Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Continuous Right Thoracic Paravertebral Block Following Bolus Initiation Reduced Postoperative Pain After Right-Lobe Hepatectomy

Background and Objectives We hypothesized that continuous right thoracic paravertebral block, following bolus initiation, decreases opioid consumption after right-lobe hepatectomy in patients receiving patient-controlled intravenous analgesia with sufentanil. Methods Patients undergoing right-lobe hepatectomy with a right thoracic paravertebral catheter placed at T7 30 minutes before surgery were randomly assigned to receive through this catheter either a 10-mL bolus of 0.2% ropivacaine before emergence, followed by a continuous infusion of 6 mL/h for 24 hours (PVB group), or saline at the same scheme of administration (control group). All patients were started on patient-controlled intravenous analgesia with sufentanil in the postanesthesia care unit. The primary outcome measure was total sufentanil consumption during the first 24 postoperative hours. P = 0.05 was considered as significant. For the multiple comparisons of data at 5 different time points, the P value for the 0.05 level of significance was adjusted to 0.01. Results Sixty-six patients were assessed for eligibility, and a PVB catheter was successfully placed for 48 patients. Data were analyzed on 22 patients in group PVB and 22 patients in the control group. The cumulative sufentanil consumption in the PVB group (54.3 ± 12.1 &mgr;g) at 24 postoperative hours was more than 20% less than that of the control group (68.1 ± 9.9 &mgr;g) (P < 0.001). There was also a significant difference in pain scores (numerical rating scale) between groups, where the PVB group had lower scores than did the control group at rest and with coughing for the first 24 hours (P < 0.001). Conclusions Continuous right thoracic paravertebral block, following bolus initiation, has an opioid-sparing effect on sufentanil patient-controlled intravenous analgesia for right-lobe hepatectomy patients and reduces numerical rating scale pain scores at rest and with coughing in the first 24 postoperative hours.
Application of Convolutional Neural Network for Image Classification on Pascal VOC Challenge 2012 dataset

In this project we work on creating a model to classify images for the Pascal VOC Challenge 2012. We use convolutional neural networks trained on a single GPU instance provided by Amazon via their cloud service Amazon Web Services (AWS) to classify images in the Pascal VOC 2012 data set. We train multiple convolutional neural network models and finally settle on the best model which produced a validation accuracy of 85.6% and a testing accuracy of 85.24%.
Serum Biochemical, Histopathology and SEM Analyses of the Effects of the Indian Traditional Herb Wattakaka Volubilis Leaf Extract on Wistar Male Rats

Objectives: The present study investigated the protective effect of Wattakaka (W.) volubilis leaf extract against streptozotocin (STZ)-induced diabetes in rats. Methods: Male Wistar rats were divided into five groups (with six rats in each group) and were fed ad libitum. The rats were fasted for sixteen hours before diabetes was induced by injecting a single dose of 90 mg/kg body weight of STZ in 0.9-percent normal saline through an intraperitoneal route. The five groups were as follows: Group 1: normal control (saline-treated), Group 2: untreated diabetic rats, Groups 3 and 4: diabetic rats treated orally with petroleum ether cold maceration extract (PEME) of W. volubilis(50 and 100 mg/kg body weight), and Group 5: diabetic rats treated orally with metformin (250 mg/kg body weight). All rats received treatment for 21 days. For the STZ-induced diabetic rats, the blood-glucose, α-amylase, total protein and alanine transaminase (ALT) levels were measured on days 7,14 and 21 of the treatment with PEME of W. volubilis and the treatment with metformin. Histopathological changes in the liver were examined with hematoxylin-eosin staining. Morphological changes in the liver were also examined with glutaraldehyde fixation. Results: The treatments with PEME of W. volubilis and with metformin in experimental rats by oral injections for 21 days produced reductions in the levels of serum biochemical markers. Histopathology and scanning electron microscopy results showed that the administrations of PEME of W. volubilis and of metformin suppressed the generation of abnormal liver cells in the STZ-treated rats. Conclusion: These results suggest that both PEME of W. volubilis and metformin have a protective effect against STZ-induced diabetes.
Modeling of spatial navigation inspired by rodent hippocampus

This paper solves spatial navigation task inspired by methods of living organisms, especially by hippocampus that is responsible for spatial navigation. We attempt to model the behavior of a rodent hippocampus by methods of artificial neural networks and reinforcement learning theory. A model of mutual relations among several parts of hippocampal formation is suggested. To investigate the behavior of our model a task similar to the well-known Morris water maze task is considered [8].
Comparative genome analysis delimits a chromosomal domain and identifies key regulatory elements in the α globin cluster

We have cloned, sequenced and annotated segments of DNA spanning the mouse, chicken and pufferfish alpha globin gene clusters and compared them with the corresponding region in man. This has defined a small segment ( approximately 135-155 kb) of synteny and conserved gene order, which may contain all of the elements required to fully regulate alpha globin gene expression from its natural chromosomal environment. Comparing human and mouse sequences using previously described methods failed to identify the known regulatory elements. However, refining these methods by ranking identity scores of non-coding sequences, we found conserved sequences including the previously characterized alpha globin major regulatory element. In chicken and pufferfish, regions that may correspond to this element were found by analysing the distribution of transcription factor binding sites. Regions identified in this way act as strong enhancer elements in expression assays. In addition to delimiting the alpha globin chromosomal domain, this study has enabled us to develop a more sensitive and accurate routine for identifying regulatory elements in the human genome.
A Novel Method of Vessel Segmentation for X-ray Coronary Angiography Images

This paper presents a new automatic region-growing method for vessel segmentation in two-dimensional X-ray coronary angiography images. The method consists of two parts: the feature map extraction based on a novel vesselness function; and the segmentation process which includes automatic seed-point selection, main branch segmentation and vessel detail repair. Both the greyscale and spatial information are extracted for segmentation based on region growing algorithm. The presented method is validated on several clinical X-ray coronary angiography images, and the experimental results show that the method can not only segment large vessels but also small vessels.
State transfer for clear and efficient runtime updates

Dynamic software updating (DSU), the practice of updating software while it executes, is a lively area of research. The DSU approach most prominent in both commercial and research systems is in-place updating, in which patches containing program modifications are loaded into a running process. However, in-place updating suffers from several problems: it requires complex tool support, it may adversely affect the performance of normal execution, it requires challenging reasoning to understand the behavior of an updated program, and it requires extra effort to modify program state to be compatible with an update. This paper presents preliminary work investigating the potential for state transfer updating to address these problems. State transfer updates work by launching a new process running the updated program version and transferring program state from the running process to the updated version. In this paper, we describe the use and implementation of Ekiden, a new state transfer updating library for C/C++ programs. Ekiden seeks to redress the difficulties of in-place updating, and we report on our experience updating VSFTPD using Ekiden. This initial experience suggests that state transfer provides the availability benefits of in-place DSU approaches while addressing many of their shortcomings.
The on-screen water cooler: Effects of televised user-generated comments on cognitive processing, social presence, and viewing experience.

Social television combines traditional television viewing and interactions with social media to create a phenomenon that connects otherwise autonomous viewers through a shared viewing experience. This dissertation explores one type of social television: on-screen usergenerated comments. Although the practice spans multiple television genres, little is known about its effect on viewers’ cognitive processing of the media, perceptions of the social presence of other viewers, or the viewers’ experience of the media. Two experimental studies explored the effects of on-screen user-generated comments on cognitive processing of the media message, the effect of manipulating the content of on-screen user-generated comments and individual differences on perceptions of social presence, and how the perception of social presence affected both the viewing experience (i.e., enjoyment of and engagement in the television show) and cognitive processing. Results revealed that depending on the television material, on-screen usergenerated comments either deter or enhance cognitive processing of the television content. Further, on-screen user-generated comments strengthen perceptions of social presence, while individual differences had little effect on that perception. Lastly, perceptions of social presence had an indirect positive effect on the relationship between on-screen user-generated comments and viewer experiences in one video stimulus, and an indirect negative effect on cognitive processing in the other video stimulus. These findings suggest that, while on-screen usergenerated comments bring the ‘socialness’ back to television watching, they may be beneficial or detrimental based on the producer’s intent for the program.
Turbocharging Mini-Batch K-Means

We propose an accelerated Mini-Batch k-means algorithm which combines three key improvements. The first is a modified center update which results in convergence to a local minimum in fewer iterations. The second is an adaptive increase of batchsize to meet an increasing requirement for centroid accuracy. The third is the inclusion of distance bounds based on the triangle inequality, which are used to eliminate distance calculations along the same lines as Elkan’s algorithm. The combination of the two latter constitutes a very powerful scheme to reuse computation already done over samples until statistical accuracy requires the use of additional data points.
Inferring Short-Range Linkage Information from Sequencing Chromatograms

Direct Sanger sequencing of viral genome populations yields multiple ambiguous sequence positions. It is not straightforward to derive linkage information from sequencing chromatograms, which in turn hampers the correct interpretation of the sequence data. We present a method for determining the variants existing in a viral quasispecies in the case of two nearby ambiguous sequence positions by exploiting the effect of sequence context-dependent incorporation of dideoxynucleotides. The computational model was trained on data from sequencing chromatograms of clonal variants and was evaluated on two test sets of in vitro mixtures. The approach achieved high accuracies in identifying the mixture components of 97.4% on a test set in which the positions to be analyzed are only one base apart from each other, and of 84.5% on a test set in which the ambiguous positions are separated by three bases. In silico experiments suggest two major limitations of our approach in terms of accuracy. First, due to a basic limitation of Sanger sequencing, it is not possible to reliably detect minor variants with a relative frequency of no more than 10%. Second, the model cannot distinguish between mixtures of two or four clonal variants, if one of two sets of linear constraints is fulfilled. Furthermore, the approach requires repetitive sequencing of all variants that might be present in the mixture to be analyzed. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of our method on the two in vitro test sets shows that short-range linkage information of two ambiguous sequence positions can be inferred from Sanger sequencing chromatograms without any further assumptions on the mixture composition. Additionally, our model provides new insights into the established and widely used Sanger sequencing technology. The source code of our method is made available at http://bioinf.mpi-inf.mpg. de/publications/beggel/linkageinformation.zip.
DCT Inspired Feature Transform for Image Retrieval and Reconstruction

Scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) is effective for representing images in computer vision tasks, as one of the most resistant feature descriptions to common image deformations. However, two issues should be addressed: first, feature description based on gradient accumulation is not compact and contains redundancies; second, multiple orientations are often extracted from one local region and therefore produce multiple descriptions, which is not good for memory efficiency. To resolve these two issues, this paper introduces a novel method to determine the dominant orientation for multiple-orientation cases, named discrete cosine transform (DCT) intrinsic orientation, and a new DCT inspired feature transform (DIFT). In each local region, it first computes a unique DCT intrinsic orientation via DCT matrix and rotates the region accordingly, and then describes the rotated region with partial DCT matrix coefficients to produce an optimized low-dimensional descriptor. We test the accuracy and robustness of DIFT on real image matching. Afterward, extensive applications performed on public benchmarks for visual retrieval show that using DCT intrinsic orientation achieves performance on a par with SIFT, but with only 60% of its features; replacing the SIFT description with DIFT reduces dimensions from 128 to 32 and improves precision. Image reconstruction resulting from DIFT is presented to show another of its advantages over SIFT.
Hot Spot Congestion Relief in Cellular Network

Popular areas, called hot spots, in cellular network experience continuous traffic congestion which needs a dynamic approach to deal with. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a dynamic allocation scheme that ensures guaranteed channel to various traffic to maintain their quality of service (QoS). Two traffic types are considered to compete for access to the limited channels available in the cell: Real-time and non-real-time calls. These calls are further categorized as new real-time and new non-real-time calls or real-time handoff and non-real-time handoff calls. Two different queues were used to take care of real-time handoff call and non-real-time handoff calls respectively. Calls in the queues are served based on first come first serve algorithm. The scheme was evaluated to determine its effectiveness using extensive simulation runs. The results confirms the optimality of the scheme when both calls are queued.
A deep cluster survey in Chandra archival data. First results

I present the first results of a search for clusters of galaxies in Chandra ACIS pointed observations at high galactic latitude with exposure times larger than 10 ks. The survey is being carried out using the Voronoi Tessellation and Percolation technique, which is particularly suited for the detection and accurate quantification of extended and/or low surface brightness emission in X-ray imaging observations. A new catalogue of 36 cluster candidates has been created from 5.55 deg 2 of surveyed area. Five of these candidates have already been associated to visible enhancements of the projected galaxy distribution in low deepness DSS-II fields and are probably low-to moderate redshift systems. Three of the candidates have been identified in previous ROSAT-based surveys. I show that a significative fraction (30-40%) of the candidate clusters are probably intermediate to high redshift systems. In this paper I publish the catalogue of these first candidate clusters. I also derive the number counts of clusters and compare it with the results of deep ROSAT-based cluster surveys.
A frequency-based and a poisson-based definition of the probability of being informative

This paper reports on theoretical investigations about the assumptions underlying the inverse document frequency (idf). We show that an intuitive idf-based probability function for the probability of a term being informative assumes disjoint document events. By assuming documents to be independent rather than disjoint, we arrive at a Poisson-based probability of being informative. The framework is useful for understanding and deciding the parameter estimation and combination in probabilistic retrieval models.
Exploring Alcohol’s Effects on Liver Function

A large proportion of heavy drinkers develop serious alcoholic liver disease. Susceptibility to alcoholic hepatitis and cirrhosis appears to be influenced by heredity, gender, diet, and co-occurring liver illness. Most alcoholic liver damage is attributed to alcohol metabolism. Liver injury may be caused by direct toxicity of metabolic by-products of alcohol as well as by inflammation induced by these byproducts. Exposure of liver cells to bacterial toxins may contribute to liver disease. Escalating liver injury can lead to fibrosis and, ultimately, to cirrhosis. Increased understanding of the mechanisms of liver injury has led to innovative treatments for alcoholic liver disease, including the use of corticosteroids, antioxidants, antibiotics, and certain polyunsaturated fats.
Model of Brand Choice with a No-Purchase Option Calibrated to Scanner-Panel Data

In usual practice, researchers specify and estimate brand-choice models from purchase data, ignoring observations in which category incidence does not occur (i.e., no-purchase observations). This practice can be problematic if there are unobservable factors that affect the no-purchase and the brand-choice decisions. When such a correlation exists, it is important to model simultaneously the no-purchase and the brand-choice decisions. The authors propose a model suitable for scanner-panel data in which the no-purchase decision depends on the price, feature, and display of each brand in the category and on household stock of inventory. They link the no-purchase model to the brand-choice outcome through marketing-mix covariates and through unobservables that affect both outcomes. The authors assume that model parameters are heterogeneous across households and allow for a flexible correlation structure between the coefficients in the no-purchase model and those in the brand-choice model. The model formulation is more general than what is possible from either a nested logit model or a translog utility model and from models in which the no-purchase outcome is an additional outcome with the deterministic component of its utility set equal to zero. The authors estimate the proposed model using Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo estimation methods. They then apply the estimation methods to scanner-panel data on the cola product category and compare the results with those from the widely used nested logit model.
Elliptic genera, torus manifolds and multi-fans

The rigidity theorem of Witten-Bott-Taubes-Hirzebruch tells us that, if the circle group acts on a closed almost complex (or more generally unitary) manifold whose first Chern class is divisible by a positive integer N greater than 1, then its equivariant elliptic genus of level N is rigid. Applying this to a non-singular compact toric variety, we see that its elliptic genus of level N is rigid if its first Chern class is divisible by N. But, using a vanishing theorem of Hirzebruch, we can show moreover that the genus actually vanishes. In this note we shall extend this result to torus manifolds. In fact, a non-singular complete multi-fan is associated with a torus manifold, and rigidity and vanishing of elliptic genus of level N can be formulated and proved for non-singular complete multi-fans. Some applications on compact non-singular toric varieties with the first Chern class divisible by a large positive integer are given.
Gravitational radiation from infall into a black hole: Regularization of the Teukolsky equation

The Teukolsky equation has long been known to lead to divergent integrals when it is used to calculate the gravitational radiation emitted when a test mass falls into a black hole from infinity. Two methods have been used in the past to remove those divergent integrals. In the first, integrations by parts are carried out, and the infinite boundary terms are simply discarded. In the second, the Teukolsky equation is transformed into another equation which does not lead to divergent integrals. The purpose of this paper is to show that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the Teukolsky equation when dealing with non-compact source terms, and that the divergent integrals result simply from an incorrect choice of Green's function. In this paper, regularization of the Teukolsky equation is carried out in an entirely natural way which does not involve modifying the equation.
The Practical Application of a Decidable Access Model

While the safety of a number of access models has been formally established, few of these models are reflected in real systems. Most currently deployed commodity systems are based on access models that have been formally proven either unsafe or undecidable. Models that are decidable and safe, such as take-grant, fail to model issues that are needed to account for safety and security in capability-based operating systems. This paper introduces diminish, a new fundamental rights weakening operation, and diminishtake, a new access model based on take-grant that incorporates this operation and models indirect reference. As with the take-grant model, safety in diminish-take is decidable in linear time. In certain cases it is decidable in constant time using only local information. These cases prove particularly important for enforcement of the *-property and multi-level security in capability-based operating systems. We also describe the relationship between the model and a real system: EROS. EROS is a fast capability system for commodity processors whose higher-level security properties are based on the model described here. We show that the diminish operation is a critical underpinning for an efficient realization of several design patterns in EROS, including confinement, protected subsystems, and user-supplied memory managers.
An efficient non-enumerative method to estimate path delay fault coverage

A method for estimating the coverage of path delay faults of a given test set, without enumerating paths, is proposed. The method is polynomial in the number of lines in the circuit, and thus allows circuits with large numbers of paths to be considered under the path delay fault model. Several levels of approximation, with increasing accuracy and increasing polynomial complexity, are proposed. Experimental results to show the effectiveness and accuracy of the estimate in evaluating the path delay fault coverage are presented. Combining this nonenumerative estimation method with a test generation method for path delay faults would yield a cost effective method to consider path delay faults in large circuits, which are beyond the capabilities of existing test generation and fault simulation procedures that are based on enumeration of paths. <<ETX>>