Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Geometrical and Monte Carlo projectors in 3D PET reconstruction.

PURPOSE In the present work, the authors compare geometrical and Monte Carlo projectors in detail. The geometrical projectors considered were the conventional geometrical Siddon ray-tracer (S-RT) and the orthogonal distance-based ray-tracer (OD-RT), based on computing the orthogonal distance from the center of image voxel to the line-of-response. A comparison of these geometrical projectors was performed using different point spread function (PSF) models. The Monte Carlo-based method under consideration involves an extensive model of the system response matrix based on Monte Carlo simulations and is computed off-line and stored on disk. METHODS Comparisons were performed using simulated and experimental data of the commercial small animal PET scanner rPET. RESULTS The results demonstrate that the orthogonal distance-based ray-tracer and Siddon ray-tracer using PSF image-space convolutions yield better images in terms of contrast and spatial resolution than those obtained after using the conventional method and the multiray-based S-RT. Furthermore, the Monte Carlo-based method yields slight improvements in terms of contrast and spatial resolution with respect to these geometrical projectors. CONCLUSIONS The orthogonal distance-based ray-tracer and Siddon ray-tracer using PSF image-space convolutions represent satisfactory alternatives to factorizing the system matrix or to the conventional on-the-fly ray-tracing methods for list-mode reconstruction, where an extensive modeling based on Monte Carlo simulations is unfeasible.
Dysfunction of a distributed neural circuitry in schizophrenia patients during a working-memory performance

Background. In a recent longitudinal study of first-episode schizophrenia patients, we found that while dysfunction of the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), right thalamus, left cerebellum and cingulate gyrus normalized with antipsychotic treatment and significant reduction in symptomatology, the left DLPFC, left thalamus, and right cerebellum remained disturbed. In the present study we investigated whether these abnormalities are also present in clinically stable, relatively well-functioning schizophrenia patients in comparison to control subjects during performance of the N-back working-memory task. Method. Twelve schizophrenia and 12 control subjects completed the study. The functional images collected during scanning were analyzed using a random-effects model in a restricted set of six regions of interest (ROIs). In addition, the exploratory search in the entire brain volume was performed. Results. The ROI analyses revealed relative underactivation in the region of the left DLPFC and the right cerebellum, as well as overactivation in the left cerebellum. The exploratory whole-brain search exposed additional overactivation in the medial frontal, anterior cingulate, and left parietal cortices. Conclusions. The present study provides evidence of significant underactivations in stable schizophrenia patients in regions that we have previously observed to be dysfunctional in acutely psychotic and partially remitted patients, together with extensive overactivations in several regions that potentially reflect some compensatory mechanism or increased effort on the working-memory task.
Warm Rain Rates from AMSR-E 89-GHz Brightness Temperatures Trained Using CloudSat Rain-Rate Observations

Collocated CloudSat rain rates and Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS (AMSR-E) 89-GHz brightness temperature Tb retrievals allow for the development of an algorithm to estimate light, warm rain statistics as a function of AMSR-E 89-GHz Tb for shallow marine clouds. Four statistics are calculated from CloudSat rainfall rate estimates within each 4 km × 6 km Tb pixel sampled by both sensors: the probability of rainfall, the mean rain rate, the mean rate when raining, and the maximum rain rate. Observations with overlying cold clouds are removed from the analysis. To account for confounding variables that modify Tb, curves are fit to the mean relationships between Tb and these four statistics within bins of constant column-integrated water vapor from AMSR-E, and sea surface temperature and wind speed from reanalysis grids. The coefficients that define these curves are then applied to all available AMSR-E Tb retrievals to estimate rain rate throughout the eastern subtropical oceans. A preliminary analysis shows strong agreement between AMSR-E rain rates and the CloudSat training dataset. Comparison with an existing microwave precipitation product shows that the new statistical product has an improved sensitivity to light rain. A climatology for the year 2007 shows that precipitation rates tend to be heavier where the sea surface is warmer and that rain is most frequent where stratocumulus transitions to trade cumulus in the subtropics.
Capital Requirements and Shifts in Commercial Bank Portfolios

Since 1989, U.S. commercial banks have shifted their portfolios away from commercial loans toward government securities. Using data for individual banks, the authors document this shift and test for whether it can be attributed to the imposition of risk-based capital requirements. Their results indicate that these requirements may indeed account for part of the portfolio shift.
Panitumumab in Japanese Patients with Unresectable Colorectal Cancer: A Post-marketing Surveillance Study of 3085 Patients†

Objective Panitumumab was approved in Japan in April 2010 for the treatment of Kirsten rat sarcoma-2 virus oncogene wild-type unresectable and recurrent colorectal cancer. We conducted a post-marketing surveillance study to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of panitumumab. Methods After panitumumab was commercially available in Japan, all patients to be treated with panitumumab were enrolled. Data on baseline characteristics, treatment outcome, and incidence and severity of adverse drug reactions were collected. Results In total, 3091 patients were registered. In the safety analysis set (n = 3085), panitumumab was administered as monotherapy (40.7%) or combination therapy (59.4%). The median treatment duration was 113 days (range: 1–559 days), and 451 (14.6%) patients received panitumumab for ≥10 months. The overall incidence rate of adverse drug reactions was 84.1%, and the most common adverse drug reaction was skin disorders (78.4%). The incidence rates (all grades) of interstitial lung disease, infusion reaction, electrolyte abnormalities and cardiac disorders were 1.3% (mortality rate: 0.6%), 1.5, 19.3 and 0.2%, respectively. The median survival time of patients treated with panitumumab monotherapy as the third-line, or later, therapy was 10.3 months. Conclusion This post-marketing survey in clinical practice confirmed the safety and effectiveness of panitumumab. The benefit/risk balance for panitumumab in Japanese patients with unresectable colorectal cancer remains favorable.
Committee Jurisdiction and Internet Intellectual Property Protection

This paper examines the impact of increasingly common congressional committee jurisdictional turf wars on policy outcomes. It develops a theoretical model that shows how legislators balance the benefits of expanded committee jurisdiction against preferred policy outcomes, yielding predictions that are different from the traditional committee-dominance theories. The theory predicts that a) senior members, and members who are in safe districts are most likely to challenge another committee’s jurisdiction; b) policy proposals may be initiated off the proposer’s ideal point in order to obtain jurisdiction over an issue; c) in many cases, policy outcomes will be more moderate with jurisdictional fights than they would be without these turf wars. The paper tests the implications of the theory examining proposed Internet intellectual property protection legislation to reform electronic database law in the 106 Congress. *Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, National Bureau of Economic Research, and John M. Olin Senior Research Fellow in Law and Economics at Harvard Law School. Thanks to Steve Ansolabehere, Rui de Figueiredo, Tom Gilligan, Shane Greenstein, David King, Mark Ramseyer, Romain Wacziarg, Ezra Zuckerman, and seminar participants at MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley for helpful comments and discussions. I would also like to thank the many people at companies, universities, and associations who permitted to be interviewed for this paper. Daniel Braga provided excellent research assistance. I also wish to acknowledge the generous financial assistance of the E-Business Center at MIT.
The Key Events Dose-Response Framework: A Cross-Disciplinary Mode-of-Action Based Approach to Examining Dose-Response and Thresholds

The ILSI Research Foundation convened a cross-disciplinary working group to examine current approaches for assessing dose-response and identifying safe levels of intake or exposure for four categories of bioactive agents—food allergens, nutrients, pathogenic microorganisms, and environmental chemicals. This effort generated a common analytical framework—the Key Events Dose-Response Framework (KEDRF)—for systematically examining key events that occur between the initial dose of a bioactive agent and the effect of concern. Individual key events are considered with regard to factors that influence the dose-response relationship and factors that underlie variability in that relationship. This approach illuminates the connection between the processes occurring at the level of fundamental biology and the outcomes observed at the individual and population levels. Thus, it promotes an evidence-based approach for using mechanistic data to reduce reliance on default assumptions, to quantify variability, and to better characterize biological thresholds. This paper provides an overview of the KEDRF and introduces a series of four companion papers that illustrate initial application of the approach to a range of bioactive agents.
Nonlinear Waves in a Strongly Nonlinear Resonant Granular Chain

We explore a recently proposed locally resonant granular system bearing harmonic internal resonators in a chain of beads interacting via Hertzian elastic contacts. In this system, we propose the existence of two types of configurations: (a) small-amplitude periodic traveling waves and (b) dark-breather solutions, i.e., exponentially localized, time periodic states mounted on top of a non-vanishing background. We also identify conditions under which the system admits long-lived bright breather solutions. Our results are obtained by means of an asymptotic reduction to a suitably modified version of the so-called discrete p-Schrodinger (DpS) equation, which is established as controllably approximating the solutions of the original system for large but finite times (under suitable assumptions on the solution amplitude and the resonator mass). The findings are also corroborated by detailed numerical computations. A remarkable feature distinguishing our results from other settings where dark breathers are observed is the complete absence of precompression in the system, i.e., the absence of a linear spectral band.
Extracting Fuzzy Rules From Polysomnographic Recordings for Infant Sleep Classification

A neuro-fuzzy classifier (NFC) of sleep-wake states and stages has been developed for healthy infants of ages 6 mo and onward. The NFC takes five input patterns previously identified on 20-s epochs from polysomnographic recordings and assigns them to one out of five possible classes: Wakefulness, REM-Sleep, Non-REM Sleep Stage 1, Stage 2, and Stage 3-4. The definite criterion for a sleep state or stage to be established is duration of at least 1 min. The data set consisted of a total of 14 continuous recordings of naturally occurring naps (average duration: 143plusmn39 min), corresponding to a total of 6021 epochs. They were divided in a training, a validation and a test set with 7, 2, and 5 recordings, respectively. During supervised training, the system determined the fuzzy concepts associated to the inputs and the rules required for performing the classification, extracting knowledge from the training set, and pruning nonrelevant rules. Results on an independent test set achieved 83.9plusmn0. 4% of expert agreement. The fuzzy rules obtained from the training examples without a priori information showed a high level of coincidence with the crisp rules stated by the experts, which are based on internationally accepted criteria. These results show that the NFC can be a valuable tool for implementing an automated sleep-wake classification system
Sociocultural, economic and ethnic homogeneity in residential mobility and spatial sorting among couples

This study aims to advance the spatial conceptualization of ‘social homophily’ by relating the match, or mismatch, between a household’s social and sociocultural characteristics and the characteristics of the neighbourhood of residence to the probability of moving away from that neighbourhood. Three matching dimensions were investigated: economic status, ethnic background and sociocultural disposition. This paper’s focus is on the sociocultural dimension because this has not been included extensively in large-scale research so far. Initially we investigate how level of education at the household level interacts with education composition at the neighbourhood level. To further investigate the sociocultural dimension, we then include the share of each partner’s income in the total household income in our analyses. Based on the spatial literature at the intersections of class, gender and family, we assume that, together with higher education, the intra-household distribution of income reflects a broader set of sociocultural values. We make use of large-N register data to analyse the residential and mobility behaviour of all registered stable couples in the four largest Dutch urban regions between 2008 and 2009. Our analyses indicate that the degree to which a household ‘matches’ its social surroundings negatively affects its probability of leaving. This is the case for all three dimensions, with sociocultural disposition having the largest effect. The conclusion reflects on the importance of these findings for social homophily, sorting and residential segregation, and proposes directions for further research.
A divide-and-conquer 2.5-D floorplanning algorithm based on statistical wirelength estimation

An efficient and effective divide-and conquer 2.5D floorplanning algorithm is proposed for wirelength optimization. Modules are pre-partitioned into different dies with respect to the statistical wirelength estimation result. Then a floorplan is generated on each die for wirelength optimization. The new partitioning method successfully solves the conflict between wirelength minimization and inter-die via constraints. Experimental results show that our algorithm could provide noticeable improvement in the total wirelength compared to both 2D design and the previous 2.5D floorplanning algorithm.
Polar lattice vibrations and phase transition dynamics in Pb(Zr1-xTix)O3

Infrared (IR) reflectivity spectra of nominally pure Pb(Zr1-xTix)O-3 ceramics with different Ti/Zr concentration (x = 0.42-0.58) were measured and evaluated, along with the time-domain terahertz transmittance spectra in the temperature range 10 K-900 K. The temperature dependence of the low-frequency vibrations, related to Pb atoms, was analyzed in terms of two overdamped modes-a soft mode and an anharmonic hopping central mode-in the cubic and high-temperature ferroelectric phase and three main vibrations in the low-temperature ferroelectric phase with the doubled unit cell: two E-symmetry modes (the soft mode and a mode corresponding to antiphase vibrations of neighboring Pb atoms in the terahertz range) and the antiferrodistortive mode producing the antiphase tilts of the oxygen octahedra. The last bare mode is not IR active, but it becomes activated by coupling with the soft mode. As predicted by theory, the intrinsic permittivity of Pb(Zr1-xTix)O-3 has a maximum at the morphotropic phase boundary, although this represents just a small percentage of the total permittivity at lower frequencies. Its maximum is linked to the softening of the anharmonic vibrations of Pb ions, perpendicular to the polarization, and shifts from x = 0.48 at room temperature to x = 0.52 at 10 K.
Beneficial for Some or for Everyone? Exploring the Effects of an Autonomy-Supportive Intervention in the Real-Life Classroom

The present study investigated whether an autonomy-supportive intervention influenced students’ need satisfaction, achievement emotions, and strategies of self-regulated learning differently depending on several student characteristics. The study was conducted with a sample of 345 9th-grade students in 17 physics classrooms who were randomly assigned to an experimental or a control condition. In both conditions, their physics teachers taught a standardized teaching unit on heat transfer that either entailed autonomy support (via provision of choices, provision of rationales, and informational language) or was taught using the regular teaching style. A range of student characteristics (gender, prior physics grades, physics-related effort, interest, extrinsic motivation, self-efficacy, and perceived autonomy in physics class) were considered as potential moderators. The differential effectiveness of the autonomy-supportive intervention was investigated using the EffecLiteR approach. Both the average effects of the intervention and conditional effects (i.e., distinct interactions of the intervention with each of the student characteristics) were investigated. Analyzing average treatment effects revealed that the autonomy-supportive intervention had a positive impact on all outcomes. The intervention fostered need satisfaction, positive achievement emotions, and learning behaviors and reduced negative emotions. Moreover, the results showed that students’ prior grades moderated the effects of the intervention with regard to 3 outcomes: Students with higher grades reported greater optional choices, joy and effort. These findings point to the benefits of providing autonomy support in physics and demonstrate the relevance of conducting a detailed analysis of the differential effects of motivational interventions.
Enigma of IL-17 and Th17 Cells in Rheumatoid Arthritis and in Autoimmune Animal Models of Arthritis

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is one of the most common autoimmune disorders characterized by the chronic and progressive inflammation of various organs, most notably the synovia of joints leading to joint destruction, a shorter life expectancy, and reduced quality of life. Although we have substantial information about the pathophysiology of the disease with various groups of immune cells and soluble mediators identified to participate in the pathogenesis, several aspects of the altered immune functions and regulation in RA remain controversial. Animal models are especially useful in such scenarios. Recently research focused on IL-17 and IL-17 producing cells in various inflammatory diseases such as in RA and in different rodent models of RA. These studies provided occasionally contradictory results with IL-17 being more prominent in some of the models than in others; the findings of such experimental setups were sometimes inconclusive compared to the human data. The aim of this review is to summarize briefly the recent advancements on the role of IL-17, particularly in the different rodent models of RA.
Therapeutic processes in group therapy: Intersections between general change mechanisms and motivational stages of change from patient perspective

ABSTRACT Intersections between Grawe’s General Psychotherapy and Prochaska’s Transtheoretical Model were investigated in group therapy in a longitudinal design. It was assumed that general change mechanisms have an impact on patients’ stages of change. Specifically, the main hypotheses were that experiential change mechanisms (ECM; clarification of meaning, problem actuation, emotional bond and group cohesion) should be especially relevant for early stages of change (precontemplation and contemplation), whereas behavioral change mechanisms (BCM; resource activation, mastery/coping and task and goals) should be especially relevant for late stages of change (action and maintenance). Therefore, 140 outpatients attending different types of group therapy, with a typical duration of 8 sessions, were investigated. Patients completed the Form for the Evaluation of Therapeutic Processes in Group Therapy (FEPiG), the University of Rhode Island Change Assessment, short version (URICA-S) and several symptomatology measures (BDI-II, BSCL and IIP-32) at two measuring times. Intersections were analysed through correlational analyses, cross-lagged panels and a path-analytic model, supporting the hypotheses. Specifically, results suggested that experiencing ECM at t1 predicted higher levels of reported contemplation at t2. Patients experiencing higher levels of BCM at t1 reported higher levels of action at t2. Clinical implications of the results are discussed.
Are We in the Same Risk of Diabetes Mellitus? Gender- and Age-Specific Epidemiology of Diabetes in 2001 to 2014 in the Korean Population

In the early 2000s, the prevalence of diabetes in adults aged ≥30 years in Korea was about 9% to 10%, and it remained stable. However, a nationwide survey showed that this prevalence increased over the past few years. After age-standardization using the Korean population of the year 2010, the prevalence of diabetes in adults aged ≥30 years was 10.0% to 10.8% between 2001 and 2012, which increased to 12.5% in 2013 and 11.6% in 2014. During that period, there have been changes in the gender- and age-specific prevalence of diabetes in Korean adults. The prevalence of diabetes in the elderly population increased significantly, while this prevalence in young adults, especially in young women, did not change significantly. The contribution of each diabetic risk factor, such as obesity, β-cell dysfunction, sarcopenia, and socioeconomic status, in developing diabetes has also changed during that period in each gender and age group. For young women, obesity was the most important risk factor; by contrast, for elderly diabetic patients, sarcopenia was more important than obesity as a risk factor. Considering the economic burden of diabetes and its associated comorbidities, a public health policy targeting the major risk factors in each population might be more effective in preventing diabetes.
Exponential source/channel duality

We propose a source/channel duality in the exponential regime, where success/failure in source coding parallels error/correctness in channel coding, and a distortion constraint becomes a log-likelihood ratio (LLR) threshold. We establish this duality by first deriving exact exponents for lossy coding of a memoryless source P, at distortion D, for a general i.i. d. codebook distribution Q, for both encoding success (R < R(P, Q, D)) and failure (R > R(P, Q, D)). We then turn to maximum likelihood (ML) decoding over a memoryless channel P with an i.i. d. input Q, and show that if we substitute P = QP, Q = Q, and D = 0 under the LLR distortion measure, then the exact exponents for decoding-error (R < I(Q, P)) and strict correct-decoding (R > I(Q, P)) follow as special cases of the exponents for source encoding success/failure, respectively. Moreover, by letting the threshold D take general values, the exact random-coding exponents for erasure (D > 0) and list decoding (D < 0) under the simplified Forney decoder are obtained. Finally, we derive the exact random-coding exponent for Forney's optimum tradeoff erasure/list decoder, and show that at the erasure regime it coincides with Forney's lower bound and with the simplified decoder exponent, settling a long standing conjecture. 1