Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Direct multiplex assay of lysosomal enzymes in dried blood spots for newborn screening.

BACKGROUND Newborn screening for deficiency in the lysosomal enzymes that cause Fabry, Gaucher, Krabbe, Niemann-Pick A/B, and Pompe diseases is warranted because treatment for these syndromes is now available or anticipated in the near feature. We describe a multiplex screening method for all five lysosomal enzymes that uses newborn-screening cards containing dried blood spots as the enzyme source. METHODS We used a cassette of substrates and internal standards to directly quantify the enzymatic activities, and tandem mass spectrometry for enzymatic product detection. Rehydrated dried blood spots were incubated with the enzyme substrates. We used liquid-liquid extraction followed by solid-phase extraction with silica gel to remove buffer components. Acarbose served as inhibitor of an interfering acid alpha-glucosidase present in neutrophils, which allowed the lysosomal enzyme implicated in Pompe disease to be selectively analyzed. RESULTS We analyzed dried blood spots from 5 patients with Gaucher, 5 with Niemann-Pick A/B, 11 with Pompe, 5 with Fabry, and 12 with Krabbe disease, and in all cases the enzyme activities were below the minimum activities measured in a collection of heterozygous carriers and healthy noncarrier individuals. The enzyme activities measured in 5-9 heterozygous carriers were approximately one-half those measured with 15-32 healthy individuals, but there was partial overlap of each condition between the data sets for carriers and healthy individuals. CONCLUSION For all five diseases, the affected individuals were detected. The assay can be readily automated, and the anticipated reagent and supply costs are well within the budget limits of newborn-screening centers.
Mask-CNN: Localizing Parts and Selecting Descriptors for Fine-Grained Image Recognition

Fine-grained image recognition is a challenging computer vision problem, due to the small inter-class variations caused by highly similar subordinate categories, and the large intra-class variations in poses, scales and rotations. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end Mask-CNN model without the fully connected layers for fine-grained recognition. Based on the part annotations of fine-grained images, the proposed model consists of a fully convolutional network to both locate the discriminative parts (e.g., head and torso), and more importantly generate object/part masks for selecting useful and meaningful convolutional descriptors. After that, a four-stream Mask-CNN model is built for aggregating the selected object- and part-level descriptors simultaneously. The proposed Mask-CNN model has the smallest number of parameters, lowest feature dimensionality and highest recognition accuracy when compared with state-of-the-arts fine-grained approaches.
Prognostic value of decremental responses to repetitive nerve stimulation in ALS patients

Decrement of the thenar compound muscle action potentials (CMAP), after repetitive nerve stimulation (RNS) of the median nerve at 3 Hz, was evaluated in patients with ALS before riluzole therapy. CMAP size as well as motor unit number and size estimates were evaluated twice before and after 1 year of riluzole therapy. The correlation between decrement and CMAP size reduction per year was highly significant (r = 0.77), but no relationship could be demonstrated between decrement and other variables. The authors thus propose that decrement after RNS may be used as a predictor of further drop in CMAP size.
Therapeutic Hypothermia for Acute Ischemic Stroke: What Do Laboratory Studies Teach Us?

Background and Purpose— The significance of brain temperature to outcome in cerebral ischemia is recognized. Numerous variations of depth, duration, and delay of cooling have been studied in animal models. It is important to become familiar with these studies to design appropriate clinical trials. With that in mind, a critical review of the pertinent literature is presented, taking into consideration potential limitations in translating such laboratory work to the clinical level. Methods— Hypothermia is an especially robust neuroprotectant in the laboratory and has been shown to alter many of the damaging effects of cerebral ischemia. Most laboratory research on therapeutic cooling in cerebral ischemia has been conducted in rodent models of temporary and permanent middle cerebral artery occlusion and report the effects of mild or moderate hypothermia arranged during or after ischemia. Results— Intraischemic cooling vastly reduces infarct size in most occlusion models. Tissue salvage with delayed onset of cooling is less dramatic but is commonly observed when cooling is begun within 60 minutes of stroke onset in permanent and 180 minutes of stroke onset in temporary occlusion models. Prolonged postischemic cooling further enhances efficacy. Conclusions— Laboratory studies have shown that intraischemic hypothermia is more protective than postischemic hypothermia and more benefit is conferred with temporary occlusion than permanent occlusion models. The efficacy of postischemic hypothermia is critically dependent on the duration and depth of hypothermia and its timing relative to ischemia.
Model Predictive Discrete-Time Sliding Mode Control of a Nanopositioning Piezostage Without Modeling Hysteresis

This paper proposes an enhanced model predictive discrete-time sliding mode control (MPDSMC) with proportional-integral (PI) sliding function and state observer for the motion tracking control of a nanopositioning system driven by piezoelectric actuators. One distinct advantage of the proposed controller lies in that its implementation only requires a simple second-order model of the system, whereas it does not need to know neither the hysteresis model nor the bounds on system uncertainties. The unmodeled hysteresis is eliminated by the one-step delayed disturbance estimation technique and the neglected residual modes are suppressed by employing a properly-designed state observer. Moreover, the reasons why the model predictive control methodology and PI action can eliminate the chattering effects and produce a low level of tracking error are discovered in state-space framework. Experimental results demonstrate that the performance of the proposed MPDSMC controller is superior to both conventional PID and DSMC methods in motion tracking tasks. A precise tracking is achieved by the nanopositioning stage along with the hysteretic nonlinearity mitigated to a negligible level, which validates the feasibility of the proposed controller in the domain of micro-/nanomanipulation.
Review and Reconsideration of Research on Cultural philosophy

Cultural philosophy is a new rising subject in the 20th century.It is self-examination to the "alienation" of technologies and the cultural crisis under the historical context of the transformation of the traditional agricultural civilization into industrial civilization.And in China,cultural philosophy research is the necessary requirement of Chinese modernization construction.In recent years,Chinese cultural philosophy research embraces four areas in academic circles: defining culture and cultural philosophy category;construction of the cultural philosophy system;research on exploring the relationship between Marxist philosophy and cultural philosophy;research on Chinese cultural construction in the background of globalization.The retrospection,analysis,recognition and rethinking on the present situation of Chinese cultural philosophy research have great significance to the academic construction of cultural philosophy and cultural construction of contemporary society in China.
Obesity and Inflammation: Epidemiology, Risk Factors, and Markers of Inflammation

Obesity is a public health problem that has reached epidemic proportions with an increasing worldwide prevalence. The global emergence of obesity increases the risk of developing chronic metabolic disorders. Thus, it is an economic issue that increased the costs of the comorbidities associated. Moreover, in recent years, it has been demonstrated that obesity is associated with chronic systemic inflammation, this status is conditioned by the innate immune system activation in adipose tissue that promotes an increase in the production and release of pro-inflammatory cytokines that contribute to the triggering of the systemic acute-phase response which is characterized by elevation of acute-phase protein levels. On this regard, low-grade chronic inflammation is a characteristic of various chronic diseases such as metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, hypertension, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, and some cancers, among others, which are also characterized by obesity condition. Thus, a growing body of evidence supports the important role that is played by the inflammatory response in obesity condition and the pathogenesis of chronic diseases related.
Discrete-Time Dynamic Term Structure Models with Generalized Market Prices of Risk

This article develops a rich class of discrete-time, nonlinear dynamic term structure models (DTSMs). Under the risk-neutral measure, the distribution of the state vector X t resides within a family of discrete-time affine processes that nests the exact discrete-time counterparts of the entire class of continuous-time models in Duffie and Kan (1996) and Dai and Singleton (2000). Under the historical distribution, our approach accommodates nonlinear (nonaffine) processes while leading to closed-form expressions for the conditional likelihood functions for zero-coupon bond yields. As motivation for our framework, we show that it encompasses many of the equilibrium models with habit-based preferences or recursive preferences and long-run risks. We illustrate our methods by constructing maximum likelihood estimates of a nonlinear discrete-time DTSM with habit-based preferences in which bond prices are known in closed form. We conclude that habit-based models, as typically parameterized in the literature, do not match key features of the conditional distribution of bond yields. The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org, Oxford University Press.
Modeling the Spatial Distribution of Chronic Tumor Hypoxia: Implications for Experimental and Clinical Studies

Tumor oxygenation status is considered one of the important prognostic markers in cancer since it strongly influences the response of cancer cells to various treatments; in particular, to radiation therapy. Thus, a proper and accurate assessment of tumor oxygen distribution before the treatment may highly affect the outcome of the treatment. The heterogeneous nature of tumor hypoxia, mainly influenced by the complex tumor microenvironment, often makes its quantification very difficult. The usual methods used to measure tumor hypoxia are biomarkers and the polarographic needle electrode. Although these techniques may provide an acceptable assessment of hypoxia, they are invasive and may not always give a spatial distribution of hypoxia, which is very useful for treatment planning. An alternative method to quantify the tumor hypoxia is to use theoretical simulations with the knowledge of tumor vasculature. The purpose of this paper is to model tumor hypoxia using a known spatial distribution of tumor vasculature obtained from image data, to analyze the accuracy of polarographic needle electrode measurements in quantifying hypoxia, to quantify the optimum number of measurements required to satisfactorily evaluate the tumor oxygenation status, and to study the effects of hypoxia on radiation response. Our results indicate that the model successfully generated an accurate oxygenation map for tumor cross-sections with known vascular distribution. The method developed here provides a way to estimate tumor hypoxia and provides guidance in planning accurate and effective therapeutic strategies and invasive estimation techniques. Our results agree with the previous findings that the needle electrode technique gives a good estimate of tumor hypoxia if the sampling is done in a uniform way with 5-6 tracks of 20–30 measurements each. Moreover, the analysis indicates that the accurate measurement of oxygen profile can be very useful in determining right radiation doses to the patients.
Echo Chambers on Facebook

Do echo chambers actually exist on social media? By focusing on how both Italian and US Facebook users relate to two distinct narratives (involving conspiracy theories and science), we offer quantitative evidence that they do. The explanation involves users’ tendency to promote their favored narratives and hence to form polarized groups. Confirmation bias helps to account for users’ decisions about whether to spread content, thus creating informational cascades within identifiable communities. At the same time, aggregation of favored information within those communities reinforces selective exposure and group polarization. We provide empirical evidence that because they focus on their preferred narratives, users tend to assimilate only confirming claims and to ignore apparent refutations.
VARIATION OF THE SUBHALO ABUNDANCE IN DARK MATTER HALOS

We analyzed the statistics of subhalo abundance of galaxy-sized and giant-galaxy-sized halos formed in a high-resolution cosmological simulation of a 46.5 Mpc cube with the uniform mass resolution of 106 M☉. We analyzed all halos with mass more than 1.5 × 1012 M☉ formed in this simulation box. The total number of halos was 125. We found that the subhalo abundance, measured by the number of subhalos with maximum rotation velocity larger than 10% of that of the parent halo, shows large halo-to-halo variations. The results of recent ultra-high-resolution runs fall within the variation of our samples. We found that the concentration parameter and the radius at the moment of the maximum expansion show fairly tight correlation with the subhalo abundance. This correlation suggests that the variation of the subhalo abundance is at least partly due to the difference in the formation history. Halos formed earlier have a smaller number of subhalos at present.
Automatic Detection of User’s Uncertainty in Problem Solving Task: a Multimodal Approach

This paper presents a novel multimodal approach to automatically detect learner’s uncertainty through the integration of multiple sensors. An acquisition protocol was established to record participants’ electrical brain activity and physiological signals while interacting with a problem solving system specifically designed for uncertainty elicitation. Data were collected from 38 subjects using 8 sensors and two video feeds. Results from machine learning classifiers support the feasibility of our approach. 81% of accuracy was reached using Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm.
Audience entrainment during live contemporary dance performance: physiological and cognitive measures

Perceiving and synchronizing to a piece of dance is a remarkable skill in humans. Research in this area is very recent and has been focused mainly on entrainment produced by regular rhythms. Here, we investigated entrainment effects on spectators perceiving a non-rhythmic and extremely slow performance issued from contemporary dance. More specifically, we studied the relationship between subjective experience and entrainment produced by perceiving this type of performance. We defined two types of entrainment. Physiological entrainment corresponded to cardiovascular and respiratory coordinated activities. Cognitive entrainment was evaluated through cognitive tasks that quantified time distortion. These effects were thought to reflect attunement of a participant’ internal temporal clock to the particularly slow pace of the danced movement. Each participant’ subjective experience—in the form of responses to questionnaires—were collected and correlated with cognitive and physiological entrainment. We observe: (a) a positive relationship between psychological entrainment and attention to breathing (their own one or that of dancers); and (b) a positive relationship between cognitive entrainment (reflected as an under-estimation of time following the performance) and attention to their own breathing, and attention to the muscles’ dancers. Overall, our results suggest a close relationship between attention to breathing and entrainment. This proof-of-concept pilot study was intended to prove the feasibility of a quantitative situated paradigm. This research is inscribed in a large-scale interdisciplinary project of dance spectating (labodanse.org).
Attention Correctness in Neural Image Captioning

Attention mechanisms have recently been introduced in deep learning for various tasks in natural language processing and computer vision. But despite their popularity, the ``correctness'' of the implicitly-learned attention maps has only been assessed qualitatively by visualization of several examples. In this paper we focus on evaluating and improving the correctness of attention in neural image captioning models. Specifically, we propose a quantitative evaluation metric for the consistency between the generated attention maps and human annotations, using recently released datasets with alignment between regions in images and entities in captions. We then propose novel models with different levels of explicit supervision for learning attention maps during training. The supervision can be strong when alignment between regions and caption entities are available, or weak when only object segments and categories are provided. We show on the popular Flickr30k and COCO datasets that introducing supervision of attention maps during training solidly improves both attention correctness and caption quality, showing the promise of making machine perception more human-like.
Comparative study of surgical treatment of acromioclavicular luxation.

BACKGROUND/AIM Acromioclavicular (AC) luxations most often affect athletes. The published results regarding the treatment of AC joint luxations vary. Each method has its advantages and disadvantages, so there is still no consensus on the best method of treatment. The aim of this study was to review the results of a number of surgical approaches to stabilization of AC joint recorded over the span of five years. METHODS This study was based on the data acquired from the analysis of 28 patients with AC luxation surgically treated in the Clinical Center of Montenegro. One group of 16 patients underwent the traditional AO method (with transfixation of AC joint with Kirschner wire and Zuggurtung tension bands) or the Bosworth method (using the coracoclavicular transfixation screw--Zugg-Bosw group). The second group of 12 patients underwent a newer techinque with the Hook plate (Hook plate group). RESULTS All the patients had AC luxation of higher degree, stage IV-VI acording to the Rockwood scale. The average age of the two groups was very similar, with 28 being the average age of the Zugg-Bosw group, and 25 of the Hook plate group. Most patients were males (82%), injured mostly during athletic activity (75%-83%). Complications were more common and more complex in the Zugg-Bosw group, with 2 early and 8 late comlications. There are only 3 late complications in the Hook plate group, but with no significant statistical difference (p = 0.19; t = -1.34; df = 27). With respect to the subjective patient satisfaction following the treatment, the Hook plate group gave significantly better evaluations (4.4 +/- 0.19) (p = 0.007; t = 2.95; df = 27). Constant score showed no significant statistical difference (p = 0.078; t = 1.8; df = 27). The Hook plate group had a better median score (90 +/- 0.18) with respect to the Zugg-Bosw group (85 +/- 0.40). CONCLUSION The Hook plate method achieved somewhat better results, which indicate that this method is one of the ways to ensure a strong, stable fixation of the AC joint without transfixation. At the same time, this method does not inhibit the ligament healing and allows an early mobilisation.
Can Integrity Replace Institutions? Theory and Evidence

Institutions are important for proper economic performance, but are replaceable by trust or other social norms. We show that when proper institutions and trust are missing, integrity of the individuals can replace them. We construct a model of a transactions-based economy with contracts preceding the transactions, and show that any one of (1) institutions, (2) trust, or (3) integrity, foster economic growth. We construct data of economic performance of social groups in Lebanon, measure integrity and other values of these groups, and use this data and data from Kenya to support one of the model’s predictions. Policy implications are discussed.
Robust Fastener Detection for Autonomous Visual Railway Track Inspection

Fasteners are critical railway components that maintain the rails in a fixed position. Their failure can lead to train derailments due to gage widening or wheel climb, so their condition needs to be periodically monitored. Several computer vision methods have been proposed in the literature for track inspection applications. However, these methods are not robust to clutter and background noise present in the railroad environment. This paper proposes a new method for fastener detection by 1) carefully aligning the training data, 2) reducing intra-class variation, and 3) bootstrapping difficult samples to improve the classification margin. Using the histogram of oriented gradients features and a combination of linear SVM classifiers, the system described in this paper can inspect ties for missing or defective rail fastener problems with a probability of detection of 98% and a false alarm rate of 1.23% on a new dataset of 85 miles of concrete tie images collected in the US Northeast Corridor (NEC) between 2012 and 2013. To the best of our knowledge, this dataset of 203,287 crossties is the largest ever reported in the literature.
Lip Localization and Viseme Classification for Visual Speech Recognition

The need for an automatic lip-reading system is ever increasing. Infact, today, extraction and reliable analysis of facial movements make up an important part in many multimedia systems such as videoconference, low communication systems, lip-reading systems. In addition, visual information is imperative among people with special needs. We can imagine, for example, a dependent person ordering a machine with an easy lip movement or by a simple syllable pronunciation. Moreover, people with hearing problems compensate for their special needs by lip-reading as well as listening to the person with whome they are talking. We present in this paper a new approach to automatically localize lip feature points in a speaker’s face and to carry out a spatial-temporal tracking of these points. The extracted visual information is then classified in order to recognize the uttered viseme (visual phoneme). We have developed our Automatic Lip Feature Extraction prototype (ALiFE). Experiments revealed that our system recognizes 72.73% of French Vowels uttered by multiple speakers (female and male) under natural conditions.