Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Gait Disorder in Downbeat Nystagmus Syndrome

Background Downbeat nystagmus (DBN) is a common form of acquired fixation nystagmus with key symptoms of oscillopsia and gait disturbance. Gait disturbance could be a result of impaired visual feedback due to the involuntary ocular oscillations. Alternatively, a malfunction of cerebellar locomotor control might be involved, since DBN is considered a vestibulocerebellar disorder. Methods Investigation of walking in 50 DBN patients (age 72±11 years, 23 females) and 50 healthy controls (HS) (age 70±11 years, 23 females) using a pressure sensitive carpet (GAITRite). The patient cohort comprised subjects with only ocular motor signs (DBN) and subjects with an additional limb ataxia (DBNCA). Gait investigation comprised different walking speeds and walking with eyes closed. Results In DBN, gait velocity was reduced (p<0.001) with a reduced stride length (p<0.001), increased base of support (p<0.050), and increased double support (p<0.001). Walking with eyes closed led to significant gait changes in both HS and DBN. These changes were more pronounced in DBN patients (p<0.001). Speed-dependency of gait variability revealed significant differences between the subgroups of DBN and DBNCA (p<0.050). Conclusions (I) Impaired visual control caused by involuntary ocular oscillations cannot sufficiently explain the gait disorder. (II) The gait of patients with DBN is impaired in a speed dependent manner. (III) Analysis of gait variability allows distinguishing DBN from DBNCA: Patients with pure DBN show a speed dependency of gait variability similar to that of patients with afferent vestibular deficits. In DBNCA, gait variability resembles the pattern found in cerebellar ataxia.
Are ICSI adolescents at risk for increased adiposity?

BACKGROUND Puberty is a critical period for the development of cardio-metabolic disturbances, including a more central body fat distribution. It is still unclear if IVF and more specifically ICSI, can permanently and detrimentally affect body fat accumulation in the human offspring. Therefore, adiposity and body fat distribution in 14-year-old adolescents born after ICSI were investigated. METHODS Body composition data, including anthropometry (weight, height and BMI), skinfold thicknesses (peripheral: triceps and biceps skinfolds; central: supra-iliacal and subscapular skinfolds; total: sum of the four skinfolds) and circumferences (waist, mid-upper arm) were compared between 217 ICSI singletons (116 boys, 101 girls) and 223 singletons (115 boys, 108 girls) born after spontaneous conception (SC). ICSI teenagers were part of a previously published ICSI cohort followed since birth; SC controls were recruited from schools in the surroundings. RESULTS Among all boys, no differences in body composition measurements were found between the ICSI and SC group, taking into account confounding variables. In boys with more advanced pubertal stages, a significantly higher sum of peripheral skinfolds was found in the ICSI group compared with the SC group (difference 3.5 mm, 95% confidence interval 0.3-6.6). In girls, peripheral adiposity assessed by skinfolds and mid-upper arm circumference, and central adiposity assessed by skinfolds and waist circumference as well as total adiposity assessed by BMI, the sum of four skinfold thicknesses and skinfold-derived body fat percentage were significantly higher in the ICSI group compared with the SC group, taking into account confounding variables (all P< 0.05). Neither parental nor early life factors could explain the differences. CONCLUSIONS We found that pubertal ICSI girls were more prone to central, peripheral and total adiposity compared with their SC counterparts. ICSI adolescents with advanced pubertal stages showed more peripheral adiposity. Continued monitoring of body fat patterns in adolescents born after fertility treatment is mandatory in order to assess their risk for developing obesity and its related adverse health effects in adulthood.
Effect of Water Content on Brightness Temperature and Emissivity of Soil for Passive Remote Sensing Applications

The relative complex dielectric constant (Ɛr= Ɛ1jƐ2) of a number of sandy soil samples from the Markib seashore, in Libya has been measured as a function of moisture content at microwave frequency in the X-band (f=10.7 GHz, λ=2.8 cm) and L-band (f=1.4 GHz, λ=21 cm). A knowledge of the complex dielectric constant of soils is essential in the interpretation of microwave airborne radiometer data of the Earth's surface. The reflectivity and emissivity of smooth surface have been calculated in both polarizations at various nadir angles using the measured laboratory data. It has been found that the emissivity decreases at larger angles of incidence for horizontal polarization, whereas it increases at vertical polarization with increasing incidence angle to a maximum at the Brewster angle. It has also been observed that the incidence angle, at which the Brewster angle occurs, shifts toward grazing for higher percent moisture content. The brightness temperature of dry and wet soil has been computed in both horizontal and vertical polarization mode as a function of physical temperature and dielectric constant of each soil with varying moisture content. The brightness temperature of dry and wet soil depend on dielectric constant, physical properties, polarization and the angle of incidence of microwaves. These facts are especially important and can be used as diagnostic tool for water prospecting in deserts.
Applying transcriptomic and proteomic knowledge to Parkinson's disease drug discovery

It is recognised that in both genetic and sporadic cases of Parkinson's disease (PD), the basis of its etiopathology resides in the particular vulnerability of the dopaminergic neurons of the substantia nigra pars compacta (SNpc) to oxidative stress and in the failure to adequately remove abnormal proteins. These observations have been confirmed recently by microarray transcriptomic studies in human SN from PD brains and have extended understanding of the molecular pathways underlying the PD pathology. This article reviews recent gene expression profiling studies in sporadic PD postmortem SN and highlights gene candidates as putative molecular signatures for early disease diagnosis. In addition, the application of transcriptomics and proteomics in the quest for multifunctional neuroprotective–neurorescue drugs that might possess disease-modifying action is discussed.
Morse theory for periodic solutions of hamiltonian systems and the maslov index

In this paper we prove Morse type inequalities for the contractible 1-periodic solutions of time dependent Hamiltonian differential equations on those compact symplectic manifolds M for which the symplectic form and the first Chern class of the tangent bundle vanish over q(M). The proof is based on a version of infinite dimensional Morse theory which is due to Floer. The key point is an index theorem for the Fredholm operator which plays a central role in Floer homology. The index formula involves the Maslov index of nondegenerate contractible periodic solutions. This Maslov index plays the same role as the Morse index of a nondegenerate critical point does in finite dimensional Morse theory. We shall use this connection between Floer homology and Maslov index to establish the existence of infinitely many periodic solutions having integer periods provided that every I-periodic solution has at least one Floquet multiplier which is not equal to 1.
Progressor: social navigation support through open social student modeling

The increased volumes of online learning content have produced two problems: how to help students to find the most appropriate resources and how to engage them in using these resources. Personalized and social learning have been suggested as potential ways to address these problems. Our work presented in this paper combines the ideas of personalized and social learning in the context of educational hypermedia. We introduce Progressor, an innovative Web-based tool based on the concepts of social navigation and open student modeling that helps students to find the most relevant resources in a large collection of parameterized self-assessment questions on Java programming. We have evaluated Progressor in a semester-long classroom study, the results of which are presented in this paper. The study confirmed the impact of personalized social navigation support provided by the system in the target context. The interface encouraged students to explore more topics attempting more questions and achieving higher success rates in answering them. A deeper analysis of the social navigation support mechanism revealed that the top students successfully led the way to discovering most relevant resources by creating clear pathways for weaker students.
Padé Discretization for Linear Systems With Polyhedral Lyapunov Functions

This technical note has been motivated by the need to assess the preservation of polyhedral Lyapunov functions for stable continuous-time linear systems under numerical discretization of the transition matrix. This problem arises when discretizing linear systems in such a manner as to preserve a certain type of stability of the discrete time approximation. Our main contribution is to show that a continuous-time system and its Padé discretization (of any order and sampling) always share at least one common piecewise linear (polyhedral) Lyapunov function.
Handling boundary constraints for numerical optimization by particle swarm flying in periodic search space

The periodic mode is analyzed together with two conventional boundary handling modes for particle swarm. By providing an infinite space that comprises periodic copies of original search space, it avoids possible disorganizing of particle swarm that is induced by the undesired mutations at the boundary. The results on benchmark functions show that particle swarm with periodic mode is capable of improving the search performance significantly, by compared with that of conventional modes and other algorithms.
Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets and Fully Connected CRFs

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) have recently shown state of the art performance in high level vision tasks, such as image classification and object detection. This work brings together methods from DCNNs and probabilistic graphical models for addressing the task of pixel-level classification (also called "semantic image segmentation"). We show that responses at the final layer of DCNNs are not sufficiently localized for accurate object segmentation. This is due to the very invariance properties that make DCNNs good for high level tasks. We overcome this poor localization property of deep networks by combining the responses at the final DCNN layer with a fully connected Conditional Random Field (CRF). Qualitatively, our "DeepLab" system is able to localize segment boundaries at a level of accuracy which is beyond previous methods. Quantitatively, our method sets the new state-of-art at the PASCAL VOC-2012 semantic image segmentation task, reaching 71.6% IOU accuracy in the test set. We show how these results can be obtained efficiently: Careful network re-purposing and a novel application of the 'hole' algorithm from the wavelet community allow dense computation of neural net responses at 8 frames per second on a modern GPU.
Joint Parameter Estimation for the Two-Wave with Diffuse Power Fading Model

Wireless sensor networks deployed within metallic cavities are known to suffer from a very severe fading, even in strong line-of-sight propagation conditions. This behavior is well-captured by the Two-Wave with Diffuse Power (TWDP) fading distribution, which shows great fit to field measurements in such scenarios. In this paper, we address the joint estimation of the parameters K and Δ that characterize the TWDP fading model, based on the observation of the received signal envelope. We use a moment-based approach to derive closed-form expressions for the estimators of K and Δ, as well as closed-form expressions for their asymptotic variance. Results show that the estimation error is close to the Cramer-Rao lower bound for a wide range of values of the parameters K and Δ. The performance degradation due to a finite number of observations is also analyzed.
A double-blind, randomised trial of tesaglitazar versus pioglitazone in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus

The efficacy and safety of tesaglitazar (0.5 and 1 mg) and pioglitazone (15, 30 and 45 mg) were compared in a 24-week, randomised, double-blind study in 1, 707 patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus. Tesaglitazar 1 mg was non-inferior to pioglitazone 45 mg for change from baseline in glycosylated haemoglobin (HbA1C) at 24 weeks (difference: −0.056 [95% confidence intervals −0.161, 0.049], pNI<0.001 for non-inferiority hypothesis). Tesaglitazar 1 mg improved triglyceride (TG), high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) and non-HDL-C levels compared with all pioglitazone doses at 24 weeks (p<0.001). Low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) was lower with tesaglitazar for all pioglitazone comparisons (p<0.05), except for tesaglitazar 0.5 mg versus pioglitazone 15 mg. Tesaglitazar 1 mg decreased LDL particle number, when compared with all pioglitazone doses (p<0.01). Both agents increased body weight and peripheral oedema in a dose-dependent manner, but only tesaglitazar increased serum creatinine. In summary, tesaglitazar provided similar glycaemic control to pioglitazone, was associated with significant improvement in lipid and lipoprotein variables, and increased serum creatinine in a dose-dependent manner.
Functional Disability and Compromised Mobility Among Older Women With Urinary Incontinence

Objective Our objective was to determine the prevalence of functional disability among older women with urinary incontinence (UI). Methods We conducted a secondary analysis of the 2005–2006 National Social Life, Health and Aging Project. Daily UI was defined as answering “daily” to the question, “How frequently…have you had difficulty controlling your bladder, including leaking small amounts of urine, leaking when you cough or sneeze, or not being able to make it to the bathroom on time? ” We then explored functional status. Women were asked about 7 basic activities of daily living (ADLs). Statistical analyses with percentage estimates and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were performed. Logistic regression was performed to assess the association between functional status and daily UI. Results In total, 1412 women were included in our analysis. Daily UI was reported by 177 (12.5%) women. Functional dependence or disability with any activities of daily living was reported in 62.1% (95% CI, 54.2%–70.1%) of women with daily UI. Among women with daily UI, 23.6% (95% CI, 16.8%–30.5%) reported specific difficulty or dependence with using the toilet, signifying functional limitations which may contribute to urine leakage. After adjusting for age category, race/ethnicity, education level, and parity, women with daily UI had 3.31 increased odds of functional difficulty or dependence compared with continent older women. Conclusions More than 60% of older women with daily UI reported functional difficulty or dependence and one fourth of women with daily UI specifically reported difficulty or dependence with using the toilet.
Cancer Epigenetics: New Therapies and New Challenges

Cancer is nowadays considered to be both a genetic and an epigenetic disease. The most well studied epigenetic modification in humans is DNA methylation; however it becomes increasingly acknowledged that DNA methylation does not work alone, but rather is linked to other modifications, such as histone modifications. Epigenetic abnormalities are reversible and as a result novel therapies that work by reversing epigenetic effects are being increasingly explored. The biggest clinical impact of epigenetic modifying agents in neoplastic disorders thus far has been in haematological malignancies, and the efficacy of DNMT inhibitors and HDAC inhibitors in blood cancers clearly attests to the principle that therapeutic modification of the cancer cell epigenome can produce clinical benefit. This paper will discuss the most well studied epigenetic modifications and how these are linked to cancer, will give a brief overview of the clinical use of epigenetics as biomarkers, and will focus in more detail on epigenetic drugs and their use in solid and blood cancers.
PSO-SVM-Based Online Locomotion Mode Identification for Rehabilitation Robotic Exoskeletons

Locomotion mode identification is essential for the control of a robotic rehabilitation exoskeletons. This paper proposes an online support vector machine (SVM) optimized by particle swarm optimization (PSO) to identify different locomotion modes to realize a smooth and automatic locomotion transition. A PSO algorithm is used to obtain the optimal parameters of SVM for a better overall performance. Signals measured by the foot pressure sensors integrated in the insoles of wearable shoes and the MEMS-based attitude and heading reference systems (AHRS) attached on the shoes and shanks of leg segments are fused together as the input information of SVM. Based on the chosen window whose size is 200 ms (with sampling frequency of 40 Hz), a three-layer wavelet packet analysis (WPA) is used for feature extraction, after which, the kernel principal component analysis (kPCA) is utilized to reduce the dimension of the feature set to reduce computation cost of the SVM. Since the signals are from two types of different sensors, the normalization is conducted to scale the input into the interval of [0, 1]. Five-fold cross validation is adapted to train the classifier, which prevents the classifier over-fitting. Based on the SVM model obtained offline in MATLAB, an online SVM algorithm is constructed for locomotion mode identification. Experiments are performed for different locomotion modes and experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm with an accuracy of 96.00% ± 2.45%. To improve its accuracy, majority vote algorithm (MVA) is used for post-processing, with which the identification accuracy is better than 98.35% ± 1.65%. The proposed algorithm can be extended and employed in the field of robotic rehabilitation and assistance.
A Fast Algorithm for the Generation of Referring Expressions

We simplify previous work in the development of algorithms for the generation of referring expressions while at the same time taking account of psycholinguistic findings and transcript data. The result is a straightforward algorithm that is computationally tractable, sensitive to the preferences of human users, and reasonably domain-independent. We provide a specification of the resources a host system must provide in order to make use of the algorithm, and describe an implementation used in the IDAS system.
SYNERGY AMONG LYMPHOID CELLS MEDIATING THE GRAFT-VERSUS-HOST RESPONSE

Spleen cells from normal adult mice were injected into lethally irradiated adult syngeneic recipients. 24 h later, cell suspensions were prepared from the recipients' spleens or peripheral lymph nodes and tested either alone or combined for their capacity to elicit graft-versus-host (GVH) reactions in neonatal F1 recipients, using the Simonsen spleen weight assay. Either the lymph node-seeking subpopulation or the spleen-seeking subpopulation alone was markedly deficient in its ability to provide a GVH reaction when compared with the normal population from which it was derived. However, an appropriate mixture of the two had a reactivity characteristic of the parent population. Both subpopulations were sensitive to treatment with anti-θ antibody and complement in vitro. These results provide a convincing demonstration of the functional heterogeneity within the pool of thymus-derived cells present in a single normal lymphoid tissue. They strongly suggest that the normal expression of GVH reactivity of such a tissue involves an interaction among distinct subpopulations of thymus-derived cells.
In situ reactive synthesis and plasma-activated sintering of binderless WC ceramics

Binderless micrometre tungsten carbide ceramics (∼1.1 μm) were in situ synthesised and densified by plasma-activated sintering (PAS) from mixed powders of tungsten trioxide and carbon black. The influence of sintering process and powders’ composition ratio on the phase composition, microstructure and mechanical properties of as-prepared samples was clarified in detail. The phase evolution was ascertained by X-ray diffraction to be WO3→WO2.72→WO2→W2C→WC, with the formation of CO and CO2 gases. The sample with nearly single WC phase, dense structure and excellent mechanical properties was fabricated under the optimised process with the proper composition ratio. Owing to the micrograin size, the fracture toughness (8.88 MPa m1/2) was enhanced while high hardness (2159 HV10) was maintained, in the absence of any ceramic toughening phase.
Single Cells of Pseudomonas aeruginosa Exhibit Electrotaxis and Durotaxis Behaviours

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is frequently associated with nosocomial infections, including polymicrobial wound infections and the complex biofilm communities that reside within the cystic fibrosis lung. P. aeruginosa utilizes flagellum-mediated motility to approach, attach to, and spread across a surface using a combination of swimming, swarming and twitching (type IV pili extension and retraction) motility. We report an innovative approach to study the motility of single P. aeruginosa cells in microfluidic channels possessing different structural geometry, all with the flexibility of being able to manipulate stiffness gradients and electric fields to investigate changes in motility in response to specific stimuli. P. aeruginosa cells exhibit restricted motility in reduced microchannel spaces, with preferential migration toward a stiffer region in a rigidness gradient of substrate medium and preferential migration toward a positive electrode in presence of a pulsed or successive electric field. This single-cue environmental study using microfluidic technology lays the groundwork for multi-cue experimentation to more faithfully mimic conditions in vivo, demonstrating just some of the advantages of this technique. This study is designed to examine the interplay between surface rigidity, mechanical, and electrical cues to pave the way for improvements in the design of anti-fouling surfaces for biomedical applications and to identify new ways to inhibit bacterial biofilm growth through motility restriction.
Toward a Physical Environmental Continuum for Occupational Intervention in a Rehabilitation Hospital

ABSTRACT A study was conducted to explore occupational therapists’ perceptions of rehabilitation environments and the influence of these perceptions on practice and occupational interventions. Traditionally, inpatient occupational therapists have a choice of intervention environments, ranging from a gym-like to a more home-like setting. Choosing to provide interventions in these different environments can have an impact on occupational performance. In this qualitative exploration, 21 occupational therapists participated in focus groups designed to explore their perceptions of practice environments. Analysis of the transcribed data revealed that therapists felt rehabilitation environments should offer choices and be flexible, that environments influenced intervention strategies, and that the practice environment had an impact on professional identity. On the basis of this data, a conceptual matrix of the intersection of environmental setting and occupation-based interventions is presented to highlight the importance of these two aspects of therapy. Future research in this understudied area is needed to transform this matrix into a clinically useful model.