Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Epidemiology and clinical consequences of occupational exposure to blood and other body fluids in a University Hospital in Saudi Arabia

D health systems requires quality information. The basis for the management of health services are medical diagnostics. Proper and accurate coding is essential for the Colombian health system. In Colombia, whether the hospital has electronic or manual medical records, health professionals encode diagnoses without receiving training on how to do it, but by learning empirically and reproducing information biases where they learn. For this, we are working on the design and implementation of a mobile tool (app) called (CODIFICO) to develop skills in diagnoses coding by playful strategies (gamification). So students of health careers learn to codify diagnoses of diseases not by memory but by associations and pathological themed trees. So that, regardless of the type of medical records system, health professionals can, through learning and fun way, encode properly the diagnostics and this reflects in: better use of time dedicated to care, better health risk management, and at the macro system, accurate diagnosis needed to provide effective health services. It has been identified that implementation of teaching strategies through technological tools such as m-health enhance learning; this is the technical assumption of this project. We will use a methodology before-after evaluation of the quality metrics in the register of medical diagnosis and analysis of usability of the app. It is expected that by their playful nature, the app can be offered free regardless of language, in the smartphones online stores.
Towards robust color recovery for high-capacity color QR codes

Color brings extra data capacity for QR codes, but it also brings tremendous challenges to the decoding because of color interference and illumination variation, especially for high-density QR codes. In this paper, we put forth a framework for high-capacity QR codes, HiQ, which optimizes the decoding algorithm for high-density QR codes to achieve robust and fast decoding on mobile devices, and adopts a learning-based approach for color recovery. Moreover, we propose a robust geometric transformation algorithm to correct the geometric distortion. We also provide a challenging color QR code dataset, CUHK-CQRC, which consists of 5390 high-density color QR code samples captured by different smartphones under different lighting conditions. Experimental results show that HiQ outperforms the baseline [1] by 286% in decoding success rate and 60% in bit error rate.
Visual impairment in very low birthweight children

AIMS To compare the visual function of a cohort of very low birthweight (VLBW) children in early adolescence with that of their normal birthweight peers; to correlate visual impairment in this group with available perinatal data; and to examine the relation between the visual ability of VLBW children and their cognitive and motor skills. METHODS As part of a long term neurodevelopmental study, 137 VLBW children and 163 normal birthweight controls were visually assessed between the ages of 11 and 13 years. Their eyes were examined for strabismus and movement disorders, and the use of visual correction for refractive errors was noted. Measures were made of visual acuity, stereopsis, and contrast sensitivity. All children had standardised tests of motor ability and cognitive skills. Perinatal data, including cranial ultrasonography results, had been obtained from the children’s notes. No data were available however, regarding retinopathy of prematurity as screening was not established when these infants were born. RESULTS On all measures, the visual function of the VLBW children was poorer than that of the controls. Reduced visual function was present in 63.5% of VLBW children compared with 36% of controls. Poor contrast sensitivity and strabismus were predictive of poor motor skills in the VLBW children. Poor contrast sensitivity and poor visual acuity (at 0.3 metres) were predictive of lower IQ. Low birthweight, intraventricular haemorrhage, intrauterine growth retardation and low 1 minute Apgar scores predicted reduced visual function. CONCLUSIONS VLBW children have a high incidence of impaired vision. Stereopsis and contrast sensitivity are useful additions to the screening of this high risk group. They identified impaired vision that was not detected by normal screening and were related to impaired neurodevelopmental outcome.
Expressive visual text to speech and expression adaptation using deep neural networks

In this paper, we present an expressive visual text to speech system (VTTS) based on a deep neural network (DNN). Given an input text sentence and a set of expression tags, the VTTS is able to produce not only the audio speech, but also the accompanying facial movements. The expressions can either be one of the expressions in the training corpus or a blend of expressions from the training corpus. Furthermore, we present a method of adapting a previously trained DNN to include a new expression using a small amount of training data. Experiments show that the proposed DNN-based VTTS is preferred by 57.9% over the baseline hidden Markov model based VTTS which uses cluster adaptive training.
Direct methods and ADI‐preconditioned Krylov subspace methods for generalized Lyapunov equations

We consider linear matrix equations where the linear mapping is the sum of a standard Lyapunov operator and a positive operator. These equations play a role in the context of stochastic or bilinear control systems. To solve them efficiently one can fall back on known efficient methods developed for standard Lyapunov equations. In this paper, we describe a direct and an iterative method based on this idea. The direct method is applicable if the generalized Lyapunov operator is a low‐rank perturbation of a standard Lyapunov operator; it is related to the Sherman–Morrison–Woodbury formula. The iterative method requires a stability assumption; it uses convergent regular splittings, an alternate direction implicit iteration as preconditioner, and Krylov subspace methods. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Multipotent stem cells of the heart—do they have therapeutic promise?

The last decade has brought a comprehensive change in our view of cardiac remodeling processes under both physiological and pathological conditions, and cardiac stem cells have become important new players in the general mainframe of cardiac homeostasis. Different types of cardiac stem cells show different capacities for differentiation into the three major cardiac lineages: myocytes, endothelial cells and smooth muscle cells. Physiologically, cardiac stem cells contribute to cardiac homeostasis through continual cellular turnover. Pathologically, these cells exhibit a high level of proliferative activity in an apparent attempt to repair acute cardiac injury, indicating that these cells possess (albeit limited) regenerative potential. In addition to cardiac stem cells, mesenchymal stem cells represent another multipotent cell population in the heart; these cells are located in regions near pericytes and exhibit regenerative, angiogenic, antiapoptotic, and immunosuppressive properties. The discovery of these resident cardiac stem cells was followed by a number of experimental studies in animal models of cardiomyopathies, in which cardiac stem cells were tested as a therapeutic option to overcome the limited transdifferentiating potential of hematopoietic or mesenchymal stem cells derived from bone marrow. The promising results of these studies prompted clinical studies of the role of these cells, which have demonstrated the safety and practicability of cellular therapies for the treatment of heart disease. However, questions remain regarding this new therapeutic approach. Thus, the aim of the present review was to discuss the multitude of different cardiac stem cells that have been identified, their possible functional roles in the cardiac regenerative process, and their potential therapeutic uses in treating cardiac diseases.
Hepatobiliary Toxicity of Furan: Identification of Furan Metabolites in Bile of Male F344/N Rats

Furan, which occurs in a wide variety of heat-treated foods, is a potent hepatotoxicant and liver carcinogen in rodents. In a 2-year bioassay, furan caused hepatocellular adenomas and carcinomas in mice and rats but also high incidences of bile duct tumors in rats. Furan is bioactivated by cytochrome P450 enzymes to cis-2-butene-1,4-dial, an α,β-unsaturated dialdehyde, which readily reacts with tissue nucleophiles. The objective of this study was to structurally characterize furan metabolites excreted with bile to better understand the potential role of reactive furan intermediates in the biliary toxicity of furan. Bile duct-cannulated F344/N rats (n = 3) were administered a single oral dose of 5 mg/kg b.wt. [12C4]furan or stable isotope-labeled [3,4-13C]furan, and bile samples collected at 30-min intervals for 4 h were analyzed by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry. A total of eight furan metabolites derived from reaction of cis-2-butene-1,4-dial with GSH and/or amino acids and subsequent enzymatic degradation were detected in bile. The main metabolite was a cyclic monoglutathione conjugate of cis-2-butene-1,4-dial, which was previously detected in urine of furan-treated rats. Furthermore, a N-acetylcysteine-N-acetyllysine conjugate, previously observed in rat urine, and a cysteinylglycine-glutathione conjugate were identified as major metabolites. These data suggest that degraded protein adducts are in vivo metabolites of furan, consistent with the hypothesis that cytotoxicity mediated through binding of cis-2-butene-1,4-dial to critical target proteins is likely to play a key role in furan toxicity and carcinogenicity.
SpliceNet: recovering splicing isoform-specific differential gene networks from RNA-Seq data of normal and diseased samples

Conventionally, overall gene expressions from microarrays are used to infer gene networks, but it is challenging to account splicing isoforms. High-throughput RNA Sequencing has made splice variant profiling practical. However, its true merit in quantifying splicing isoforms and isoform-specific exon expressions is not well explored in inferring gene networks. This study demonstrates SpliceNet, a method to infer isoform-specific co-expression networks from exon-level RNA-Seq data, using large dimensional trace. It goes beyond differentially expressed genes and infers splicing isoform network changes between normal and diseased samples. It eases the sample size bottleneck; evaluations on simulated data and lung cancer-specific ERBB2 and MAPK signaling pathways, with varying number of samples, evince the merit in handling high exon to sample size ratio datasets. Inferred network rewiring of well established Bcl-x and EGFR centered networks from lung adenocarcinoma expression data is in good agreement with literature. Gene level evaluations demonstrate a substantial performance of SpliceNet over canonical correlation analysis, a method that is currently applied to exon level RNA-Seq data. SpliceNet can also be applied to exon array data. SpliceNet is distributed as an R package available at http://www.jjwanglab. org/SpliceNet.
Effect of Sintering Temperature on Biphasic Calcium Phosphate (BCP) Biocomposite

The present report aims to fabricate biphasic calcium phosphate (BCP) biocomposite in order to study the effects of sintering temperature on the sintered BCP biocomposite characteristics (phase’s formation, porosity and hardness properties). These effects were quantified using design of experiment (DOE) to develop mathematical models. BCP biocomposite pellets (60 wt% HA) were fabricated using mixing, pressing and sintered at two different temperatures (1100°C and 1250°C). The experiment was run by following the run order suggested by DOE software (Minitab 16) through randomization stage. Results show that sintering temperature will affect the formation of α-tricalcium phosphate (α-TCP) and the porosity of the samples. The formation of α-TCP phases will reduce the hardness value of BCP biocomposite.
Model-Based Transrating of H.264 Coded Video

This paper presents a model-based transrating (bit-rate reduction) system for H.264 coded video via requantization. In works related to previous standards, optimal requantization step sizes were obtained via Lagrangian optimization that minimizes the distortion subject to a rate constraint. Due to H.264 advanced coding features, the choices of quantization step size and coding modes are dependent and the rate control becomes computationally expensive. Therefore, optimal requantization algorithms developed for previous standards cannot be applied as they are. Hence, previous works on transrating in H.264 focused on changing the input coding decisions rather than on rate control, while requantization was addressed by a simple one-pass algorithm. Here we propose new model-based optimal requantization algorithms for transrating of H.264 coded video. The optimal requantization goal is to achieve the target bit rate with minimal effect on video quality. Incorporation of the proposed models serves two goals. For intra-coded frames, a novel closed-loop statistical estimator that overcomes spatial neighbors dependencies is developed. For inter-coded frames, the proposed macroblock-level models reduce the computational burden of the optimization. Overall, as compared to re-encoding (cascaded decoder-encoder), the proposed system reduces the computational complexity by a factor of about four, at an average PSNR loss of only 0.4 dB for transrating CIF/SIF sequences from 2 Mb/s to 1 Mb/s. In comparison with a simple one-pass requantization, the proposed algorithm achieves better performance (an average PSNR gain of 0.45 dB), at the cost of just twice the complexity.
Microstructure Changes of Machined Surfaceson Austenitic 304 Stainless Steel

This paper presents a experiment to estimate the influences of cutting conditions in microstructure changes of machining austenitic 304 stainless steel, especially for wear insert. The wear insert were prefabricated with a width of 0.5 mm. And the forces, temperature distribution, RS, and microstructure changes were measured by force dynamometer, infrared thermal camera, X-ray diffraction, XRD, SEM, respectively. The results told that the different combinations of machining condition have a significant influence on machined surface microstructure changes. In addition to that, the ANOVA and AOM were used to tell the different influences of cutting speed, feed rate, and wear insert. Keywords—Microstructure Changes, Wear width, Stainless steel
Current treatment of head and neck squamous cell cancer

Head and neck cancer is a heterogenous group of cancers involving the upper aerodigestive tract. In this review article, the most common sites will be discussed, including the oral cavity, oropharynx, hypopharynx, and larynx. Etiology and epidemiology will be discussed followed by staging, treatment, and survival. J. Surg. Oncol. 2014 110:551–574. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
The relationship among knowledge of, attitudes toward and acceptance of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) among Slovenian teachers

Electronic Journal of Biotechnology ISSN: 0717-3458 Vol.12 No.3, Issue of October 15, 2009 © 2009 by Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso -- Chile Received February 25, 2009 / Accepted June 19, 2009
A Pragmatic Approach to Capital Account Liberalization a Pragmatic Approach to Capital Account Liberalization the Evolution of the Cost-benefit Tradeoff

Any opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but the institute itself takes no institutional policy positions. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post World Net. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. ABSTRACT A Pragmatic Approach to Capital Account Liberalization * Crosscountry regressions suggest little connection from foreign capital inflows to more rapid economic growth for developing countries and emerging markets. This suggests that the lack of domestic savings is not the primary constraint on growth in these economies, as implicitly assumed in the benchmark neoclassical framework. We explore emerging new theories on both the costs and benefits of capital account liberalization, and suggest how one might adopt a pragmatic approach to the process. * We are grateful to James Hines and Jeremy Stein for very useful comments and to Timothy Taylor for helping us sharpen the exposition. Yusuke Tateno provided excellent research assistance. 2 2 In the mid-1990s, mainstream economists of nearly all stripes commonly recommended capital account liberalization – that is, allowing a free flow of funds in and out of a country's economy-as an essential step in the process of economic development. sought to make " the liberalization of capital movements one of the purposes of the IMF, and extend as needed, the IMF's jurisdiction …regarding the liberalization of such movements. " But then came the East Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, in which even seemingly healthy and well-managed economies like those of South Korea were engulfed by massive capital outflows and tremendous currency volatility, and capital account liberalization became quite controversial in the economics profession. For example, Fischer …
Cyclin-Dependent Kinase Inhibitors in Maize Endosperm and Their Potential Role in Endoreduplication 1

Two maize (Zea mays) cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK) inhibitors, Zeama;KRP;1 and Zeama;KRP;2, were characterized and shown to be expressed in developing endosperm. Similar to the CDK inhibitors in Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) and tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum), the maize proteins contain a carboxy-terminal region related to the inhibitory domain of the mammalian Cip/Kip inhibitors. Zeama;KRP;1 is present in the endosperm between 7 and 21 d after pollination, a period that encompasses the onset of endoreduplication, while the Zeama;KRP;2 protein declines during this time. Nevertheless, Zeama;KRP;1 accounts for only part of the CDK inhibitory activity that peaks coincident with the endoreduplication phase of endosperm development. In vitro assays showed that Zeama;KRP;1 and Zeama;KRP;2 are able to inhibit endosperm Cdc2related CKD activity that associates with p13. They were also shown to specifically inhibit cyclin A1;3and cyclin D5;1associated CDK activities, but not cyclin B1;3/CDK. Overexpression of Zeama;KRP;1 in maize embryonic calli that ectopically expressed the wheat dwarf virus RepA protein, which counteracts retinoblastoma-related protein function, led to an additional round of DNA replication without nuclear division.
On the Role of Object Information in Action Observation: An fMRI Study

Observing other people’s actions activates a network of brain regions that is also activated during the execution of these actions. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to test whether these “mirror” regions in frontal and parietal cortices primarily encode the spatiomotor aspects or the functional goal-related aspects of observed tool actions. Participants viewed static depictions of actions consisting of a tool object (e.g., key) and a target object (e.g., keyhole). They judged the actions either with regard to whether the objects were oriented correctly for the action to succeed (spatiomotor task) or whether an action goal could be achieved with the objects (function task). Compared with a control condition, both tasks activated regions in left frontoparietal cortex previously implicated in action observation and execution. Of these regions, the premotor cortex and supramarginal gyrus were primarily activated during the spatiomotor task, whereas the middle frontal gyrus was primarily activated during the function task. Regions along the intraparietal sulcus were more strongly activated during the spatiomotor task but only when the spatiomotor properties of the tool object were unknown in advance. These results suggest a division of labor within the action observation network that maps onto a similar division previously proposed for action execution.
Multiple system atrophy

Multiple system atrophy (MSA) is a degenerative disease of the central nervous system. Dejerine and Thomas in 1900 were the first to use the term olivopontocerebellar atrophy (OPCA) in two sporadic cases,1 although Menzel described the first case in 1891. Shy and Drager in 1960 described four cases of a “neurological syndrome with orthostatic hypotension”. 2They defined the full syndrome comprising of orthostatic hypotension, urinary and rectal incontinence, loss of sweating, iris atrophy, external ocular palsies, rigidity, tremor, loss of associated movements, impotence, atonic bladder, loss of rectal sphincter tone, fasciculations, wasting of distal muscles, evidence of a neuropathic lesion in the electromyogram suggesting involvement of the anterior horn cells, and the finding of a neuropathic lesion in the muscle biopsy. Adams et al first described a syndrome designated striatonigral degeneration in the early 1960s.3 These patients had mild autonomic failure and ataxia and were shown to have lesions in the olivopontocerebellar system. Graham and Oppenheimer first proposed the term multiple system atrophy in 1969 and suggested that OPCA, idiopathic orthostatic hypotension, the Shy-Drager syndrome, and striatonigral degeneration “are merely the expression of neuronal atrophy in a variety of overlapping combinations”. 4 MSA is a sporadic disease. MSA was considered a rare disease but many patients with MSA are misdiagnosed as suffering from idiopathic Parkinson's disease. It is clear from a large postmortem series of parkinsonian brains that cases of MSA are more common than previously thought. Between 4% and 22% of the brains in parkinsonian brain banks have MSA.5 According to one estimate the prevalence of MSA is 16.4 per 100 000 population. Mean age of disease onset is 53 years (range 36–74) and the median disease duration to death is five years (range 1–11). Both sexes are affected equally.6 MSA can cause any combination …
A Magnetic Microrobot with in situ Force Sensing Capabilities

This paper presents a proof-of-concept prototype of a micro force sensing mobile microrobot. The design consists of a planar, elastic mechanism serving as computer vision-based force sensor module, while the microrobot body is made from a magnetic layer driven by a magnetic field. From observing the deformation of the elastic mechanism, manipulation forces can be determined. The deformation is tracked by a CCD camera attached to an optical microscope. This design is validated through experimental tests with a micromachined prototype. The preliminary results verify this first microrobot prototype is indeed capable of in situ force sensing. This concept can be scaled down further for next generation designs and can be designed for real biomedical applications on microscale.