient classical simulations such as this one is as a simulation of a model of non-deterministic quantum computation. Problem areas for future investigations are suggested.
ORGANIZATIONS: A MULTILEVEL PERSPECTIVE

The objective of this paper is to contribute to a deeper understanding of system usage in organizations by examining its multilevel nature. Past research on system usage has suffered from a levels bias, with researchers studying system usage at single levels of analysis only (e.g., the individual, group, or organizational level). Although single-level research can be useful, we suggest that studying organizations one level at a time will ultimately lead to an unnatural, incomplete, and very disjointed view of how information systems are used in Deborah Compeau was the accepting senior editor for this paper. Natalia Levina, Teresa Marcon, and Neil Ramiller served as reviewers. The associate editor chose to remain anonymous. practice. To redress this situation, we draw on recent advances in multilevel theory to present system usage as a multilevel construct and provide an illustration for what it takes for researchers to study it as such. The multilevel perspective advanced in this article offers rich opportunities for theoretical and empirical insights and suggests a new foundation for in-depth research on the nature of system usage, its emergence and change, and its antecedents and consequences.
Therapeutic Effect of Bone Marrow Mesenchymal Stem Cells on Laser-Induced Retinal Injury in Mice

Stem cell therapy has shown encouraging results for neurodegenerative diseases. The retina provides a convenient locus to investigate stem cell functions and distribution in the nervous system. In the current study, we investigated the therapeutic potential of bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) by systemic transplantation in a laser-induced retinal injury model. MSCs from C57BL/6 mice labeled with green fluorescent protein (GFP) were injected via the tail vein into mice after laser photocoagulation. We found that the average diameters of laser spots and retinal cell apoptosis were decreased in the MSC-treated group. Interestingly, GFP-MSCs did not migrate to the injured retina. Further examination revealed that the mRNA expression levels of glial fibrillary acidic protein and matrix metalloproteinase-2 were lower in the injured eyes after MSC transplantation. Our results suggest that intravenously injected MSCs have the ability to inhibit retinal cell apoptosis, reduce the inflammatory response and limit the spreading of damage in the laser-injured retina of mice. Systemic MSC therapy might play a role in neuroprotection, mainly by regulation of the intraocular microenvironment.
Rapport, rigor, and rate my professor: students’ perceptions of hospitality and tourism professors

ABSTRACT Student evaluation is a common measure used to assess the quality of an instructor’s teaching. However, the results of traditional student evaluation scores are often not available to students, thus students seek out other platforms to learn about professors that they have in mind as instructors for their future courses. Little is known about students’ evaluations of instructors on public, online teacher-rating websites, especially in the hospitality and tourism field. The purpose of this study was to explore hospitality and tourism students’ perceptions of instructors and their teaching effectiveness based on students’ comments and ratings. Results showed that hospitality and tourism students speak positively of their instructors and courses and rated them to be helpful, high in quality, and precise. The comments posted by students were also closely related to students’ perceptions on overall quality, helpfulness, clarity, and easiness.
Sequence Variation within the KIV-2 Copy Number Polymorphism of the Human LPA Gene in African, Asian, and European Populations

Amazingly little sequence variation is reported for the kringle IV 2 copy number variation (KIV 2 CNV) in the human LPA gene. Apart from whole genome sequencing projects, this region has only been analyzed in some detail in samples of European populations. We have performed a systematic resequencing study of the exonic and flanking intron regions within the KIV 2 CNV in 90 alleles from Asian, European, and four different African populations. Alleles have been separated according to their CNV length by pulsed field gel electrophoresis prior to unbiased specific PCR amplification of the target regions. These amplicons covered all KIV 2 copies of an individual allele simultaneously. In addition, cloned amplicons from genomic DNA of an African individual were sequenced. Our data suggest that sequence variation in this genomic region may be higher than previously appreciated. Detection probability of variants appeared to depend on the KIV 2 copy number of the analyzed DNA and on the proportion of copies carrying the variant. Asians had a high frequency of so-called KIV 2 type B and type C (together 70% of alleles), which differ by three or two synonymous substitutions respectively from the reference type A. This is most likely explained by the strong bottleneck suggested to have occurred when modern humans migrated to East Asia. A higher frequency of variable sites was detected in the Africans. In particular, two previously unreported splice site variants were found. One was associated with non-detectable Lp(a). The other was observed at high population frequencies (10% to 40%). Like the KIV 2 type B and C variants, this latter variant was also found in a high proportion of KIV 2 repeats in the affected alleles and in alleles differing in copy numbers. Our findings may have implications for the interpretation of SNP analyses in other repetitive loci of the human genome.
‘My family is making me sick’ – but, for both him and her?: examining the effect of gender on the association between close relationships and health

ABSTRACT Using a biopsychosocial health approach, we examine the role of close relationships on health for men and women. With a cross-sectional US sample (N = 872), we examine a structural model to determine how close relationships (family and romantic) influence number of chronic disease and number of prescription medication through physiological (allostatic load) and psychological (depression/anxiety symptoms) biobehavioural reactivity differently by gender. For both men and women, family/couple relationships impact health through depression/anxiety symptoms more so than allostatic load. However, for women, family relationships can both positively and negatively influenced health outcomes when considering both indirect and direct associations. Findings indicate that there may be unmeasured coping mechanisms (eg exercise, alcohol consumption) that can differentially impact health for men compared to women. Also, when examining family and couple dimensions of relationships simultaneously, couple relationships appear to have less of an impact on health.
Enhancement of Tight Junctional Barrier Function by Micronutrients: Compound-Specific Effects on Permeability and Claudin Composition

Amid an increasing number of reports in the literature concerning epithelial barrier enhancement by various nutrient compounds, there has never been a study performing side-by-side comparisons of these agents in a single epithelial model. We compare five nutrient compounds (previously reported in various epithelial models to enhance barrier function) regarding their ability to increase transepithelial electrical resistance (Rt) and decrease transepithelial mannitol permeability (Jm) across LLC-PK1 renal epithelial cell layers. The effects of these nutrients on the abundance of various tight junctional proteins are also compared. In the overall group of nutrients tested - zinc, indole, quercetin, butyrate and nicotine - only nicotine failed to improve barrier function by either parameter. Nicotine also was without effect on tight junctional proteins. Quercetin simultaneously increased Rt and decreased Jm. Zinc, butyrate and indole only exhibited statistically significant enhancement of Rt. Each of these four effective nutrient compounds had unique patterns of effects on the panel of tight junctional proteins studied. No two compounds produced the same pattern of effects. This unique pattern of effects on tight junctional complex composition by each compound establishes the chance for additive or even synergistic improvement of barrier function by combinations of compounds. A synergistic effect of the combination of quercetin and zinc on Rt is shown.
Measurements and predictions of subsidence induced by soil consolidation using persistent scatterer InSAR and a hyperbolic model

A space‐borne SAR interferometric technique is presented for measuring and predicting ground subsidence associated with soil consolidation. Instead of a conventional constant velocity model, a hyperbolic model is introduced for persistent scatterer SAR interferometry (PSI) processing. Twenty three JERS‐1 SAR acquired between 1992 and 1998 were used to measure land subsidence in Mokpo city, Korea which had been primarily built on land reclaimed from the sea. Two subsidence field maps were derived and compared: a constant velocity model and a hyperbolic model. Non‐linear components depending on the stage of soil consolidation are well represented by the hyperbolic model. The maximum subsidence velocity reaches over 6 cm/yr, while the maximum acceleration is about −0.3 to −0.4 cm/year2. The predicted subsidence rate with the new model was validated by using later ENVISAT SAR data for 2004–2005. Prediction accuracy with the non‐linear model is improved significantly, indicating the importance of a physically‐based deformation model.
SPATIAL DISTRIBUTION OF ARBUSCULAR MYCORRHIZAS ALONG AN ELEVATION AND ADAPHIC GRADIENT IN THE FOREST DYNAMICS PLOT AT SINHARAJA, SRI LANKA.

To study how the endomycorrhizal spore density and diversity varies with soil parameters and elevation in the 25 ha forest dynamics plot in the Sinharaja forest, soil samples were collected from three transects, along the elevational gradient. Soil mycorrhizal spores were isolated using the wet – sieving and decanting method (Brundrett et al., 1996). They were observed and counted under stereo zooming microscope with an external light source. Different morphotypes of spores were identified using external spore characteristics to find out spore diversity. Soil chemical and physical properties such as water potential, pH, total soil organic carbon and plant available phosphate were analyzed using standard methods. There is a decreasing trend in spore density and spore diversity with increasing elevation (R 2 = 21.6%, 40.6% respectively) but spore density does not vary with four main habitat types in the 25 ha FDP plot. The number of small spores of 45-125 µm contributed more to the total spore counts in all samples examined. Soil parameters except water potential, do not correlate with endomycorrhizal spore density and diversity. Spore diversity showed a significant positive correlation with soil water potential (P = 0.041), but not spore density.
Cytokines in the Cerebrospinal Fluids of Patients with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis

Objectives. Previous research has provided evidence for dysregulation in peripheral cytokines in patients with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (CFS/ME). To date only one study has examined cytokines in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) samples of CFS/ME patients. The purpose of this pilot study was to examine the role of cytokines in CSF of CFS/ME patients. Methods. CSF was collected from 18 CFS/ME patients and 5 healthy controls. The CSF samples were examined for the expression of 27 cytokines (interleukin- (IL-) 1β, IL-1ra, IL-2, IL-4, IL-6, IL-7, IL-8, IL-9, IL-10, IL-12p70, IL-13, IL-15, IL-17, basic FGF, eotaxin, G-CSF, GM-CSF, IFN-γ, IP-10, MCP-1 (MCAF), MIP-1α, MIP-1β, PDGF-BB, RANTES, TNF-α, and VEGF) using the Bio-Plex Human Cytokine 27-plex Assay. Results. Of the 27 cytokines examined, only IL-10 was significantly reduced in the CFS/ME patients in comparison to the controls. Conclusions. This preliminary investigation suggests that perturbations in inflammatory cytokines in the CSF of CFS/ME patients may contribute to the neurological discrepancies observed in CFS/ME.
A Real-Time Rover Executive Based On Model-Based Reactive Planning

This paper reports on the experimental verification of the ability of IDEA (Intelligent Distributed Execution Architecture) effectively operate at multiple levels of abstraction in an autonomous control system. The basic hypothesis of IDEA is that a large control system can be structured as a collection of interacting control agents, each organized around the same fundamental structure. Two IDEA agents, a system-level agent and a mission-level agent, are designed and implemented to autonomously control the K9 rover in real-time. The system is evaluated in the scenario where the rover must acquire images from a specified set of locations. The IDEA agents are responsible for enabling the rover to achieve its goals while monitoring the execution and safety of the rover and recovering from dangerous states when necessary. Experiments carried out both in simulation and on the physical rover, produced highly promising results.
Adapting WordNet to the Medical Domain using Lexicosyntactic Patterns in the Ohsumed Corpus.

Ontologies are widely used in several areas with applications including knowledge Management, Web commerce and electronic business. An ontology provides a consensus of concept specifications for a specific domain shared by a group of people. In this paper we deal with Ontology Learning, specifically we aim to adapt the WordNet ontology, a general source of lexical knowledge, to the medical domain. We use for this task a combination of lexico– syntactic pattern, mainly conjunctions of the form “Noun_CJC_Noun”, where CJC can be {and, or, but}. Pairs of words extracted in this fashion are compared to find their similarity in the WordNet noun hierarchy, using a form of the Resnik similarity method. Large scale experiments were conducted by extracting many such pairs of nouns from the Ohsumed corpus and mapping them into WordNet. For a noun pattern like “A or B” we find the lowest common ancestor of A and B by using the hypernym and hyponym links. This enables us to keep the appropriate medical sense of the two words A and B.
Competition for Attention

We present a model of market competition and product differentiation in which consumers' attention is drawn to the products' most salient attributes. Firms compete for consumer attention via their choices of quality and price. With salience, strategic positioning of each product affects how all other products are perceived. With this attention externality, depending on the cost of producing quality some markets exhibit "commoditized" price salient equilibria, while others exhibit "de-commoditized" quality salient equilibria. When the cost of producing quality changes, innovation can lead to a radical change in markets. In the context of financial innovation, the model generates the well documented phenomenon of "reaching for yield".
Teaching Writing in the 1990s.

she saw, Emig identified stages of the writing process and she described distinct processes which she believed characterized how the students she observed wrote (Emig 1969). Following Emig's research, Donald Graves (1975) examined and identified the stages and writing processes of younger children. Sharon Pianko (1977) and Sondra Perl (1979) examined the composing processes of college students. These and many other studies about writing which followed throughout the next two and a half decades helped to stimulate new interest in teaching students to write. This research has enabled many English and language arts teachers to understand more about why, how, and under what conditions students learn how to write.
Circulating Immune Complexes among Diabetic Children

Insulin dependent diabetes mellitus (IDDM) is an autoimmune disease associated with the presence of different types of autoantibodies. The presence of these antibodies and the corresponding antigens in the circulation leads to the formation of circulating immune complexes (CIC). CIC are known to persist in the blood for long periods of time. Such CIC following deposition in the small blood vessels have the potential to lead to microangiopathy with debilitating clinical consequences. The aim of our pilot study was to investigate whether a correlation exists between CIC and the development of microvascular complications in diabetic children. Isolation of a new glycoprotein complement inhibition factor (CIF) from the parasitic plant Cuscuta europea seed, which appears to bind specifically to complement component C3 has provided an unique tool for the measurement of immune complexes by means of ELISA-type techniques (CIF-ELISA). We studied the levels of CIC (IgG, IgM and IgA) in 58 diabetic children (mean age 12.28±4.04 years, diabetes duration 5.3±3.7 years), 29 of them had vascular complications (group 1) and the other 29 were without vascular complications (group 2). As controls, we studied sera samples from 21 healthy children (mean age 13.54±4.03 years). Sera from the diabetic patients showed statistically significant higher levels of CIC IgG ( p=0.03) than sera from the control group. In sera from group 1 values of CIC IgG showed statistically significant higher levels than controls (0.720±0.31 vs. 0.46±0.045; p=0.011) Sera from 59% of the patients were positive for CIC IgG, 36% for CIC IgM and 9% for CIC IgA. Among 26 patients with microalbuminuria, sera from 17/26 (65%) were positive for CIC IgG, 8/26 (31%) for CIC IgM and 2/26 (8%) for CIC IgA. CIC IgG correlated with HbA1c (r=0.51; p=0.005) and microalbuminuria (r=0.42, p=0.033). CIC IgA correlated with age (r=0.44, p=0.03). CIC IgM correlated with the duration of diabetes (r=0.63, p=0.02). These findings suggest that elevated levels of CIC IgG are associated with the development of early diabetic nephropathy.
Deep Learning for Chemical Compound Stability Prediction

This paper explores the idea of using deep neural networks with various architectures and a novel initialization method, to solve a critical topic in the field of materials science. Understanding the relationship between the composition and the property of materials is essential for accelerating the course of materials discovery. Data driven approaches using advanced machine learning to derive knowledge from that of existing compounds, and/or from simulations of nonexisting ones, have only started to play a crucial role. We demonstrate an application with a large-scale data set containing 300K organic and inorganic compounds. Deep multilayer perceptrons are used to capture nonlinear mappings between chemical composition and compound stability characterized by a continuous value, known as the formation energy. It is surprising to see that input features as raw and sparse as the compositional fractions of elements can lead to a remarkably accurate modeling of a far-fetched regression prediction. The performance is shown to be outperforming state-of-the-art predictions by as much as 54%.
On the Robustness of Efficient Velocity Filter Banks to Registration Error

Detection of pointlike targets in noisy imagery is a difficult task. The velocity filter improves detection performance by integrating information across several frames. Due to absence of target knowledge a bank of Velocity Filters must be used. The required size of the filter bank grows exponentially with the number of frames, prohibiting exhaustive evaluation. This study employs pixel-first and best-first search regimes to reduce the computational demand of the filter bank. Simulations demonstrate that both approaches yield good results and exhibit robustness to registration error. The techniques are successfully applied to real imaging seeker data.
Presence in the Nurse–Client Relationship: An Integrative Review

Aim: To integrate empirical literature related to the use and outcomes of presence. Design: An integrative review of empirical research was conducted. Method: A comprehensive search from 1966 to August 2017 was conducted using Whittemore and Knafl’s five-step method. Twenty-six studies were eligible for the review. Results: Presence is a deliberate, interpersonal intervention that is implemented through physical, psychological, and spiritual actions to promote client well-being. Nursing actions associated with presence include use of self, availability, and therapeutic communication. Conclusion: This diverse range of primary sources indicates the significance of presence to nursing practice.