Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Relocalization, Global Optimization and Map Merging for Monocular Visual-Inertial SLAM

The monocular visual-inertial system (VINS), which consists one camera and one low-cost inertial measurement unit (IMU), is a popular approach to achieve accurate 6-DOF state estimation. However, such locally accurate visual-inertial odometry is prone to drift and cannot provide absolute pose estimation. Leveraging history information to relocalize and correct drift has become a hot topic. In this paper, we propose a monocular visual-inertial SLAM system, which can relocalize camera and get the absolute pose in a previous-built map. Then 4-DOF pose graph optimization is performed to correct drifts and achieve global consistent. The 4-DOF contains x, y, z, and yaw angle, which is the actual drifted direction in the visual-inertial system. Furthermore, the proposed system can reuse a map by saving and loading it in an efficient way. Current map and previous map can be merged together by the global pose graph optimization. We validate the accuracy of our system on public datasets and compare against other state-of-the-art algorithms. We also evaluate the map merging ability of our system in the large-scale outdoor environment. The source code of map reuse is integrated into our public code, VINS-Monol11https://github.com/HKUST-Aerial-Robotics/VINS-Mono.
Effect of two biodegradable chelates on metals uptake, translocation and biochemical changes of Lantana Camara growing in fly ash amended soil

ABSTRACT The present work had two purposes firstly to evaluate the potential of Lantana Camara for phytoextraction of heavy metals from fly ash amended soil and to assess the suitability of a proper biodegradable chelating agent for chelate assisted phytoextraction. Plants were grown in manure mixed soil amended with various concentration of fly ash. Two biodegradable chelating agents were added (EDDS and MGDA) in the same dose separately before maturation stage. Sampling was done at different growing stages. The plant took up metal in different plant parts in the following order: for Cu, and Zn leaf >root >stem, for Cr and Mn leaf>stem >root, for Ni root >leaf>stem and for Pb root≈leaf>stem respectively. For Cu, Zn, Cr and Mn Lantana camara acted as phytoextractor. Translocation factor and bioaccumulation coefficient was>1 signifying enrichment and translocation of metals in the plant. Morphological studies showed no toxicity symptom in the plant. Among biochemical parameters protein and nitrate reductase activity decreased, whereas, chlorophyll and peroxidise activity increased with the growth stages. Finally, it was evident from the results that Lantana Camara can be used as efficient phytoextractor of metals, with proper harvesting cycle and both chelate were proved as effective chelators for phytoextraction of metals.
Hypoglycemia unawareness in type 1 diabetes suppresses brain responses to hypoglycemia

BACKGROUND. Among nondiabetic individuals, mild glucose decrements alter brain activity in regions linked to reward, motivation, and executive control. Whether these effects differ in type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) patients with and without hypoglycemia awareness remains unclear. METHODS. Forty-two individuals (13 healthy control [HC] subjects, 16 T1DM individuals with hypoglycemia awareness [T1DM-Aware], and 13 T1DM individuals with hypoglycemia unawareness [T1DM-Unaware]) underwent blood oxygen level–dependent functional MRI brain imaging during a 2-step hyperinsulinemic euglycemic (90 mg/dl)-hypoglycemic (60 mg/dl) clamp for assessment of neural responses to mild hypoglycemia. RESULTS. Mild hypoglycemia in HC subjects altered activity in the caudate, insula, prefrontal cortex, and angular gyrus, whereas T1DM-Aware subjects showed no caudate and insula changes, but showed altered activation patterns in the prefrontal cortex and angular gyrus. Most strikingly, in direct contrast to HC and T1DM-Aware subjects, T1DM-Unaware subjects failed to show any hypoglycemia-induced changes in brain activity. These findings were also associated with blunted hormonal counterregulatory responses and hypoglycemia symptom scores during mild hypoglycemia. CONCLUSION. In T1DM, and in particular T1DM-Unaware patients, there is a progressive blunting of brain responses in cortico-striatal and fronto-parietal neurocircuits in response to mild-moderate hypoglycemia. These findings have implications for understanding why individuals with impaired hypoglycemia awareness fail to respond appropriately to falling blood glucose levels. FUNDING. This study was supported in part by NIH grants R01DK020495, P30 DK045735, K23DK109284, K08AA023545. The Yale Center for Clinical Investigation is supported by an NIH Clinical Translational Science Award (UL1 RR024139).
"Estudo do Efeito da Reticulação por Genipin em suportes biocompatíveis de Quitosana-PVA"

O tegumento humano, mais conhecido como pele, e formado por camadas distintas, unidas entre si. As suas principais funcoes sao a protecao dos tecidos subjacentes, a regulacao da temperatura somatica e ainda contem terminacoes nervosas sensitivas. Este orgao esta sujeito aos mais diversos tipos de solicitacoes e lesoes provocadas por agentes fisicos e quimicos. Por sua importância, a pele vem sendo alvo de inumeras pesquisas no sentido de compreender suas propriedades e produzir materiais que melhorem e acelerem o processo reparo. O mercado mundial apresenta um crescimento em relacao a demanda por biomateriais para tratamento epitelial. Isto ocorre, em parte, por causa dos riscos decorrentes de xenoenxertos e aloenxertos. Portanto, este trabalho objetivou o estudo de membranas de PVA e quitosana com e sem reticulacao de genipin. O genipin foi escolhido como agente de reticulacao pois e um reticulante natural, que vem se mostrando promissor em inumeras pesquisas para desenvolvimento de biomateriais. Foram investigados os parâmetros para a preparacao dosfilmes e suas caracteristicas fisico-quimicas, propriedades mecânicas e sua biocompatibilidade. Os filmes produzidos neste trabalho, apresentaram resultados promissores para a preparacao de biomateriais substituintes do tecido epitelial. Os materiais apresentaramresistencia a tracao compativel com os valores do tecido epitelial e biocompatibilidade necessaria para biomateriais.
A smooth-trajectory mobility model for airborne networks

Mobility models used for the design and evaluation of routing protocols for airborne networks (ANs) must catch the mobility features of the airborne vehicles. Airborne vehicles in ANs show different mobility features, such as moving with high speed and subject to some physical constraints. But existing mobility models have limitations for ANs such as sharp turn, sudden stop, etc. So, we propose a new mobility model, smooth-trajectory mobility model. According to the movement pattern of this model, the airborne vehicles randomly choose to move straight forward or make clockwise turn (or counterclockwise turn) at the transition instants to mimic the realistic movement. And to ensure smooth trajectories, the vehicles do not change their heading directions at transition instants. Because node spatial distribution is a fundamental feature of a mobility model, we first prove that the uniform distributions of location and heading direction are remained if there is a uniform initialization. Secondly, through stability analysis, we show location and heading direction are uniformly distributed regardless of the initial distribution. Also, we validate the theoretic results by simulation. Furthermore, by changing the parameters of this model, we can extend it to various mobility models.
Factors Affecting Treatment Duration - A Dilemma In Orthodontics.

BACKGROUND One of the first concerns of new orthodontic patients, apart from the outcome, is the duration of treatment. A better understanding of orthodontic treatment duration as well as factors affecting the treatment duration is useful for efficient patient counselling and improved clinical practice. Hence, the objectives of this study are to compare the treatment durations of subjects with Class I and Class II division 1 (II/1) malocclusions, and to identify the factors affecting the treatment duration of these malocclusions. METHODS This was a chart review conducted in the orthodontic department of the Aga Khan University Hospital, Karachi. The study sample comprised of 120 subjects and data were recorded from their treatment records. ANOVA and Bonferroni post-hoc were performed to determine the difference in treatment durations of Class I and Class II/1 malocclusions, whereas multiple linear regression was applied to identify the factors affecting the treatment duration. A level of significance (p≤0.05) was used for the statistical tests. RESULTS A statistically significant difference was found between the treatment durations of Class I and Class II/1 non-extraction (p=0.007), Class I non-extraction and Class II/1 extraction (p=0.001), and Class I and II/1 extraction (p=0.004) groups. The factors significantly increasing the treatment duration included missed appointments, breakages, and lower incisor proclination. CONCLUSIONS Orthodontic treatment of Class II/1 malocclusion lasts longer than that of Class I malocclusion. Prolonged treatment time is associated with missed appointments, band/bracket debonds and increased lower incisor inclination. The variance in treatment time can be explained most significantly by number of missed appointments and breakages.
Spatial and directional modulation with random frequency diverse array

A novel spatial and directional modulation (SDM) method is proposed for enhancing the physical layer security of traditional directional modulation (DM) in the context of random frequency diverse array (RFDA). The novelty of the proposed method is that the concept of spatial modulation (SM) is combined to increase the robustness against the distributed multiple eavesdroppers, and to increase the transmission rate of the legitimate users, even if the location information of the legitimate user is already obtained by the eavesdroppers. Our results show that through a careful design the proposed method performs better than the benchmark in terms of both spectral efficiency and security enhancement.
Reflection, Abstraction And Theorizing In Design And Development Research

Design theories have been proposed as means to capture abstract knowledge about the design and development of information technology (IT) and information systems (IS) artifacts. There is now an increasingly accepted and used body of knowledge on the processes of design research and the components of design theories. Explicit guidance is still sparse, however, as to how to extract design theories during design science research. In this paper, we focus on reflection and abstraction in design science research as distinct activities leading to design theory. We suggest an abstraction framework that recognizes different modes of causal analysis related to the discrete decisions made by designers and developers as well as to the artifact in use: creative (mental) causes, active causes, and passive causes. The first recognizes the creativity of the human mind, the second deliberate interventions and their consequences, and the third is built upon the notion of affordances that describe the potential uses of an artifact depending on its use context. We argue that these modes of causal analysis can be used to abstract from specific design processes in order to identify key components of design theory.
Impact of type 1 diabetes mellitus and sitagliptin treatment on the neuropeptide Y system of rat retina

Neuropeptide Y (NPY) is a neuromodulator that is expressed in the retina. Increasing evidence suggests that NPY has pronounced anti‐inflammatory effects, which might depend on the inhibition of dipeptidyl‐peptidase‐IV (DPP‐IV). The aim of this study was to investigate the impact of type 1 diabetes mellitus (DM) and sitagliptin, a DPP‐IV inhibitor, on the NPY system in the retina using an animal model.
Layer 5 Callosal Parvalbumin-Expressing Neurons: A Distinct Functional Group of GABAergic Neurons

Previous studies have shown that parvalbumin-expressing neurons (CC-Parv neurons) connect the two hemispheres of motor and sensory areas via the corpus callosum, and are a functional part of the cortical circuit. Here we test the hypothesis that layer 5 CC-Parv neurons possess anatomical and molecular mechanisms which dampen excitability and modulate the gating of interhemispheric inhibition. In order to investigate this hypothesis we use viral tracing to determine the anatomical and electrophysiological properties of layer 5 CC-Parv and parvalbumin-expressing (Parv) neurons of the mouse auditory cortex (AC). Here we show that layer 5 CC-Parv neurons had larger dendritic fields characterized by longer dendrites that branched farther from the soma, whereas layer 5 Parv neurons had smaller dendritic fields characterized by shorter dendrites that branched nearer to the soma. The layer 5 CC-Parv neurons are characterized by delayed action potential (AP) responses to threshold currents, lower firing rates, and lower instantaneous frequencies compared to the layer 5 Parv neurons. Kv1.1 containing K+ channels are the main source of the AP repolarization of the layer 5 CC-Parv and have a major role in determining both the spike delayed response, firing rate and instantaneous frequency of these neurons.
Bearing Fault Diagnosis Using Fully-Connected Winner-Take-All Autoencoder

Intelligent fault diagnosis of bearings has been a heated research topic in the prognosis and health management of rotary machinery systems, due to the increasing amount of available data collected by sensors. This has given rise to more and more business desire to apply data-driven methods for health monitoring of machines. In recent years, various deep learning algorithms have been adapted to this field, including multi-layer perceptrons, autoencoders, convolutional neural networks, and so on. Among these methods, autoencoder is of particular interest for us because of its simple structure and its ability to learn useful features from data in an unsupervised fashion. Previous studies have exploited the use of autoencoders, such as denoising autoencoder, sparsity aotoencoder, and so on, either with one layer or with several layers stacked together, and they have achieved success to certain extent. In this paper, a bearing fault diagnosis method based on fully-connected winner-take-all autoencoder is proposed. The model explicitly imposes lifetime sparsity on the encoded features by keeping only $k$ % largest activations of each neuron across all samples in a mini-batch. A soft voting method is implemented to aggregate prediction results of signal segments sliced by a sliding window to increase accuracy and stability. A simulated data set is generated by adding white Gaussian noise to original signals to test the diagnosis performance under noisy environment. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, we compare our methods with some state-of-the-art bearing fault diagnosis methods. The experiments result show that, with a simple two-layer network, the proposed method is not only capable of diagnosing with high precision under normal conditions, but also has better robustness to noise than some deeper and more complex models.
Molecular Mechanisms for Herpes Simplex Virus Type 1 Pathogenesis in Alzheimer’s Disease

This review focuses on research in the areas of epidemiology, neuropathology, molecular biology and genetics that implicates herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) as a causative agent in the pathogenesis of sporadic Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Molecular mechanisms whereby HSV-1 induces AD-related pathophysiology and pathology, including neuronal production and accumulation of amyloid beta (Aβ), hyperphosphorylation of tau proteins, dysregulation of calcium homeostasis, and impaired autophagy, are discussed. HSV-1 causes additional AD pathologies through mechanisms that promote neuroinflammation, oxidative stress, mitochondrial damage, synaptic dysfunction, and neuronal apoptosis. The AD susceptibility genes apolipoprotein E (APOE), phosphatidylinositol binding clathrin assembly protein (PICALM), complement receptor 1 (CR1) and clusterin (CLU) are involved in the HSV lifecycle. Polymorphisms in these genes may affect brain susceptibility to HSV-1 infection. APOE, for example, influences susceptibility to certain viral infections, HSV-1 viral load in the brain, and the innate immune response. The AD susceptibility gene cholesterol 25-hydroxylase (CH25H) is upregulated in the AD brain and is involved in the antiviral immune response. HSV-1 interacts with additional genes to affect cognition-related pathways and key enzymes involved in Aβ production, Aβ clearance, and hyperphosphorylation of tau proteins. Aβ itself functions as an antimicrobial peptide (AMP) against various pathogens including HSV-1. Evidence is presented supporting the hypothesis that Aβ is produced as an AMP in response to HSV-1 and other brain infections, leading to Aβ deposition and plaque formation in AD. Epidemiologic studies associating HSV-1 infection with AD and cognitive impairment are discussed. Studies are reviewed supporting subclinical chronic reactivation of latent HSV-1 in the brain as significant in the pathogenesis of AD. Finally, the rationale for and importance of clinical trials treating HSV-1-infected MCI and AD patients with antiviral medication is discussed.
Ultraviolet light and melanoma

Melanoma is a clinically heterogeneous disease, and current strategies for treatment of the primary tumour are based on pathological criteria alone. In the recent past, several DNA‐sequencing and RNA‐sequencing studies of primary and advanced melanoma samples have identified unique relationships between somatic mutations, genomic aberrations, and the genetic fingerprint of ultraviolet radiation (UVR). The recurrent patterns of genomic alterations reveal different disease pathways, drug targets and mechanisms limiting drug response. Here, we examine the known associations between the molecular categories of melanoma and the multidimensional UVR damage. Copyright © 2018 Pathological Society of Great Britain and Ireland. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Pyramidal Neurons in Different Cortical Layers Exhibit Distinct Dynamics and Plasticity of Apical Dendritic Spines

The mammalian cerebral cortex is typically organized in six layers containing multiple types of neurons, with pyramidal neurons (PNs) being the most abundant. PNs in different cortical layers have distinct morphology, physiology and functional roles in neural circuits. Therefore, their development and synaptic plasticity may also differ. Using in vivo transcranial two-photon microscopy, we followed the structural dynamics of dendritic spines on apical dendrites of layer (L) 2/3 and L5 PNs at different developmental stages. We show that the density and dynamics of spines are significantly higher in L2/3 PNs than L5 PNs in both adolescent (1 month old) and adult (4 months old) mice. While spine density of L5 PNs decreases during adolescent development due to a higher rate of spine elimination than formation, there is no net change in the spine density along apical dendrites of L2/3 PNs over this period. In addition, experiences exert differential impact on the dynamics of apical dendritic spines of PNs resided in different cortical layers. While motor skill learning promotes spine turnover on L5 PNs in the motor cortex, it does not change the spine dynamics on L2/3 PNs. In addition, neonatal sensory deprivation decreases the spine density of both L2/3 and L5 PNs, but leads to opposite changes in spine dynamics among these two populations of neurons in adolescence. In summary, our data reveal distinct dynamics and plasticity of apical dendritic spines on PNs in different layers in the living mouse cortex, which may arise from their distinct functional roles in cortical circuits.
LYOPHILIZED GLICLAZIDE­POLOXAMER SOLID DISPERSIONS FOR ENHANCEMENT OF IN­ VITRO DISSOLUTION AND IN­VIVO BIOAVAILABILITY

Gliclazide (GLC), an oral hypoglycemic agent, is characterized by low solubility in gastric fluid, low dissolution rate and inter‐individual variability in bioavailability. The objective of this study was therefore to design optimized solid dispersions (SD) of GLC with a hydrophilic carrier viz., poloxamer 407 (PXM) by lyophillisation method in an attempt to enhance the aqueous solubility and therapeutic efficacy of the drug. Phase solubility study with increasing PXM concentrations (0.5 to 10% w/v) was done to study the influence of polymer concentration on solubility of GLC. SD’s of GLC and PXM in 1:1, 1:3 and 1:5w/w ratios were prepared by physical mixing and lyophillisation (freeze drying) method, followed by dissolution studies. A comparative in vivo study between optimized SD and GLC was conducted on twelve healthy New Zealand rabbits. The dissolution rate of GLC from the lyophilized dispersions was greatly enhanced as compared to those from physical mixtures and pure drug. The in‐vivo studies indicated that the pharmacokinetic parameters following oral administration of the optimized SD and pure GLC were significantly different (P < 0.05). The peak serum concentration (Cmax) for the lyophilized SD and GLC were found to be 3.01±0. 42µg/mL and 2.27 ± 0. 39µg/mL respectively, whereas the time required to reach the peak serum concentration (Tmax) for the optimized SD was significantly shorter (2.16±0.41h) compared to that for GLC (4.33±0.52h). The relative bioavailability of the SD under in‐vivo test was found to be 158.52%. These results demonstrate that the use of a suitable hydrophilic carrier like PXM to formulate SDs by the lyophillisation technique can rapidly accelerate the solubi lity and in vitro dissolution of a lipophilic drug like GLC. The suggested method also provides good signs of improvement in the rate of absorption as well as bioavailability of gliclazide following oral administration.
Hostility patterns and health implications: correlates of Cook-Medley Hostility Scale scores in a national survey.

Correlated Cook-Medley Hostility Scale (Ho) scores with sociodemographic variables in a national survey of 2,536 adults. Multiple regression models revealed that Ho scores were associated with race (p less than .0001), years of education (p less than .001), sex (p less than .001), occupation (p = .0002), and income (p = .0025). Higher scores were found in non-Whites, men, and those of lower socioeconomic status. There was a Race x Income interaction (p less than .005), such that the greatest Ho score differences between the races occurred among those with the lowest incomes. Age was related to Ho scores in a curvilinear fashion: higher scores in the youngest and oldest age groups than in the middle-aged groups (p = .025). Marital status was unrelated to Ho scores. These patterns of hostility are similar to the patterns of health indicators in the population. Because hostility has been found to be associated with adverse health outcomes, hostility may account for some of the demographic variations in health status. However, it is argued that research must first establish the generality of the hostility-health relationship across subgroups of the population.