Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Radiopacities of the Jaws: Interpretation and Diagnosis

General dental practitioners are less confident at diagnosing radiopaque lesions of the jaws than radiolucent ones, possibly because the incidence of jaw radiopacities is comparatively low. The current review covers the majority of radiopaque lesions that are referred for a specialist opinion, and focuses on those lesions that occur commonly or those that mimic other diagnoses. The majority of radiopaque jaw lesions represent normal anatomy/normal variants or superimposed soft tissue calcifications that are typically of no clinical significance. Common pathological radiopacities of the jaws include sclerosing (condensing) osteitis, a response to low-grade chronic apical infection, and odontomes, a form of odontogenic hamartoma. The typical imaging appearances of these and other jaw radiopacities are discussed.
Tailor-Made Programs for Preventive Falls that Match the Level of Physical Well-Being in Community-Dwelling Older Adults

Falls are relatively common in the elderly, with approximately 30% of individuals aged 65 and older falling at least once a year and approximately half of them experiencing repeated falls (Tinetti et al., 1988). Falls and fractures have a major impact on elderly individuals, their caregivers, health service providers, and the community. Sherrington et al. reported that up to 42% of falls can be prevented by well-designed exercise programs that target balance and involve a good amount of exercise (Sherrington et al., 2008).
Saponins, tannins and flavonols found in hydroethanolic extract from Periandra dulcis roots

Periandra dulcis Mart. ex Benth. Fabaceae (Syn.: P. mediterranea (Vell.) Taub. ) is native to the northern and middle parts of Brazil. In Brazilian ethnomedicine, their roots are used as anti inflammatory, expectorant, diuretic and laxative. An HPLC-ESI-MS/MS system was employed to provide a rapid method to make a tentative characterization of the compounds found in the hydroethanolic extract from P. dulcis roots. The structures of sixteen compounds found in this hydroethanolic extract were suggested mainly by MS data conjugated with the UVDAD spectra, reference compounds and available mass spectra data in literature. Saponin derivatives of hederagenin and soyasapogenol E, such as hederagenin-3-O-rhamnosyl glucosyl glucuronide, soyasapogenol E-3-O-rhamnosyl glucosyl glucuronide and periandrin isomers were found as the main constituents, with a minor content of flavonols quercetin and myricetin glycosides derivatives and hydrolysable tannins, such as dihexahydroxydiphenoyl galloyl glucoside and trisgalloyl hexahydroxydiphenoyl glucose. To the best of our knowledge, with exception of periandrins found in the roots, nothing has been published about the chemical composition of P. dulcis.
Irreversibility and Action of the Heat Conduction Process

Irreversibility (that is, the “one-sidedness” of time) of a physical process can be characterized by using Lyapunov functions in the modern theory of stability. In this theoretical framework, entropy and its production rate have been generally regarded as Lyapunov functions in order to measure the irreversibility of various physical processes. In fact, the Lyapunov function is not always unique. In the represent work, a rigorous proof is given that the entransy and its dissipation rate can also serve as Lyapunov functions associated with the irreversibility of the heat conduction process without the conversion between heat and work. In addition, the variation of the entransy dissipation rate can lead to Fourier’s heat conduction law, while the entropy production rate cannot. This shows that the entransy dissipation rate, rather than the entropy production rate, is the unique action for the heat conduction process, and can be used to establish the finite element method for the approximate solution of heat conduction problems and the optimization of heat transfer processes.
Reiki Is Better Than Placebo and Has Broad Potential as a Complementary Health Therapy

This study reviews the available clinical studies of Reiki to determine whether there is evidence for Reiki providing more than just a placebo effect. The available English-language literature of Reiki was reviewed, specifically for peer-reviewed clinical studies with more than 20 participants in the Reiki treatment arm, controlling for a placebo effect. Of the 13 suitable studies, 8 demonstrated Reiki being more effective than placebo, 4 found no difference but had questionable statistical resolving power, and only one provided clear evidence for not providing benefit. Viewed collectively, these studies provide reasonably strong support for Reiki being more effective than placebo. From the information currently available, Reiki is a safe and gentle “complementary” therapy that activates the parasympathetic nervous system to heal body and mind. It has potential for broader use in management of chronic health conditions, and possibly in postoperative recovery. Research is needed to optimize the delivery of Reiki.
Haptic Rendering of 3D Geometry on 2D Touch Surface Based on Mechanical Rotation

In this paper, we present a robotic surface display that physically imitates the orientation of virtual 3D geometry touched through a 2D flat screen. The proposed approach renders the surface orientation of 3D geometry such that users can tactually obtain relative geometric information, which plays a significant role in the process of real-world haptic object perception. Taking advantage of the planar aspect of touch surfaces, the system constructs a rotation matrix to control the pose of a surface with minimal mechanical movements with given partial geometric information (i.e., normal vector at the point of touch). To evaluate the proposed rendering scheme, we conducted a geometric task (two alternative forced choices) with a set of hand-sized cylindrically curved geometries in which participants were asked to identify which of the two surfaces they perceived as being more curved. Curvatures with the same polarities (i.e., convex-convex and concave-concave) were employed in the study and psychometric curves estimated to obtain the threshold of the curvature difference and to validate the proposed rendering scheme. Possible applications of the proposed system and its limitations are also presented.
Effectiveness of blood pressure-lowering drug treatment by levels of absolute risk: post hoc analysis of the Australian National Blood Pressure Study

Objectives In many current guidelines, blood pressure (BP)-lowering drug treatment for primary prevention of cardiovascular disease (CVD) is based on absolute risk. However, in clinical practice, therapeutic decisions are often based on BP levels alone. We sought to investigate which approach was superior by conducting a post hoc analysis of the Australian National Blood Pressure (ANBP) cohort, a seminal study establishing the efficacy of BP lowering in ‘mild hypertensive’ persons. Design A post hoc subgroup analysis of the ANBP trial results by baseline absolute risk tertile. Setting and participants 3244 participants aged 35–69 years in a community-based randomised placebo controlled trial of blood pressure-lowering medication. Interventions Chlorothiazide500 mg versus placebo. Primary outcome measures All-cause mortality and non-fatal events (non-fatal CVD, congestive cardiac failure, renal failure, hypertensive retinopathy or encephalopathy). Results Treatment effects were assessed by HR, absolute risk reduction and number needed to treat. Participants had an average 5-year CVD risk in the intermediate range (10.5±6.5) with moderately elevated BP (mean 159/103 mmHg) and were middle aged (52±8 years). In a subgroup analysis, the relative effects (HR) and absolute effects (absolute risk reduction and number needed to treat) did not statistically differ across the three risk groups except for the absolute benefit in all-cause mortality (p for heterogeneity=0.04). With respect to absolute benefit, drug treatment significantly reduced the number of events in the high-risk group regarding any event with a number needed to treat of 18 (10 to 64), death from any cause with 45 (25 to 196) and major CVD events with 23 (12 to 193). Conclusion Our analysis confirms that the benefit of treatment was substantial only in the high-risk tertile, reaffirming the rationale of treating elevated blood pressure in the setting of all risk factors rather than in isolation.
Observers Design for 2-D Positive Time-Delay Roesser Systems

The problem of designing positive observers for 2-D positive Roesser systems with delays is addressed in this brief. Specifically, the design of an extended Luenberger-type observer that generates a nonnegative asymptotic estimation of the state vector and a reduced-order functional state observer that is an asymptotic approximation of a given linear functional of the state vector is considered for 2-D positive delayed systems. By utilizing the positivity and linear programming (LP) approach, necessary and sufficient delay-independent conditions are first derived for the existence of desired observers. Then, based on the existence conditions, effective design procedures are formulated using the LP setting to obtain the observer parameters. Finally, the efficacy of the design method is demonstrated by two numerical examples.
Salt tolerance assessment of barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) genotypes at germination stage by tolerance indices

Abstract This study was performed to assess several indices for identifying genotypes at germination stage with the best performance in salinity conditions. In order to evaluate the seed germination of barley genotypes in different levels of salt conditions, an experiment was conducted as factorial arrangement with a completely randomized design with 3 replications. The effect of salinity treatments was studied through an analysis of the germination, yielding results that show significant differences among genotypes. Stress tolerance index, stress tolerance, stress susceptibility index, germination reduction ratio, mean productivity and geometric mean productivity were used. The majority of used indices indicated that ESBYTM8910, 4 Shori and MBS8715 were the best barley genotypes showing the highest stress resistance for the greatest NaCl concentration. This result was similar to those obtained from the analysis of variance and statistical comparison of means of genotypes germination percentages. There were positive and strong correlations of germination percentage in normal and stress condition with STI in high levels of salinity. Thus, this correlation seems to be a useful indicator of tolerant genotypes at this stage.
A computational investigation of the laser bonding of balloon catheters

The balloon catheters produced by Boston Scientific are manufactured using a laser bonding process. The behaviour of the materials during this laser welding process is not very well understood. In this work a computational model of this process was created which will help predict the behaviour of the materials during bonding and will increase understanding of the laser bonding process. The two parts being bonded are cylindrical and are both made of a thermoplastic polymer called PEBAX®. During the bonding process, these cylindrical parts are surrounded by a heat-shrink tubing which applies a pressure to the PEBAX® parts when heated. The heat and pressure cause the PEBAX® to melt and flow. Modelling the heat-shrink tubing and the melt flow during the laser welding process are key aims of this work. A thermal model of the process was created by modelling the laser absorption and heat transfer through the assembly. This was compared with previous work and validated with experimental data. The PEBAX® was modelled as a viscoelastic material which transitions from relatively rigid to very compliant as it passes its melting temperature. Extensive experimental testing was performed to characterise the heat-shrink tubing. The heat-shrink tubing was modelled using two shape memory models from the literature. These two models were implemented into Abaqus FEA using two user defined material subroutines (UMATs). A thermo-mechanical finite element model of the bonding process was then created in Abaqus FEA and the results were compared with experimental data. This model captures the overall behaviour of the materials during the bonding process, providing predictions of melt flow. The results are compared with the experimentally observed melt flow providing new knowledge on the thermo-mechanical behaviour during the laser bonding process of balloon catheters.
PSAP: Pseudonym-Based Secure Authentication Protocol for NFC Applications

Nowadays, near field communication (NFC) has been widely used in electronic payment, ticketing, and many other areas. NFC security standard requires the use of public key infrastructure (PKI) to implement mutual authentication and session keys negotiation in order to ensure communication security. In traditional PKI-based schemes, every user uses a fixed public/private key pair to implement authentication and key agreement. An attacker can create a profile based on user’s public key to track and compromise the user’s privacy. Recently, He et al. and Odelu et al. successively proposed pseudonym-based authentication key and agreement protocols for NFC after Eun et al.’s protocol (2013), which is first claimed to provide conditional privacy for NFC. They respectively claimed that their scheme can satisfy the security requirements. In this paper, first, we prove that their protocols still have security flaws, including the confusion of the user’s identity and the random identity. Then, we propose a pseudonym-based secure authentication protocol (PSAP) for NFC applications, which is effective in lifetime and includes time synchronization-based method and nonce-based method. In our scheme, trusted service manager issues pseudonyms but does not need to maintain verification tables and it could reveal the user’s identity of internal attackers. Furthermore, security and performance analysis proves that PSAP can provide traceability and more secure features with a little more cost.
Wide-range electrical tunability of single-photon emission from chromium-based colour centres in diamond

We demonstrate electrical control of the single-photon emission spectrum from chromium-based colour centres implanted in monolithic diamond. Under an external electric field, the tunability range is typically three orders of magnitude larger than the radiative linewidth and at least one order of magnitude larger than the observed linewidth. The electric and magnetic field dependence of luminescence gives indications of the inherent symmetry, and we propose Cr–X or X–Cr–Y-type non-centrosymmetric atomic configurations as the most probable candidates for these centres.
Learning-Based Task Offloading for Vehicular Cloud Computing Systems

Vehicular cloud computing (VCC) is proposed to effectively utilize and share the computing and storage resources on vehicles. However, due to the mobility of vehicles, the network topology, the wireless channel states and the available computing resources vary rapidly and are difficult to predict. In this work, we develop a learning-based task offloading framework using the multi-armed bandit (MAB) theory, which enables vehicles to learn the potential task offloading performance of its neighboring vehicles with excessive computing resources, namely service vehicles (SeVs), and minimizes the average offloading delay. We propose an adaptive volatile upper confidence bound (AVUCB) algorithm and augment it with load-awareness and occurrence-awareness, by redesigning the utility function of the classic MAB algorithms. The proposed AVUCB algorithm can effectively adapt to the dynamic vehicular environment, balance the tradeoff between exploration and exploitation in the learning process, and converge fast to the optimal SeV with theoretical performance guarantee. Simulations under both synthetic scenario and a realistic highway scenario are carried out, showing that the proposed algorithm achieves close-to- optimal delay performance.
Dynamic Community Detection Using Nonnegative Matrix Factorization

Community detection is of great importance in the study of complex networks, which motivates a body of new work in this domain. However, almost all networks change over time; traditional methods for static networks are not able to track evolutionary behaviors in temporal networks. To address this problem, we present a novel dynamic community detection model ENMF using nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF), which can not only track the temporal evolutions but also maintain the quality of detecting communities. Specifically, we propose gradient descent algorithm to optimize object function and evaluate the performance of the algorithm on one synthetic datasets. The results show that our proposed model outperforms other NMF methods.
Technology and the Effectiveness of Regulatory Programs over Time: Vehicle Emissions and Smog Checks with a Changing Fleet

Many regional and local governments across the United States (US), Europe, and Asia have inspection and maintenance (I/M) programs designed to reduce pollution from personal transportation. To test for a link between I/M and local air pollution levels, we estimate the contemporaneous effect of inspections on local air quality in the US state of California. We use day-to-day, within-county variation in the number of vehicles certified after failing an initial emissions inspection as a proxy for emissions-related repairs. Additional passed reinspections of older vehicles with inferior emissions technology (pre-1985 model year) reduce local carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, and particulate matter levels, but passed reinspections of newer vehicles with more modern engine technology have no economically significant effect on air pollution. This suggests that biannual emissions inspections as currently implemented will play less of a role in reducing local air pollution as polluting vehicles from the 1970s and 1980s leave the road.
Electromechanical Testing of Carbon Fibers

An electromechanical method for determining the strains in non-embedded carbon fibers is developed. The method is extended to carbon fibers in polymer based composites and verified through Raman spectroscopic measurements. In the electromechanical method a correlation between the strain and change in resistance in the fiber is found through tensile test of single nonembedded fibers. This correlation is used for estimating the quality of the interface between a carbon fiber and a polymer matrix. Through a number of experiments it has been found that the developed method is reliable, cheap and easy to use. The results obtained from the electromechanical measurements are shown to correlate well with results obtained from Raman measurements.
OuterSPACE: An Outer Product Based Sparse Matrix Multiplication Accelerator

Sparse matrices are widely used in graph and data analytics, machine learning, engineering and scientific applications. This paper describes and analyzes OuterSPACE, an accelerator targeted at applications that involve large sparse matrices. OuterSPACE is a highly-scalable, energy-efficient, reconfigurable design, consisting of massively parallel Single Program, Multiple Data (SPMD)-style processing units, distributed memories, high-speed crossbars and High Bandwidth Memory (HBM). We identify redundant memory accesses to non-zeros as a key bottleneck in traditional sparse matrix-matrix multiplication algorithms. To ameliorate this, we implement an outer product based matrix multiplication technique that eliminates redundant accesses by decoupling multiplication from accumulation. We demonstrate that traditional architectures, due to limitations in their memory hierarchies and ability to harness parallelism in the algorithm, are unable to take advantage of this reduction without incurring significant overheads. OuterSPACE is designed to specifically overcome these challenges. We simulate the key components of our architecture using gem5 on a diverse set of matrices from the University of Florida's SuiteSparse collection and the Stanford Network Analysis Project and show a mean speedup of 7.9× over Intel Math Kernel Library on a Xeon CPU, 13.0× against cuSPARSE and 14.0× against CUSP when run on an NVIDIA K40 GPU, while achieving an average throughput of 2.9 GFLOPS within a 24 W power budget in an area of 87 mm2.
Reconstructive endovascular treatment of vertebral artery dissecting aneurysms with the Low-profile Visualized Intraluminal Support (LVIS) device

Introduction The Low-profile Visualized Intraluminal Support (LVIS) device is a new generation of self-expanding braided stent recently introduced in China for stent assisted coiling of intracranial aneurysms. The aim of our study is to evaluate the feasibility, safety, and efficacy of the LVIS device in reconstructive treatment of vertebral artery dissecting aneurysms (VADAs). Methods We retrospectively reviewed the neurointerventional database of our institution from June 2014 to May 2016. Patients who underwent endovascular treatment of VADAs with LVIS stents were included in this study. Clinical presentation, aneurysmal characteristics, technical feasibility, procedural complications, and angiographic and clinical follow-up results were evaluated. Results 38 patients with VADAs who underwent treatment with LVIS stent were identified, including 3 ruptured VADAs. All VADAs were successfully treated with reconstructive techniques including the stent-assisted coiling (n = 34) and stenting only (n = 4). Post-procedural complications developed in 3 patients (7.9%) including two small brainstem infarctions and one delayed thromboembolic event. Complications resulted in one case of minor permanent morbidity (2.6%). There was no procedure-related mortality. The follow-up angiogram was available in 30 patients at an average of 8.3 months (range, 2 to 30 months), which revealed complete occlusion in 23 patients (76.7%), residual neck in five patients (16.7%), and residual sac in two patients (6.7%). The follow-up of 25 aneurysms with incomplete immediate occlusion revealed 22 aneurysms (88%) with improvement in the Raymond class. One aneurysm (3.3%) showed recanalization and required retreatment. Clinical followed-up at 5–28 months (mean 14.1 months) was achieved in 36 patients because two patients died of pancreatic cancer and basal ganglia hemorrhage, respectively. No new neurologic deterioration or aneurysm (re)bleeding was observed. Conclusions Our preliminary experience with reconstruction of VADAs with the LVIS device demonstrates that this treatment approach is feasible with good short-term angiographic and clinical outcomes. Long-term and larger cohort studies are necessary to determine long-term outcomes of this therapy.
Antifungal Activity of Denture Soft Lining Material Modified by Silver Nanoparticles—A Pilot Study

Soft liner materials in oral cavity environments are easily colonized both by fungi and dental plaque. These factors are the cause of mucosal infections. The microorganism that most frequently colonizes soft liner materials is Candida albicans. Colonization occurs on the surface of materials and within materials. A solution to this problem might involve modification of soft liner materials with silver nanoparticles (AgNPs). In this article, we present results showing the antifungal efficacy of silicone soft lining materials modified with AgNPs. The modification process was conducted by dissolving both material components (base and catalyst) in a colloidal solution of AgNPs and evaporating the solvent. Composites with various AgNP concentrations (10, 20, 40, 80, 120 and 200 ppm) were examined. The in vitro antifungal efficacy (AFE) of composite samples was 16.3% to 52.5%.