Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Preclinical Assessment of Low Doses of Cisplatin in the Management of Acute Promyelocytic Leukemia

Cis-diamminedichloroplatinum (II) (cisplatin) is the most widely used chemotherapeutic drug for various cancers, but its effectiveness is limited by tumor cell resistance and the severe side effects it causes. Since high level of cisplatin is cytotoxic to both cancer and normal cells, the goal of the present study was to explore the effectiveness of prolonged low doses of cisplatin in the management of leukemia. To achieve our goal, human leukemia (HL-60) cells were treated with different doses (1, 2, or 3 µM) of cisplatin for 24, 48, 72 and 96 hours. Cell viability was assessed by MTS assay. Both oxidative stress damage and genotoxicity were estimated by antioxidants, lipid peroxidation, and comet assays, respectively. Data obtained from the MTS assay demonstrated that cisplatin treatment decreased the number of viable tumor cells by direct cell killing or by simply decreasing the rate of cellular proliferation in a dose- and time-dependent fashion. The results of the lipid peroxidation showed a significant increase (p<0.05) of malondialdehyde levels with increasing cisplatin doses. Results obtained from super oxide dismutase and catalase assays showed a gradual increase in antioxidant enzyme activity in cisplatin-treated cells compared to control cells. Data generated from the Comet assay demonstrated a significant dose-dependent increase in genotoxicity with respect to DNA damage as a result of cisplatin treatment. Taken together, our research demonstrated that cisplatin-induced cytotoxicity in HL-60 cells is mediated at least in part via induction of oxidative stress and oxidative damage.
Multiple forms of methyl-accepting chemotaxis proteins distinguished by a factor in addition to multiple methylation

Methyl-accepting chemotaxis proteins are central to both the excitation and adaptation phases of chemotactic behavior. Using null mutations in the genes coding for the two major methyl-accepting proteins (tsr and tar), we identified the gene products among the membrane proteins of Escherichia coli visualized on one- and two-dimensional gels. On two-dimensional gels, both the tsr and the tar proteins appeared as a group of multiple spots arranged in two to four diagonal arrays. The multiplicity of forms could not be completely explained by the previously documented heterogeneity of the methylated proteins resulting from different numbers of methylated glutamyl residues per polypeptide chain. We suggest that there is at least one other way besides extent of methylation in which the polypeptides of a methylated protein can differ.
An Eco-Friendly Ultrasound-Assisted Synthesis of Novel Fluorinated Pyridinium Salts-Based Hydrazones and Antimicrobial and Antitumor Screening

The present work reports an efficient synthesis of fluorinated pyridinium salts-based hydrazones under both conventional and eco-friendly ultrasound procedures. The synthetic approach first involves the preparation of halogenated pyridinium salts through the condensation of isonicotinic acid hydrazide (1) with p-fluorobenzaldehyde (2) followed by the nucleophilic alkylation of the resulting N-(4-fluorobenzylidene)isonicotinohydrazide (3) with a different alkyl iodide. The iodide counteranion of 5–10 was subjected to an anion exchange metathesis reaction in the presence of an excess of the appropriate metal salts to afford a new series of fluorinated pyridinium salts tethering a hydrazone linkage 11–40. Ultrasound irradiation led to higher yields in considerably less time than the conventional methods. The newly synthesized ILs were well-characterized with FT-IR, 1H NMR, 13C NMR, 11B, 19F, 31P and mass spectral analyses. The ILs were also screened for their antimicrobial and antitumor activities. Within the series, the salts tethering fluorinated counter anions 11–13, 21–23, 31–33 and 36–38 were found to be more potent against all bacterial and fungal strains at MIC 4–8 µg/mL. The in vitro antiproliferative activity was also investigated against four tumor cell lines (human ductal breast epithelial tumor T47D, human breast adenocarcinoma MCF-7, human epithelial carcinoma HeLa and human epithelial colorectal adenocarcinoma Caco-2) using the MTT assay, which revealed that promising antitumor activity was exhibited by compounds 5, 12 and 14.
Phylogenetic eigenvectors and nonstationarity in the evolution of theropod dinosaur skulls

Despite the long‐standing interest in nonstationarity of both phenotypic evolution and diversification rates, only recently have methods been developed to study this property. Here, we propose a methodological expansion of the phylogenetic signal‐representation (PSR) curve based on phylogenetic eigenvectors to test for nonstationarity. The PSR curve is built by plotting the coefficients of determination R2 from phylogenetic eigenvector regression (PVR) models increasing the number of phylogenetic eigenvectors against the accumulated eigenvalues. The PSR curve is linear under a stationary model of trait evolution (i.e. the Brownian motion model). Here we describe the distribution of shifts in the models R2 and used a randomization procedure to compare observed and simulated shifts along the PSR curve, which allowed detecting nonstationarity in trait evolution. As an applied example, we show that the main evolutionary pattern of variation in the theropod dinosaur skull was nonstationary, with a significant shift in evolutionary rates in derived oviraptorosaurs, an aberrant group of mostly toothless, crested, birdlike theropods. This result is also supported by a recently proposed Bayesian‐based method (AUTEUR). A significant deviation between Ceratosaurus and Limusaurus terminal branches was also detected. We purport that our new approach is a valuable tool for evolutionary biologists, owing to its simplicity, flexibility and comprehensiveness.
Effect of calf-raise training on rapid force production and balance ability in elderly men

Calf-raise training with the intent to move rapidly, without special equipment or venue, induces an improvement of explosive plantar flexion force, which is attributable to neuromuscular rather than musculotendinous adaptations. Although the training effect on balance performance was trivial, we found a sign of improvement (i.e., neuromuscular adaptations during standing). In conclusion, functional neuromuscular capacity can be enhanced by home-based calf-raise exercise in elderly men, which may protect against mobility loss with aging.
Incoherent training of deep neural networks to de-correlate bottleneck features for speech recognition

Recently, the hybrid model combining deep neural network (DNN) with context-dependent HMMs has achieved some dramatic gains over the conventional GMM/HMM method in many speech recognition tasks. In this paper, we study how to compete with the state-of-the-art DNN/HMM method under the traditional GMM/HMM framework. Instead of using DNN as acoustic model, we use DNN as a front-end bottleneck (BN) feature extraction method to decorrelate long feature vectors concatenated from several consecutive speech frames. More importantly, we have proposed two novel incoherent training methods to explicitly de-correlate BN features in learning of DNN. The first method relies on minimizing coherence of weight matrices in DNN while the second one attempts to minimize correlation coefficients of BN features calculated in each mini-batch data in DNN training. Experimental results on a 70-hr Mandarin transcription task and the 309-hr Switchboard task have shown that the traditional GMM/HMMs using BN features can yield comparable performance as DNN/HMM. The proposed incoherent training can produce 2-3% additional gain over the baseline BN features. At last, the discriminatively trained GMM/HMMs using incoherently trained BN features have consistently surpassed the state-of-the-art DNN/HMMs in all evaluated tasks.
Sleep disturbance in nursing personnel working shifts.

OBJECTIVE The aim of the present study was to explore the factors that are associated with sleep disturbance in nursing personnel working irregular shifts. METHODS A cross-sectional survey was carried out. The Standard Shiftwork Index was used for data collection, which was completed by 365 nurses and nurse assistants working shifts including nights. RESULTS Female nurses and nurses with elevated levels of chronic fatigue were found with greater sleep disturbance between all shifts. Sleep disturbance between most shifts was greater in participants with more than 18 years of working experience and those having family members to look after. No differences were observed in family status, professional training, or circadian characteristics. CONCLUSION Our results suggest that demographics, working characteristics, and family structure are associated with sleep disturbance between shifts in nursing personnel. The modification of shift schedules according to individual needs and preferences is necessary for the reduction of sleeping problems.
New Transforms for JPEG Format

The two-dimensional discrete cosine transform (DCT) can be found in the heart of many image compression algorithms. Specifically, the JPEG format uses a lossy form of compression based on that transform. Since the standardization of the JPEG, many other transforms become practical in lossy data compression. This article aims to analyze the use of these transforms as the DCT replacement in the JPEG compression chain. Each transform is examined for different image datasets and subsequently compared to other transforms using the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR). Our experiments show that an overlapping variation of the DCT, the local cosine transform (LCT), overcame the original block-wise transform at low bitrates. At high bitrates, the discrete wavelet transform employing the Cohen-Daubechies-Feauveau 9/7 wavelet offers about the same compression performance as the DCT.
Solving optimal control problems with state constraints using nonlinear programming and simulation tools

This paper illustrates how nonlinear programming and simulation tools, which are available in packages such as MATLAB and SIMULINK, can easily be used to solve optimal control problems with state- and/or input-dependent inequality constraints. The method presented is illustrated with a model of a single-link manipulator. The method is suitable to be taught to advanced undergraduate and Master's level students in control engineering.
Substrate Profile and Metal-ion Selectivity of Human Divalent Metal-ion Transporter-1*

Background: DMT1 plays essential roles in iron homeostasis, but questions remain about which other metals this transporter serves. Results: DMT1 exhibits substrate selectivity Cd2+ > Fe2+ > Co2+, Mn2+ ≫ Ni2+, VO2+, Zn2+. Conclusion: DMT1 is an iron-preferring transporter that does not transport copper. Significance: These findings will help in predicting the contribution of DMT1 to absorption and cellular uptake of metal ions. Divalent metal-ion transporter-1 (DMT1) is a H+-coupled metal-ion transporter that plays essential roles in iron homeostasis. DMT1 exhibits reactivity (based on evoked currents) with a broad range of metal ions; however, direct measurement of transport is lacking for many of its potential substrates. We performed a comprehensive substrate-profile analysis for human DMT1 expressed in RNA-injected Xenopus oocytes by using radiotracer assays and the continuous measurement of transport by fluorescence with the metal-sensitive PhenGreen SK fluorophore. We provide validation for the use of PhenGreen SK fluorescence quenching as a reporter of cellular metal-ion uptake. We determined metal-ion selectivity under fixed conditions using the voltage clamp. Radiotracer and continuous measurement of transport by fluorescence assays revealed that DMT1 mediates the transport of several metal ions that were ranked in selectivity by using the ratio Imax/K0.5 (determined from evoked currents at −70 mV): Cd2+ > Fe2+ > Co2+, Mn2+ ≫ Zn2+, Ni2+, VO2+. DMT1 expression did not stimulate the transport of Cr2+, Cr3+, Cu+, Cu2+, Fe3+, Ga3+, Hg2+, or VO+. 55Fe2+ transport was competitively inhibited by Co2+ and Mn2+. Zn2+ only weakly inhibited 55Fe2+ transport. Our data reveal that DMT1 selects Fe2+ over its other physiological substrates and provides a basis for predicting the contribution of DMT1 to intestinal, nasal, and pulmonary absorption of metal ions and their cellular uptake in other tissues. Whereas DMT1 is a likely route of entry for the toxic heavy metal cadmium, and may serve the metabolism of cobalt, manganese, and vanadium, we predict that DMT1 should contribute little if at all to the absorption or uptake of zinc. The conclusion in previous reports that copper is a substrate of DMT1 is not supported.
Prevalence and Thrombotic Risk Assessment of Anti-β2 Glycoprotein I Domain I Antibodies: A Systematic Review

Abstract Background To date, the exact prevalence of anti-β2 glycoprotein I domain I (anti-β2GPI-DI) antibodies in patients with antiphospholipid syndrome (APS) and their role when assessing thrombosis risk is uncertain. Objectives To estimate the prevalence of anti-β2GPI-DI in patients with APS and to determine whether anti-β2GPI-DI-positive individuals are at greater risk of thrombosis, as compared with individuals without anti-β2GPI-DI, by systematically reviewing the literature. Methods A detailed literature search was applied a priori to Ovid MEDLINE In-Process and Other Non-Indexed Citation 1986 to present and to abstracts from the European League Against Rheumatism (EULAR) and American College of Rheumatology (ACR)/Association for Rheumatology Health Professionals (ARHP ) Annual Meetings (2011–2015). Results A total of 11 studies, including 1,585 patients, were analyzed. Patients were distributed as follow: 1,218 patients APS (45.4% anti-β2GPI-DI-positive; in more detail: 504 primary APS [55.4% anti-β2GPI-DI-positive], 192 secondary APS [43.2% anti-β2GPI-DI-positive], and 522 not specified), 318 with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE; 26.7% anti-β2GPI-DI-positive), 49 asymptomatic carriers of antiphospholipid antibodies (aPL) (30.6% anti-β2GPI-DI-positive), and 1,859 healthy controls. When considering the five studies eligible for thrombotic risk assessment, four studies found a significant association of anti-β2GPI-DI-positivity with thrombotic events, whereas one study found no predictive correlation with thrombosis (overall odds ratio [OR] for pooled data: 1.99; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.52–2.6; p < 0.0001). Conclusion We report an overall estimated median prevalence of anti-β2GPI-DI antibodies of 44.3% in patients with APS and/or SLE and a significantly higher prevalence among patients with APS compared with SLE alone. Anti-β2GPI-DI antibodies might represent a promising tool when assessing thrombotic risk in patients with APS.
LoRea: A Backscatter Reader for Everyone!

Computational RFID (CRFID) platforms have enabled reconfigurable, battery-free applications for close to a decade. However, several factors have impeded their wide-spread adoption: low communication range, low throughput, and expensive infrastructure - CRFID readers usually cost upwards of $1000. This paper presents LoRea, a backscatter reader that achieves an order of magnitude higher range than existing CRFID readers, while costing a fraction of their price. LoRea achieves this by diverging from existing designs of CRFID readers and more specifically, how self-interference is tackled. LoRea builds on recent work that frequency-shifts backscatter transmissions away from the carrier signal to reduce self- interference. LoRea also decouples the carrier generation from the reader, helping to further decrease self-interference. Decoupling carrier generation also enables the use of deployed infrastructure of smartphones and sensor nodes to provide the carrier signal. Together these methods reduce cost and complexity of the reader. LoRea also purposefully operates at lower bi- trates than recent backscatter systems which enables high sensitivity and longer range. We evaluate LoRea experimentally and find that it achieves a communication range of up to 225 m in line-of-sight scenarios. In indoor environments, where the signal traverses several walls separating the reader and the backscatter tag, LoRea achieves a range of 30 m. These results illustrate how LoRea outperforms state- of-art backscatter systems and CRFID platforms.
Speeded Up Low-Rank Online Metric Learning for Object Tracking

Visual object tracking can be considered as an online procedure to adaptively measure the foreground object similarity itself. However, many previous works usually adopt a fixed metric or offline metric learning to evaluate this dynamic process; even with some online metric learning (OML) trackers, their models often suffer from overfitting issues. To overcome these deficiencies, we propose a self-supervised tracking method that incorporates adaptive metric learning and semisupervised learning into a unified framework. For similarity measurement, we design a new OML model via low-rank constraint to handle overfitting. In particular, we employ the max norm instead of the trace norm used in our previous work. This not only maintains the low-rank property to overcome overfitting, but also reduces the computational complexity from O(n3) to O(n2), such that the new model is more suitable for object tracking. Moreover, by associating the information from stored training templates with unlabeled testing samples, a bilinear graph is defined accordingly to propagate the label of each sample. High-confidence samples are then collected for self-training the model and updating the templates concurrently to handle large scale. Experiments on various benchmark data sets and comparisons to several state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our algorithm.
Reference values for variables of fetal cardiocirculatory dynamics at 11–14 weeks of gestation

Despite the increasing popularity of first‐trimester fetal echocardiography, the evaluation of fetal heart function during this period remains challenging. The parameters of normal cardiac function at 11–14 weeks' gestation are not well defined and appropriate reference values have not yet been established. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the fetal cardiocirculatory dynamics during routine first‐trimester screening and establish cross‐sectional reference ranges for 11–14 weeks' gestation.
Attention-based active 3D point cloud segmentation

In this paper we present a framework for the segmentation of multiple objects from a 3D point cloud. We extend traditional image segmentation techniques into a full 3D representation. The proposed technique relies on a state-of-the-art min-cut framework to perform a fully 3D global multi-class labeling in a principled manner. Thereby, we extend our previous work in which a single object was actively segmented from the background. We also examine several seeding methods to bootstrap the graphical model-based energy minimization and these methods are compared over challenging scenes. All results are generated on real-world data gathered with an active vision robotic head. We present quantitive results over aggregate sets as well as visual results on specific examples.
Contrast Negation and Texture Synthesis Differentially Disrupt Natural Texture Appearance

Natural textures have characteristic image statistics that make them discriminable from unnatural textures. For example, both contrast negation and texture synthesis alter the appearance of natural textures even though each manipulation preserves some features while disrupting others. Here, we examined the extent to which contrast negation and texture synthesis each introduce or remove critical perceptual features for discriminating unnatural textures from natural textures. We find that both manipulations remove information that observers use for distinguishing natural textures from transformed versions of the same patterns, but do so in different ways. Texture synthesis removes information that is relevant for discrimination in both abstract patterns and ecologically valid textures, and we also observe a category-dependent asymmetry for identifying an “oddball” real texture among synthetic distractors. Contrast negation exhibits no such asymmetry, and also does not impact discrimination performance in abstract patterns. We discuss our results in the context of the visual system’s tuning to ecologically relevant patterns and other results describing sensitivity to higher-order statistics in texture patterns.
A SURVEY OF GRACEFUL TREES

In a method for controlling a tire vulcanization of a vulcanizing apparatus, an initial green tire temperature is measured before vulcanization and a tire temperature during vulcanization is estimated on the basis of the thus measured initial tire temperature. In addition, a sum of products of vulcanizing rates derived from the thus estimated tire temperature is calculated so as to stop the tire vulcanization when the sum of products of vulcanizing rates becomes equal to a predetermined value. Therefore, the vulcanizing rate controlling can be performed in an easy and accurate manner without measuring the tire temperature during vulcanization, and thus a trace of a thermometer insertion is not remained on the vulcanized tire surface.
All you need is a good init

Layer-sequential unit-variance (LSUV) initialization - a simple method for weight initialization for deep net learning - is proposed. The method consists of the two steps. First, pre-initialize weights of each convolution or inner-product layer with orthonormal matrices. Second, proceed from the first to the final layer, normalizing the variance of the output of each layer to be equal to one. Experiment with different activation functions (maxout, ReLU-family, tanh) show that the proposed initialization leads to learning of very deep nets that (i) produces networks with test accuracy better or equal to standard methods and (ii) is at least as fast as the complex schemes proposed specifically for very deep nets such as FitNets (Romero et al. (2015)) and Highway (Srivastava et al. (2015)). Performance is evaluated on GoogLeNet, CaffeNet, FitNets and Residual nets and the state-of-the-art, or very close to it, is achieved on the MNIST, CIFAR-10/100 and ImageNet datasets.