Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Optimal Control with an Isoperimetric Constraint Applied to Cancer Immunotherapy

In this paper, a therapeutic strategy for the treatment of cancer using immunotherapy that aims to maximize the active immune response and to minimize the tumor cells level while reducing drugs side effects and treatment cost is proposed. Assume that the treatment amount that can be administered to a potential patient during therapy period is known precisely, an ODE model with control acting as an immunotherapy agent is presented and an optimal control problem is formulated to include an isoperimetric constraint on the immunotherapy treatment. The Pontryagin's maximum principle is used to characterize the optimal control taking into account the fixed isoperimetric constraint. The optimality system is derived and solved numerically using an adapted iterative method with a Runge-Kutta fourth order scheme and secant method routine. General Terms Cancer immunotherapy, Optimal control theory, Forward backward sweep method.
Crowdfunding Success Factors: The Characteristics of Successfully Funded Projects on Crowdfunding Platforms

Crowdfunding platforms offer promising opportunities for project founders to publish their project ideas and to collect money in order to be able to realize them. Consequently, the question of what influences the successful funding of projects, i.e., reaching the target amount of money, is very important. Building upon media richness theory and the concept of reciprocity, we extend previous research in the field of crowdfunding success factors. We provide a comprehensive view on factors influencing crowdfunding success by both focusing on project-specific as well as founder-specific aspects. Analyzing a sample of projects of the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, we find that the project description, related images and videos as well as the question of whether the founder has previously backed other projects influence funding success. Interestingly, the question of whether the founder has previously created other projects has no significant influence. Our results are of high interest for the stakeholders on crowdfunding platforms.
Blind maximum-likelihood decoding for orthogonal space-time block codes: a semidefinite relaxation approach

Orthogonal space-time block codes (OSTBCs) have attracted much attention because they provide an effective and simple scheme for fully utilizing the diversity gain in multi-antenna systems. We address the problem of decoding OSTBCs without channel state information. We place our emphasis on the blind maximum-likelihood (ML) method with the BPSK constellation, and show that blind ML decoding requires the solution of a computationally hard optimization problem. To overcome this computational difficulty, we propose using a high-precision and efficient approximation algorithm, called semidefinite relaxation (SDR), to implement blind ML decoding suboptimally. The resultant SDR-ML blind decoder is efficient in that its complexity is approximately cubic in the number of symbols processed, and is promising for its appealing theoretical worst-case approximation accuracy. Simulation results show that the bit error performance of the SDR-ML blind decoder is substantially better than that of several other blind decoders including the cyclic ML method and the subspace method.
Which threshold for ER positivity? a retrospective study based on 9639 patients.

BACKGROUND Guidelines for the use of chemotherapy and endocrine therapy recently recommended that estrogen receptor (ER) status be considered positive if ≥1% of tumor cells demonstrate positive nuclear staining by immunohistochemistry. In clinical practice, a range of thresholds are used; a common one is 10% positivity. Data addressing the optimal threshold with regard to the efficacy of endocrine therapy are lacking. In this study, we compared patient, tumor, treatment and survival differences among breast cancer patients using ER-positivity thresholds of 1% and 10%. METHODS The study population consisted of patients with primary breast carcinoma treated at our center from January 1990 to December 2011 and whose records included complete data on ER status. Patients were separated into three groups: ≥10% positive staining for ER (ER-positive ≥10%), 1%-9% positive staining for ER (ER-positive 1%-9%) and <1% positive staining (ER-negative). RESULTS Of 9639 patients included, 80.5% had tumors that were ER-positive ≥10%, 2.6% had tumors that were ER-positive 1%-9% and 16.9% had tumors that were ER-negative. Patients with ER-positive 1%-9% tumors were younger with more advanced disease compared with patients with ER-positive ≥10% tumors. At a median follow-up of 5.1 years, patients with ER-positive 1%-9% tumors had worse survival rates than did patients with ER-positive ≥10% tumors, with and without adjustment for clinical stage and grade. Survival rates did not differ significantly between patients with ER-positive 1%-9% and ER-negative tumors. CONCLUSIONS Patients with tumors that are ER-positive 1%-9% have clinical and pathologic characteristics different from those with tumors that are ER-positive ≥10%. Similar to patients with ER-negative tumors, those with ER-positive 1%-9% disease do not appear to benefit from endocrine therapy; further study of its clinical benefit in this group is warranted. Also, there is a need to better define which patients of this group belong to basal or luminal subtypes.
Excessively Volatile Stock Markets : Equilibrium Computation and Policy Analysis

This paper incorporates excess volatility in stock prices into a standard general equilibrium model and finds large welfare gains from stabilizing policies. Stock prices in this model aggregate information about fundamentals which is dispersed in the economy but also reflect excess volatility stemming from correlated distortions in beliefs. To solve the model, this paper develops a novel solution method for nonlinear models with dispersed information which can be applied to a large class of dynamic general equilibrium models. The innovation lies in a nonlinear change of variables which, when combined with perturbation methods, yields the nonlinear price function consistent with equilibrium expectation operators. The main positive result shows that dispersion of information allows arbitrarily small distortions in beliefs to generate large amounts of excess volatility and renders arbitrage infeasible. The government cannot observe whether a given stock price movement originates from information or noise. As a normative result, price stabilizing policies lead to a higher level of consumption: a fall in the risk premium lowers the marginal product of capital and raises the capital stock and production. History-dependent policies may improve the information content of prices and result in even higher welfare gains. JEL classification: C63, E44, E61, G18, H21 I am indebted to John Y. Campbell, Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln, Kenneth L. Judd, N. Gregory Mankiw, and Andrei Shleifer for many discussions and suggestions. I also thank George-Marios Angeletos, Robert Barro, Emmanuel Farhi, Tarek Hassan, David Laibson, and seminar participants at Harvard University, MIT, NYU Stern School of Business, the Federal Reserve Banks of Boston and of New York, Duke University, Carnegie-Mellon, Boston University, and the Bank for International Settlements for valuable comments. ∗Finance Department, New York University, Stern School of Business, e-mail: mertens@stern.nyu. edu
Effect of Iron Ores and Sintering Conditions on Flame Front Properties

In iron ore sintering, the properties of the flame front are clearly critical as they determine the heat imparted to the particulate bed and, hence, the strength of the formed sinter. This study explores the factors that influence flame front temperature and also the speed at which it descends down a bed. These two properties are dependent on post-ignition airflow rate and the properties of the sinter mix. Post-ignition airflow rate is a strong function of the pre-ignition airflow rate and the flow resistance of the flame front. This study reiterates the strong dependence of flame front resistance on gas flow velocity, flame front temperature and applied suction. Dense ores produce higher bulk density and lower porosity beds and, as a consequence, they have the effect of slowing down and broadening the flame front. The influence of flame front speed on flame front properties for different ores was also established. For comparable flame front properties results show that sinter basicity has a large influence on sinter strength and yield. Studies of coke combustion efficiency show decreasing values with increasing flame front speed and values increased significantly when sintering YANDI ore. Many of the obtained quantitative dependences will be used to verify a sintering mathematical model that is under development.
Chronic graft-versus-host disease complicated by membranous glomerulonephritis.

Key words: graft-versus-host disease; nephrotic administered for GVHD prophylaxis from day −1 to syndrome day +180. Ten-months after alloHSCT, a mucosal ulceration and dryness in her mouth was observed. A mucosal form of cGVHD was diagnosed on the basis of clinical and biopsy findings. CsA (400 mg/day) and
Preclinical antitumor efficacy of selective exportin 1 inhibitors in glioblastoma.

BACKGROUND Glioblastoma (GBM) is poorly responsive to current chemotherapy. The nuclear transporter exportin 1 (XPO1, CRM1) is often highly expressed in GBM, which may portend a poor prognosis. Here, we determine the efficacy of novel selective inhibitors of nuclear export (SINE) specific to XPO1 in preclinical models of GBM. METHODS Seven patient-derived GBM lines were treated with 3 SINE compounds (KPT-251, KPT-276, and Selinexor) in neurosphere culture conditions. KPT-276 and Selinexor were also evaluated in a murine orthotopic patient-derived xenograft (PDX) model of GBM. Cell cycle effects were assayed by flow cytometry in vitro and immunohistochemistry in vivo. Apoptosis was determined by terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase dUTP nick end labeling (TUNEL) and caspase 3/7 activity assays. RESULTS Treatment of GBM neurosphere cultures with KPT-276, Selinexor, and KPT-251 revealed dose-responsive growth inhibition in all 7 GBM lines [range of half-maximal inhibitory concentration (IC50), 6-354 nM]. In an orthotopic PDX model, treatment with KPT-276 and Selinexor demonstrated pharmacodynamic efficacy, significantly suppressed tumor growth, and prolonged animal survival. Cellular proliferation was not altered with SINE treatment. Instead, induction of apoptosis was apparent both in vitro and in vivo with SINE treatment, without overt evidence of neurotoxicity. CONCLUSIONS SINE compounds show preclinical efficacy utilizing in vitro and in vivo models of GBM, with induction of apoptosis as the mechanism of action. Selinexor is now in early clinical trials in solid and hematological malignancies. Based on these preclinical data and excellent brain penetration, we have initiated clinical trials of Selinexor in patients with relapsed GBM.
A Precise Approximation for Performance Evaluation of Amplify-and-Forward Multihop Relaying Systems

The instantaneous end-to-end received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in K-hop amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying systems is commonly upper bounded by 1/k of the harmonic mean of the individual per-hop instantaneous SNRs. It is shown that performance results in Nakagami-m fading of AF multihop relaying systems obtained based on this upper bound are not tight for small values of SNR or for larger values of the Nakagami parameter and, depending on certain channel conditions, these bounds may become looser as the number of hops increases. A new approximation to the instantaneous end-to-end received SNR is introduced in the form of a scaled version of the harmonic mean of the individual per-hop SNRs. The scaling factor is determined based on the average link SNRs. Performance results evaluated using the proposed approximation are more accurate than all performance bounds previously reported in the literature, even though they are obtained with the same computational complexity. Numerical results show that the approximate performance results are very close to the exact results especially in small SNR regimes or for larger values of the Nakagami parameter.
HYDRA: hybrid design for remote attestation (using a formally verified microkernel)

Remote Attestation (RA) allows a trusted entity (verifier) to securely measure internal state of a remote untrusted hardware platform (prover). RA can be used to establish a static or dynamic root of trust in embedded and cyber-physical systems. It can also be used as a building block for other security services and primitives, such as software updates and patches, verifiable deletion and memory resetting. There are three major types of RA designs: hardware-based, software-based, and hybrid, each with its own set of benefits and drawbacks. This paper presents the first hybrid RA design - called HYDRA - that builds upon formally verified software components that ensure memory isolation and protection, as well as enforce access control to memory and other resources. HYDRA obtains these properties by using the formally verified seL4 microkernel. (Until now, this was only attainable with purely hardware-based designs.) Using seL4 imposes fewer hardware requirements on the underlying microprocessor. Also, building upon a formally verified software component increases confidence in security of the overall design of HYDRA and its implementation. We instantiate HYDRA on two commodity hardware platforms and assess the performance and overhead of performing RA on such platforms via experimentation; we show that HYDRA can attest 10MB of memory in less than 250msec when using a Speck-based cryptographic checksum.
Forecasting the Demand of Short-Term Electric Power Load with Large-Scale LP-SVR

This research studies short-term electricity load prediction with a large-scalelinear programming support vector regression (LP-SVR) model. The LP-SVR is compared with other three non-linear regression models: Collobert’s SVR, Feed-Forward Neural Networks (FFNN), and Bagged Regression Trees (BRT). The four models are trained to predict hourly day-ahead loads given temperature predictions, holiday information and historical loads. The models are trained on-hourly data from the New England Power Pool (NEPOOL) region from 2004 to 2007 and tested on out-of-sample data from 2008. Experimental results indicate that the proposed LP-SVR method gives the smallest error when compared against the other approaches. The LP-SVR shows a mean absolute percent error of 1.58% while the FFNN approach has a 1.61%. Similarly, the FFNN method shows a 330 MWh (Megawatts-hour) mean absolute error, whereas the LP-SVR approach gives a 238 MWh mean absolute error. This is a significant difference in terms of the extra power that would need to be produced if FFNN was used. The proposed LP-SVR model can be utilized for predicting power loads to a very low error, and it is comparable to FFNN and over-performs other state of the art methods such as: Bagged Regression Trees, and Large-Scale SVRs.
Extractive metallurgy of niobium, tantalum, and vanadium

AbstractA comprehensive review is presented of the extractive metallurgy of niobium, tantalum, and vanadium. An account of the various resources of these metals is followed by sections on resource processing, reduction processes, and refining. The review coneludes with a summary of present trends and future projections for each metal.
Functional activities of the upper extremity of young adults with cerebral palsy: A limiting factor for participation?

Purpose. To assess functional activities of the upper extremity of young adults with cerebral palsy (CP) and to determine their relations with participant characteristics and participation. Method. Assessment of functional activities of the upper extremity was performed on 103 participants (aged 16 – 20 years) with the Melbourne assessment and the Abilhand Questionnaire. Participation was measured with the Life Habits Questionnaire. Participant characteristics included age, gender, limb distribution of the spastic paresis, educational level and gross and fine motor function. Relations among these variables were studied by means of correlation coefficients and linear regression analysis. Results. Limitations in functional activities of the upper extremity were related to the limb distribution of the spastic paresis and were especially present in quadriplegic participants. Significant correlations between participant characteristics and measures of functional activities were present. Limitations in functional activities of the upper extremity, measured with the Abilhand Questionnaire, were an important determinant for participation, in addition to the gross motor function and educational level. Conclusion. Limitations in functional activities of the upper extremity are an important determinant for restrictions in participation in young adults with CP. It is recommended to include assessment of functional activities of the upper extremity in patients with CP.
Genotyping Pattern among Iranian HCV Positive Patients

Background: Successful treatment to eliminate HCV RNA depends on the identified genotype. In the present study, we compared the frequency of different HCV genotypes, during four years study (2004 till 2008). Methods: Sera specimens were received from 16 provinces of Iran. We used High Pure Viral Nucleic Acid Purification kit for extraction and samples were tested with improved form of RT-PCR technique. HCV genotypes were determined using Amplisense PCR kit and Amplicor HCV Monitoring Version 2 test utilized a reverse transcription (RT)-PCR approach to quantitative HCV RNA. Two hundreds six HCV positive specimens were entered to the study out of 389 tested samples. Results: Type 3a was the most frequent type (46.6%), followed by type 1 (including 1a and 1b with 25.73% and 17.47% for each respectively) with 43.2%. Looking through collected results of the four years study confirmed the rate of HCV infection in those single genotypes 1b, 3a were slightly increased from 12.22% and 38.88% in the first year to 18.66 and 46.51% in the fourth year of the study period. Conclusion: The analyzed data proved that some patients were infected with two different types. High viral load was also more correlated to genotype 1 than other types.
Diazoxide Opens the Mitochondrial Permeability Transition Pore and Alters Ca2+ Transients in Rat Ventricular Myocytes

Background—The mitochondrial KATP channel (mitoKATP) has been implicated as an end effector or trigger of ischemic preconditioning (IP). Although a mitoKATP opener, diazoxide, mimics IP, mechanisms for the cardioprotective action remain unclear. Methods and Results—We measured Ca2+ transients (CaTs) and mitochondrial inner membrane potential (&Dgr;&psgr;m) with confocal microscopy and the fluorescent probes fluo-4 and tetramethylrhodamine ethyl ester perchlorate in rat ventricular myocytes. Diazoxide increased the amplitudes and diastolic levels of CaTs dose dependently. The effects of diazoxide on CaTs were inhibited by the mitoKATP antagonist sodium 5-hydroxydecanoic acid (100 &mgr;mol/L), whereas application of diazoxide caused little change in &Dgr;&psgr;m. After sarcoplasmic reticulum function was disabled with ryanodine and thapsigargin, the effects of diazoxide on CaTs were still observed. The opening of the mitochondrial permeability transition pore was monitored with fluorescent calcein. Diazoxide accelerated the leakage of calcein from mitochondrial matrix (16% of control;P <0.05), and this effect was inhibited by cyclosporin A (2 &mgr;mol/L). Cyclosporin A also abolished the effects of diazoxide on CaTs. Diazoxide oxidized flavoprotein fluorescence reversibly, and this effect was partially blunted by cyclosporin A (by 24%;P <0.05). Conclusions—We conclude that in rat ventricular myocytes, diazoxide modulates the opening of the mitochondrial permeability transition pore, resulting in an increase in CaTs independent of the changes in &Dgr;&psgr;m. The action of diazoxide on the mitochondrial permeability transition pore also affects the mitochondrial redox state.
Spatially regularized compressed sensing of diffusion MRI data

The present paper introduces a method for substantial reduction of the number of diffusion encoding gradients required for reliable reconstruction of HARDI signals. The method exploits the theory of compressed sensing (CS), which establishes conditions on which a signal of interest can be recovered from its under-sampled measurements, provided that the signal admits a sparse representation in the domain of a linear transform. In the case at hand, the latter is defined to be spherical ridgelet transformation, which excels in sparsifying HARDI signals. What makes the resulting reconstruction procedure even more accurate is a combination of the sparsity constraints in the diffusion domain with additional constraints imposed on the estimated diffusion field in the spatial domain. Accordingly, the present paper describes a novel way to combine the diffusion- and spatial-domain constraints to achieve a maximal reduction in the number of diffusion measurements, while sacrificing little in terms of reconstruction accuracy. Finally, details are provided on a particularly efficient numerical scheme which can be used to solve the aforementioned reconstruction problem by means of standard and readily available estimation tools. The paper is concluded with experimental results which support the practical value of the proposed reconstruction methodology.
Influence of microstructural evolution on mechanical behaviour of AZ31 alloy sheet processed by flat extrusion container

Abstract Influence of microstructural evolution on the mechanical behaviour of AZ31 alloy sheet processed by flat extrusion container is analysed upon annealing treatments. The basal texture is significantly increased as a result of the formation of new grains with a largely altered c axis orientation relative to the initial basal orientation owing to static recrystallisation. The results reveal that the ductility of the alloys without annealing treatments is the highest, but the strength is the lowest, which confirms the strong anisotropy of stress–strain behaviour with respect to the initial textures. Significant differences in the stress–strain curves are observed for the as received and annealed specimens.
Tumor Etiology and Chromosome Pattern

Fibrosarcomas induced in Chinese hamsters and rats by Rous sarcomla virus and 7,12-dimethylbenz(a)anthracene are associated with nonrandom chromosome variation. Although histologically indistinguishable, the tumors induced by the virus or chemical in each host species are characterized by completely different karyotypic patterns.