Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A novel adaptive local thresholding approach for segmentation of HEp-2 cell images

The patterns of Human Epithelial type 2 (HEp-2) cell provide useful information for the diagnosis of systemic autoimmune diseases. However, the recognition of cell patterns requires manual annotation by experienced physicians, which is subject to inter-observer variability. Therefore, an automatic diagnosis system is desirable. As the crucial pre-processing step for cell pattern recognition, the performance of cell segmentation is crucial. In this paper, a novel adaptive local thresholding approach is proposed to solve the issue. The approach divides cell images into overlapping sub-images and applies adaptive threshold estimator to each of them. The ICPR 2014 HEp-2 cell datasets are employed to assess the segmentation performance of our framework. The results show that the system achieves an average segmentation accuracy of 66.95%, which outperforms the typical thresholding approaches.
Cervical Cytology Specimen Adequacy: Patient Management Guidelines and Optimizing Specimen Collection

Objective. To provide updated management guidelines according to cervical cytology specimen adequacy and techniques to optimize adequacy based on literature review and expert opinion. Materials and Methods. Selected members of the American Society for Colposcopy and Cervical Pathology committee and invited experts conducted a literature review and discussed appropriate management and areas for future research emphasis. Results. The guidelines recommend a repeat Pap test in a short interval of 2 to 4 months for most women when the cytology result is unsatisfactory. The preferred follow-up for women with a negative cytology result lacking an endocervical/transformation zone component or showing other quality indicators is a repeat Pap test in 12 months. Indications for an early repeat Pap test in 6 months are provided, and the influence of human papillomavirus testing results on management is discussed. Techniques for optimizing specimen adequacy are provided in detail. Conclusion. The specimen adequacy management guidelines will help promote uniform and optimal follow-up of patients receiving cervical cytology screening. The topics for future research emphasis will be helpful in promoting studies in needed areas.
Can generalised relative pose estimation solve sparse 3D registration?

Popular 3D scan registration projects, such as Stanford digital Michelangelo or KinectFusion, exploit the high-resolution sensor data for scan alignment. It is particularly challenging to solve the registration of sparse 3D scans in the absence of RGB components. In this case, we can not establish point correspondences since the same 3D point cannot be captured in two successive scans. In contrast to correspondence based methods, we take a different viewpoint and formulate the sparse 3D registration problem based on the constraints from the intersection of line segments from adjacent scans. We obtain the line segments by modeling every horizontal and vertical scan-line as piece-wise linear segments. We propose a new alternating projection algorithm for solving the scan alignment problem using line intersection constraints. We develop two new minimal solvers for scan alignment in the presence of plane correspondences: 1) 3 line intersections and 1 plane correspondence, and 2) 1 line intersection and 2 plane correspondences. We outperform other competing methods on Kinect and LiDAR datasets.
Supply of order-1 building blocks for functions linearly combined of sinusoidal bases with integral frequencies

In line with the theory of schema sampling, a hypothesis could be made that sufficient supply of low-order building blocks (BBs) was one of the necessary conditions for a genetic algorithm(GA) to work. A consequential question of this hypothesis regards, when a certain fitness function is optimized with a commonly used GA, whether it is rare or common that there are plenty of low-order BBs. It is remarked that, when a base-m encoded GA is applied to a fitness function that is linearly combined of sinusoidal basis functions with integral frequencies, it is unlikely to obtain order-1 BBs with fixed positions at multiple loci, i.e., it is rare that there are plenty of order-1 BBs. However, if a considerable part of the sinusoidal basis functions are with frequencies exponential to a positive integer m, a base-m encoding can provide relatively more order-1 BBs compared with the encodings with cardinalities other than m.
Stories of experiences of care for growth hormone deficiency: the CRESCERE project

Aims: Growth hormone deficiency therapy is demanding for patients and caregivers. Teams engaged in the clinical management of growth hormone deficiency therapy need to know how families live with this condition, to provide an adequate support and prevent the risk of withdrawal from therapy. Methods: Using Narrative Medicine, testimonies from patients, their parents and providers of care were collected from 11 Italian centers. Narrations were analyzed throughout an elaboration of recurring words and expressions. Results: Although care management and outcomes were considered satisfying in the 182 collected narratives, recurring signals of intolerance among adolescents and the worry of not being well informed about side effects among parents are open issues. Conclusion: Narratives found that communication issues could decrease adherence and influence the physicians’ clinical practice.
Essential crossed products for inverse semigroup actions: simplicity and pure infiniteness

We define "essential" crossed products for inverse semigroup actions by Hilbert bimodules on C*-algebras and for Fell bundles over etale, locally compact groupoids. If the underlying groupoid is non-Hausdorff, this is a quotient of the reduced crossed product by an ideal coming from a generalised expectation with values in the local multiplier algebra. We characterise when the essential and reduced crossed products coincide. We generalise the notion of aperiodicity or proper outerness from group actions to general C*-inclusions. For inverse semigroup actions, aperiodicity implies that the coefficient algebra supports the essential crossed product and detects ideals in it. It is equivalent to the topological freeness of the dual groupoid for actions of inverse semigroups on C*-algebras that are separable or of Type I. This gives efficient criteria for the essential crossed product to be purely infinite and simple. In particular, for a possibly non-Hausdorff groupoid, the commutative C*-algebra of functions on the object space detects ideals in the essential groupoid C*-algebra if and only if it supports the essential groupoid C*-algebra, if and only if the groupoid is topologically free.
Cybernetic Approaches to Personality and Social Behavior

Cybernetics is the study of principles governing goal-directed, self-regulating, information-processing systems (artificial and living). Originating in the 1940s, it helped shape the cognitive revolution in psychology and has provided insight into cognition and the control of behavior. This chapter elucidates cybernetic concepts and discusses their application to understanding personality and social behavior. Cybernetic approaches are promising for developing solutions to two major problems at the intersection of personality and social psychology: first, describing stable individual differences in terms of psychological processes that change from moment to moment in response to situational factors; second, developing explanatory, process-based theories to accompany the descriptive models of personality, like the Big Five, that constitute the largest accomplishment of personality psychology in the last half century. Following discussion of the basic principles of cybernetics, a cybernetic theory of the Big Five is discussed, followed by applications to social behavior, including self-monitoring and interpersonal theory.
Implementing Next Generation Services Using Policy-Based Management and Autonomic Computing Principles

Motorola's seamless mobility solution is one specific example of generic next generation services. Such services use applications that provide a world of simple, intuitive, and uninterrupted access to information based on the user's context. Fundamental to this concept are technology enablers that facilitate gathering and processing of information, supported by communication across diverse environments, devices and networks. This requires technical innovation on many fronts, all anchored by an architecture that can be customized to adapt to different levels of user sophistication. A main goal of the architecture is to provide customizable user experiences. This paper describes a unique architecture that is based on autonomic computing principles. Its decisions are governed by the DEN-ng policy management architecture, and based on a set of extensions to the TeleManagement Forum (TMF's) next generation operational systems and software (NGOSS) technology-neutral architecture
Decreasing the interference of visual-based P300 BCI using facial expression changes

Interferences from the spatially adjacent non-target stimuli evoke ERPs during non-target sub-trials and lead to false positives. This phenomenon is commonly seen in visual attention based BCIs and affects the performance of BCI system. Although, users or subjects tried to focus on the target stimulus, they still could not help being affected by conspicuous changes of the stimuli (flashes or presenting images) which were adjacent to the target stimulus. In view of this case, the aim of this study is to reduce the adjacent interference using new stimulus presentation pattern based on facial expression changes. Positive facial expressions can be changed to negative facial expressions by minor changes to the original facial image. Although the changes are minor, the contrast will be big enough to evoke strong ERPs. In this paper, two different conditions (Pattern_1, Pattern_2) were used to compare across objective measures such as classification accuracy and information transfer rate as well as subjective measures. Pattern_1 was a “flash-only” pattern and Pattern_2 was a facial expression change of a dummy face. In the facial expression change patterns, the background is a positive facial expression and the stimulus is a negative facial expression. The results showed that the interferences from adjacent stimuli could be reduced significantly (P<;0.05) by using the facial expression change patterns. The online performance of the BCI system using the facial expression change patterns was significantly better than that using the “flash-only” patterns in terms of classification accuracy (p<;0.01), bit rate (p<;0.01), and practical bit rate (p<;0.01). Subjects reported that the annoyance and fatigue could be significantly decreased (p<;0.05) using the new stimulus presentation pattern presented in this paper.
Functional Interactions between KCNE1 C-Terminus and the KCNQ1 Channel

The KCNE1 gene product (minK protein) associates with the cardiac KvLQT1 potassium channel (encoded by KCNQ1) to create the cardiac slowly activating delayed rectifier, IKs. Mutations throughout both genes are linked to the hereditary cardiac arrhythmias in the Long QT Syndrome (LQTS). KCNE1 exerts its specific regulation of KCNQ1 activation via interactions between membrane-spanning segments of the two proteins. Less detailed attention has been focused on the role of the KCNE1 C-terminus in regulating channel behavior. We analyzed the effects of an LQT5 point mutation (D76N) and the truncation of the entire C-terminus (Δ70) on channel regulation, assembly and interaction. Both mutations significantly shifted voltage dependence of activation in the depolarizing direction and decreased IKs current density. They also accelerated rates of channel deactivation but notably, did not affect activation kinetics. Truncation of the C-terminus reduced the apparent affinity of KCNE1 for KCNQ1, resulting in impaired channel formation and presentation of KCNQ1/KCNE1 complexes to the surface. Complete saturation of KCNQ1 channels with KCNE1-Δ70 could be achieved by relative over-expression of the KCNE subunit. Rate-dependent facilitation of K+ conductance, a key property of IKs that enables action potential shortening at higher heart rates, was defective for both KCNE1 C-terminal mutations, and may contribute to the clinical phenotype of arrhythmias triggered by heart rate elevations during exercise in LQTS mutations. These results support several roles for KCNE1 C-terminus interaction with KCNQ1: regulation of channel assembly, open-state destabilization, and kinetics of channel deactivation.
Exploring the Links Between Parent–Student Conversations About College, Academic Self-Concepts, and Grades for First-Generation College Students

Two studies examined the link between academic self-concepts and grades (Studies 1 and 2) for first-generation (i.e., parents have not obtained a 4-year degree) and continuing-generation (i.e., at least one parent with a 4-year degree) college students, and how parent–student conversations about college related to this link (Study 2). In Study 1, based on online surveys with 102 students, we found self-concepts were positively related to grades for all students. Yet, first-generation students reported less positive self-concepts than continuing-generation students. Study 2 replicated Study 1 findings with 169 students and also revealed that first-generation students reported having less conversations about college with parents than continuing-generation students. For first-generation students, conversations about college predicted more positive self-concepts, which predicted higher grades. Conversations about college were unrelated to self-concepts and grades for continuing-generation students. The findings from this work have important implications for university practice and retention around providing support for first-generation college students.
An Overview of Research Challenges for Classification of cardiotocogram Data

Cardiotocography (CTG) is a simultaneous recording of Fetal Heart Rate (FHR) and Uterine Contractions (UC). The most common diagnostic techniques to evaluate maternal and fetal well-being during pregnancy and before delivery. By observing the Cardiotocography trace patterns doctors can understand the state of the fetus. There are several signal processing and computer programming based techniques for interpreting a typical Cardiotocography data. A model based CTG data classification system using a supervised Artificial Neural Network (ANN) which can classify the CTG data based on its training data. The performance neural network based classification model has been compared with the most commonly used unsupervised clustering methods Fuzzy C-mean and k-mean clustering. The arrived results show that the performance of the supervised machine learning based classification approach provided significant performance than other compared unsupervised clustering methods. The traditional clustering methods can identify the Normal CTG patterns; they were incapable of finding Suspicious and Pathologic patterns. The ANN based classifier was capable of identifying Normal, Suspicious and Pathologic condition, from the nature of CTG data with very good accuracy.
Is the Rate of Metabolic Ageing and Survival Determined by Basal Metabolic Rate in the Zebra Finch?

The relationship between energy metabolism and ageing is of great interest because aerobic metabolism is the primary source of reactive oxygen species which is believed to be of major importance in the ageing process. We conducted a longitudinal study on captive zebra finches where we tested the effect of age on basal metabolic rate (BMR), as well as the effect of BMR on the rate of metabolic ageing (decline in BMR with age) and survival. Basal metabolic rate declined with age in both sexes after controlling for the effect of body mass, indicating a loss of functionality with age. This loss of functionality could be due to accumulated oxidative damage, believed to increase with increasing metabolic rate, c.f. the free radical theory of ageing. If so, we would expect the rate of metabolic ageing to increase and survival to decrease with increasing BMR. However, we found no effect of BMR on the rate of metabolic ageing. Furthermore, survival was not affected by BMR in the males. In female zebra finches there was a tendency for survival to decrease with increasing BMR, but the effect did not reach significance (P<0.1). Thus, the effect of BMR on the rate of functional deterioration with age, if any, was not strong enough to influence neither the rate of metabolic ageing nor survival in the zebra finches.
The Impact of Bankruptcy on Airline Service Levels

The current financial crisis in the commercial airline industry has engendered an active debate over appropriate governmental policies. Proponents of government support, instrumental in legislating a $5 billion cash transfer and $10 billion loan guarantee fund for U.S. carriers following September 11, 2001, point to the critical role that airlines play in the U.S. economy and the devastating effects airline failures could have on air service. Opponents argue that most airlines continue to operate through bankruptcy resolution and that even a complete shutdown of a major carrier, which rarely occurs, would stimulate expansion by other airlines to replace its abandoned flights. This debate highlights the need to understand the causal effect of airline financial distress on airline operations, distinct from correlations that may exist as a result of adverse demand or cost shocks that lead to both service declines and financial distress. We focus on airline Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings, an extreme measure of financial distress. We use data from 1984 through 2001 to evaluate the impact of major bankruptcies on the level of flights and destinations served at U.S. airports. Our results suggest that bankruptcy induces modest declines in service levels, particularly at midsize airports. This raises the question of whether such declines are socially inefficient. Restrictions imposed by the bankruptcy court judge or the creditors of an airline operating under Chapter 11 may affect total industry output or capacity offered if other carriers cannot rapidly replace the production of the constrained firm (i.e., if firms are not homogeneous and entry is not costless). With heterogeneous firms, one firm may be uniquely positioned to supply a flight, and its decision not to do so may lead to a reduction in total service. This is particularly likely in network industries, such as airlines, where there are strong production complementarities across routes. It is also possible, however, that pre-bankruptcy service levels were inefficiently high. The bankrupt carrier may have overprovided service, perhaps in an attempt to build market share, or flight-frequency competition among carriers may have led to excessive flights. In these cases, the flight reduction associated with bankruptcy may cause a movement toward the socially optimal level of service. Our work takes a first step toward resolving this issue, by determining the magnitude of bankruptcy effects on aggregate air service. The results suggest the need for further research to assess its possible welfare implications.
Long-Term Habituation of the Gill-Withdrawal Reflex in Aplysia Requires Gene Transcription, Calcineurin and L-Type Voltage-Gated Calcium Channels

Although habituation is possibly the simplest form of learning, we still do not fully understand the neurobiological basis of habituation in any organism. To advance the goal of a comprehensive understanding of habituation, we have studied long-term habituation (LTH) of the gill-withdrawal reflex (GWR) in the marine snail Aplysia californica. Previously, we showed that habituation of the GWR in a reduced preparation lasts for up to 12 h, and depends on protein synthesis, as well as activation of protein phosphatases 1 and 2A and postsynaptic glutamate receptors. Here, we have used the reduced preparation to further analyze the mechanisms of LTH in Aplysia. We found that LTH of the GWR depends on RNA synthesis because it was blocked by both the irreversible transcriptional inhibitor actinomycin-D and the reversible transcriptional inhibitor, 5,6-dichlorobenzimidazole riboside (DRB). In addition, LTH requires activation of protein phosphatase 2B (calcineurin), because it was disrupted by ascomycin. Finally, LTH was blocked by nitrendipine, which indicates that activation of l-type voltage-gated Ca2+ channels is required for this form of learning. Together with our previous results, the present results indicate that exclusively presynaptic mechanisms, although possibly sufficient for short-term habituation, are insufficient for LTH. Rather, LTH must involve postsynaptic, as well as presynaptic, mechanisms.
Strong distortion in transformation groups

We show that the groups Diff0r(Rn) and Diffr(Rn) have the strong distortion property, whenever 0⩽r⩽∞,r≠n+1 . This implies in particular that every element in these groups is distorted, a property with dynamical implications. The result also gives new examples of groups with Bergman's strong boundedness property as in Bergman (Bull. Lond. Math. Soc. 38 (2006) 429–440). With related techniques we show that, for M a closed manifold or homeomorphic to the interior of a compact manifold with boundary, the diffeomorphism groups Diff0r(M) satisfy a relative Higman embedding type property, introduced by Schreier. In the simplest case, this answers a problem asked by Schreier in the famous Scottish Book.
Project Outcome Predictions: Risk Barometer Based on Historical Data

The influence of globalization on software development has been recognized as significant by many studies. Existence of unique factors that distinguish globally distributed software development environment increases the complexity of software development processes and brings challenges to project managers in achieving project success. This paper describes a study on globally distributed projects, which aims to determine the severity of global threats and provide an approach for sustainable support in managing project outcome predictions. Risk Barometer has been developed based on empirical data from industrial projects investigated during the study. It calculates the probability of negative outcome for global threats upon historical data. The results of this study provide practitioners that lack knowledge and experience a tool for more effective risk management, as well as cost and effort estimation for a globally distributed project.
Groups, Inequality, and Synergy

Abstract:We combine insights from the sociological and psychological traditions of social psychology to examine how status inequality may affect group performance. Specifically, we examine how synergy, that is, performance gains produced through group interaction, is realized in ethnically diverse groups. Research suggests that diverse work groups struggle to capitalize on the strengths of all group members, and in turn, achieve synergy less frequently than homogeneous groups. We examine how an intervention in the status generalizing process affects group members' influence—and how this affects synergistic gains (n = 50). We study these processes over a three-week period of time. In groups that received an intervention in the status generalizing process (experimental condition), racial hierarchy is decreased in weeks 1 and 3—but inequality remained in baseline groups. Additionally, in week 3, experimental groups achieved synergy more than baseline groups and did not perform worse than baseline groups on any task.