Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluating the microbial pattern of periprosthetic joint infections of the hip and knee

Purpose. Periprosthetic joint infection (PJI) is a devastating complication that leads to enormous economic and health care complaints from affected patients. The aim of this study is to identify the causative pathogens responsible for PJI, evaluate temporal trends concerning the pathogen pattern and identify potential risk factors for PJI. Methodology. This was a retrospective study analysing a total of 937 patients suffering PJI of the hip or knee joint between 2003 and 2011. Results. In total, 394 patients (42.0 %) with total knee arthroplasty (TKA), 477 patients (50.9 %) with total hip arthroplasty (THA) and 64 patients (6.8 %) receiving a dual‐head prosthesis had to be hospitalised due to PJI. In two cases (0.2 %), a simultaneous infection of TKA and THA occurred. The mean age of the study cohort was 70.85±11.68 years. The mean body mass index (BMI) was 28.53±5.7. According to the Charlson comorbidity index, 2.99 % of the patients were classified as severity Grade 1, 13.98 % Grade 2, 40.02 % Grade 3 and 43.0 % Grade 4. Staphylococcus aureus (MSSA), methicillin‐resistant Staphylococcus epidermidis (MRSE), methicillin‐resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), coagulase‐negative Staphylococcus (CoNS), Streptococcus, and Enterococcus were the pathogens mainly responsible. An increase in high‐resistance pathogens, such as MRSE, extended‐spectrum beta‐lactamase bacteria (ESBL), ampicillin‐resistant Enterococcus, Acinetobacter spp. and vancomycin‐resistant Enterococcus (VRE), was found during the study period. Only MRSA showed a declining tendency in a regression model. Conclusion. Patients suffering PJI present a certain risk profile with many comorbidities, e.g. high age and obesity. The observed microbiological pattern demonstrates the rise of high‐resistance pathogens.
Dense Bynet: Residual Dense Network for Image Super Resolution

This paper proposes a method, Dense ByNet, for single image super-resolution based on a convolutional neural network (CNN). The main innovation is a new architecture that combines several CNN design choices. Using a residual network as a basis, it introduces dense connections inside residual blocks, significantly reducing the number of parameters. Second, we apply dilation convolutions to increase the spatial context. Lastly, we propose modifications to the activation and cost functions. We evaluate the method on benchmark datasets and show that it achieves state-of-the-art results over multiple upscaling factors in terms of peak SNR and structural similarity (SSIM).
Prosodic Focus Acquisition in French Early Cochlear Implanted Children

Cochlear implanted (CI) children display an array of speech production and perception problems. No study has evaluated the specific use of prosody regarding information structure in the discourse, in French speaking early CI children. This study aims to evaluate prosody production in these children, to determine whether they show prosodic effect on word duration. We conducted a cross-sectional study of 10 prelingually hearing impaired French speaking children (4-7 years old), without comorbidities, CI before the age of 18 months between 2009 and 2012. The speech production task consisted in playing a computer-based semi-structured game, where children interacted with their caregiver. Results were interpreted according to both chronological age and hearing age (HA) . In our series, 6- and 7-year old children (HA<6.2 years) showed stronger lengthening of the focused word in the corrective narrow focus condition than in the contrastive narrow focus which in turn was stronger than in broad focus condition. Only 7-year old children adopted a strategy similar to that of adults, lengthening the end-phrase adjective to preserve the typical phrasing pattern of French. This study shows for the first time that early CI children are able to acquire important intonation structure features comparable to adult patterns.
CO-tip manipulation using repulsive interactions

Understanding the interactions between a tip apex and a target atom or molecule is crucial for the manipulation of individual molecules with precise control by using scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) and atomic force microscopy. Herein, we demonstrate the manipulation of target CO molecules on a Cu(111) substrate using a CO-functionalized W tip with atomic-scale accuracy. All experiments were performed in a home-built ultra-high vacuum STM system at 5 K. The CO-tip was fabricated by picking up a single CO molecule from a Cu(111) surface. In contrast to a metal tip, repulsive interactions occur between the CO-tip and the target CO molecule. This repulsive interaction promises perfect lateral hopping without any vertical hopping. Hopping events were directly monitored as sudden current drops in the simultaneously measured I–z curves. A larger barrier height between the CO-tip and the target CO (∼9.5 eV) was found from the slope of the I–z curve, which decreases the electron tunnelling probability between the tip and sample. Therefore, electron-driven manipulation cannot be a major trigger for the CO–CO repulsive manipulation. The CO-tip is able to manipulate only the target CO molecule, even when another CO molecule was located ∼0.5 nm away. Statistical measurements revealed that the nearest neighbour atop site is the energetically stable position after hopping. However, if the CO target has another CO molecule in a neighbouring position (denoted as a ‘pair’), the target CO hops more than twice as far. This means that the CO-tip experiences a larger repulsive interaction from the pair. These observations of CO-tip manipulation are useful for the design of two-dimensional artificial molecular networks as well as for developing a better understanding of catalytic oxidation processes.
Impact of differences in nutritional quality of wingless and winged aphids on parasitoid fitness

ABSTRACT Winged aphids are described as hosts of lesser quality for parasitoids because a part of their resources is used to produce wings and associated muscles during their development. Host lipid content is particularly important for parasitoid larvae as they lack lipogenesis and therefore rely entirely on the host for this resource. The goal of this study was to determine to what extent winged and wingless aphids differ from a nutritional point of view and whether these differences impact parasitoid fitness, notably the lipid content. We analysed the energetic budget (proteins, lipids and carbohydrates) of aphids of different ages (third instars, fourth instars and adults) according to the morph (winged or wingless). We also compared fitness indicators for parasitoids emerging from winged and wingless aphids (third and fourth instars). We found that in third instars, parasitoids are able to inhibit wing development whereas this is not the case in fourth instars. Both winged instars allow the production of heavier and fattier parasitoids. The presence of wings in aphids seems to have little effect on the fitness of emerging parasitoids and did not modify female choice for oviposition. Finally, we demonstrate that Aphidius colemani, used as a biological control agent, is able to parasitize wingless as well as winged Myzus persicae, at least in the juvenile stages. If the parasitism occurs in third instars, the parasitoid will prevent the aphid from flying, which could in turn reduce virus transmission. Summary: Developing winged aphids should not be considered as low-quality hosts as they bring a higher fitness to parasitoids.
Audio-Visual Prediction of Head-Nod and Turn-Taking Events in Dyadic Interactions

Head-nods and turn-taking both signiﬁcantly contribute conversational dynamics in dyadic interactions. Timely prediction and use of these events is quite valuable for dialog management systems in human-robot interaction. In this study, we present an audio-visual prediction framework for the head-nod and turn-taking events that can also be utilized in real-time systems. Prediction systems based on Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Networks (LSTM-RNN) are trained on human-human conversational data. Uni-modal and multi-modal classiﬁcation performances of head-nod and turn-taking events are reported over the IEMOCAP dataset.
The Influence of Side Effect Information Framing on Nocebo Effects.

BACKGROUND One contributing factor to the development of nocebo effects is information provided about possible side effects. However, nondisclosure of information can be problematic. PURPOSE We assessed whether positively framed side effect information (highlighting likelihood of not experiencing side effects) can reduce nocebo effects compared to negatively framed information (highlighting likelihood of experiencing side effects). METHODS One hundred twelve participants took part in research ostensibly assessing the influence of benzodiazepines (actually sham capsules) on anxiety. Participants were randomized to receive a sham capsule with positively or negatively framed information about four side effects, or a no-treatment control condition. Side effect expectations were assessed after information provision. Framed side effects and other unmentioned symptoms were assessed during the session and 24-hr follow-up. RESULTS Nocebo effects occurred in symptoms presented as side effects (regardless of framing) during the study session and follow-up (ps < .003). At follow-up, there was also a nocebo effect in other unmentioned symptoms (p = .018). Positive framing reduced side effect symptoms compared with negative framing during the study session (p = .037), but this effect was no longer present at follow-up (p = .53). Side effect expectations did not differ between the framing conditions (p = .14). CONCLUSIONS Positive framing reduced side effects short-term, but not at follow-up. Expectations did not differ between negative and positive framing. Nocebo effects appeared to generalize to other unmentioned symptoms over a 24-hr period. Further research is needed to determine whether the initial impact of positive framing can be maintained over time.
Metformin Decreases Risk of Tuberculosis Infection in Type 2 Diabetes Patients

Background: Metformin may show an antibiotic effect, but whether its use can reduce the risk of tuberculosis infection has rarely been investigated in population-based studies. Methods: This is a retrospective cohort analysis of the Taiwan’s National Health Insurance database. New-onset type 2 diabetes patients, 148,468 ever users and 15,799 never users of metformin, identified during 1999–2005 were followed up until 31 December 2011 for the incidence of tuberculosis infection. Hazard ratios were estimated by Cox regression incorporated with the inverse probability of treatment weighting using propensity score. Results: A total of 360 never users and 1976 ever users developed a tuberculosis infection with respective incidence of 510.91 and 282.94 per 100,000 person–years. The overall hazard ratio of presenting a tuberculosis infection among metformin ever users in respect to never users was 0.552 (95% confidence interval: 0.493–0.617). The hazard ratios for the first (<27.10 months), second (27.10–58.27 months), and third (>58.27 months) tertile of cumulative duration of metformin therapy were 1.116 (0.989–1.261), 0.543 (0.478–0.618), and 0.200 (0.171–0.233), respectively; and were 1.037 (0.918–1.173), 0.533 (0.469–0.606), and 0.249 (0.215–0.288), respectively, for the first (<817,000 mg), second (817,000–2,047,180 mg), and third (>2,047,180 mg) tertile of cumulative doses of metformin. The findings were consistent when analyses were restricted to pulmonary tuberculosis. Additionally, regular users of metformin tended to have greater benefit than irregular users. Conclusions: Metformin use is associated with a reduced risk of tuberculosis infection in a dose–response pattern in type 2 diabetes patients.
Assessing the Quality of Geospatial Linked Data - Experiences from Ordnance Survey Ireland (OSi)

Ordnance Survey Ireland (OSi) is Ireland’s national mapping agency that is responsible for the digitisation of the island’s infrastructure in terms of mapping. Generating data from various sensors (e.g. spatial sensors), OSi build its knowledge in the Prime2 framework, a subset of which is transformed into geo-Linked Data. In this paper we discuss how the quality of the generated sematic data fares against datasets in the LOD cloud. We set up Luzzu, a scalable Linked Data quality assessment framework, in the OSi pipeline to continuously assess produced data in order to tackle any quality problems prior to publishing.
Domain Adaptation Using Factorized Hidden Layer for Robust Automatic Speech Recognition

Domain robustness is a challenging problem for automatic speech recognition (ASR). In this paper, we consider speech data collected for different applications as separate domains and investigate the robustness of acoustic models trained on multi-domain data on unseen domains. Speciﬁcally, we use Factor-ized Hidden Layer (FHL) as a compact low-rank representation to adapt a multi-domain ASR system to unseen domains. Experimental results on two unseen domains show that FHL is a more effective adaptation method compared to selectively ﬁne-tuning part of the network, without dramatically increasing the model parameters. Furthermore, we found that using singular value decomposition to initialize the low-rank bases of an FHL model leads to a faster convergence and improved performance.
SSF-CNN: Spatial and Spectral Fusion with CNN for Hyperspectral Image Super-Resolution

Fusing a low-resolution hyperspectral image with the corresponding high-resolution RGB image to obtain a high-resolution hyperspectral image is usually solved as an optimization problem with prior-knowledge such as sparsity representation and spectral physical properties as constraints, which have limited applicability. Deep convolutional neural network extracts more comprehensive features and is proved to be effective in upsampling RGB images. However, directly applying CNNs to upsample either the spatial or spectral dimension alone may not produce pleasing results due to the neglect of complementary information from both low resolution hyper spectral and high resolution RGB images. This paper proposes two types of novel CNN architectures to take advantages of spatial and spectral fusion for hyperspectral image superresolution. Experiment results on benchmark datasets validate that the proposed spatial and spectral fusion CNNs outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and baseline CNN architectures in both quantitative values and visual qualities
Nerve repair and regeneration: Biological tubulization limits and future perspectives

Peripheral nerve physiology and regeneration has been observed and investigated in literature but surgical applications to reconstruct and restore motor or sensory functions are still in a developmental phase. The peripheral nerve progresses slowly and incompletely compared with other tissues, it may provoke separations of the nerve stumps and the axonal proliferation of the conduits is restricted to 30 mm. Recent surgical attempts to treat proximal nerve injures include direct nerve restoration, transfer, and autografting measures with favorable results. Moreover, studies are suggesting that engineering tissue tubes maybe as effective as nerve grafting to restore separations of more than 4 cm toward optimal nerve repair.
KFL1 Gene Variants in α-Thalassemia Individuals with Increased Fetal Hemoglobin in a Chinese Population

Abstract Krüppel-like factor 1 (KLF1) is a pleiotropic erythroid transcription factor that is a regulator of definitive erythropoiesis. The aim of this study was to detect KLF1 gene variants in α-thalassemia (α-thal) carriers with an increased Hb F level in a Chinese population, and determine the changes of hematological parameters as a result of interactions between KLF1 gene mutations and α-thal. Subjects with α-thal and Hb F levels of ≥1.0% were selected for further investigation. Direct sequencing was used to detect KLF1 gene mutations. Hematological parameters of subjects with α-thal and concomitant KLF1 gene mutations and those with α-thal alone were compared. The KLF1 gene variants were detected in 46 of 275 (16.7%) individuals with α-thal and Hb F levels of ≥1.0%. The detection rate of KLF1 gene mutations rose correspondingly when the Hb F level increased. For α0-thal carriers, significantly lower mean corpuscular volume (MCV) and mean corpuscular hemoglobin (Hb) (MCH) values were observed in KLF1 gene mutation-positive carriers than that in KLF1 gene mutation-free carriers; conversely, significantly higher Hb A2 and Hb F levels were observed in the former condition rather than in the latter condition. The results of this study indicate that KLF1 gene variants are common in Chinese subjects with α-thal and increased Hb F levels, and KLF1 gene mutations decreased the red blood cell (RBC) indices in α-thal carriers as that in normal adults.
Novel Group of AChE Reactivators—Synthesis, In Vitro Reactivation and Molecular Docking Study

The acetylcholinesterase (AChE) reactivators (e.g., obidoxime, asoxime) became an essential part of organophosphorus (OP) poisoning treatment, together with atropine and diazepam. They are referred to as a causal treatment of OP poisoning, because they are able to split the OP moiety from AChE active site and thus renew its function. In this approach, fifteen novel AChE reactivators were determined. Their molecular design originated from former K-oxime compounds K048 and K074 with remaining oxime part of the molecule and modified part with heteroarenium moiety. The novel compounds were prepared, evaluated in vitro on human AChE (HssAChE) inhibited by tabun, paraoxon, methylparaoxon or DFP and compared to commercial HssAChE reactivators (pralidoxime, methoxime, trimedoxime, obidoxime, asoxime) or previously prepared compounds (K048, K074, K075, K203). Some of presented oxime reactivators showed promising ability to reactivate HssAChE comparable or higher than the used standards. The molecular modelling study was performed with one compound that presented the ability to reactivate GA-inhibited HssAChE. The SAR features concerning the heteroarenium part of the reactivator’s molecule are described.
Deep Asymmetric Networks with a Set of Node-wise Variant Activation Functions

This work presents deep asymmetric networks with a set of node-wise variant activation functions. The nodes' sensitivities are affected by activation function selections such that the nodes with smaller indices become increasingly more sensitive. As a result, features learned by the nodes are sorted by the node indices in the order of their importance. Asymmetric networks not only learn input features but also the importance of those features. Nodes of lesser importance in asymmetric networks can be pruned to reduce the complexity of the networks, and the pruned networks can be retrained without incurring performance losses. We validate the feature-sorting property using both shallow and deep asymmetric networks as well as deep asymmetric networks transferred from famous networks.
Categorical vs Dimensional Perception of Italian Emotional Speech

Culture and measurement strategies are inﬂuential factors when evaluating the perception of emotion in speech. However, multilingual databases suitable for such a study are missing, and there is no agreement on the most suitable emotional model. To address this gap, we present EmoFilm , a new multilingual emotional speech corpus, consisting of 1115 English, Spanish, and Italian emotional utterances extracted from 43 ﬁlms and 207 speakers. We have performed a within-culture categorical vs dimensional perceptual evaluation, employing 225 native Italian listeners, who evaluated the Italian section of the database with the emotional states of anger, sadness, happiness, fear, and contempt. The aim of this study is to assess whether the emotional model (categorical or dimensional), taken as reference for measurement, inﬂuences a listener’s perception of emotional speech, and—to what extent—both models are complementary or not. We show that the measurement strategy chosen does inﬂuence a listener’s response, especially for some emotions, e.g., contempt. The confusion patterns typical of a categorical evaluation are not always mirrored by the dimensional assessment.
Attentional bias to pain-related information: a meta-analysis of dot-probe studies

ABSTRACT Studies investigating attentional biases towards pain information vary widely in both design and results. The aim of this meta-analysis was to determine the degree to which attentional biases towards pain occur when measured with the dot-probe task. A total of 2168 references were screened, resulting in a final sample of 4466 participants from 52 articles. Participants were grouped according to pain experience: chronic pain, acute pain, anticipating experimental/procedural pain, social concern for pain, or healthy people. In general, results revealed a significant, but small bias towards pain words (d = 0.136), and pain pictures (d = 0.110) in chronic pain patients, but not in those with acute pain, those anticipating pain, or healthy people. Follow-up analyses revealed an attentional bias towards sensory pain words in the chronic pain group (d = 0.198), and the acute pain group (d = 0.303), but not other groups. In contrast, attentional biases towards affective pain stimuli were not significant for any pain groups. This meta-analysis found support for attentional biases towards sensory pain stimuli in patients with chronic pain in comparison to healthy individuals across a range of common parameters. Future researchers need to consider task design when seeking to optimally measure pain-relevant attentional biases.
Body image is more negative in patients with chronic low back pain than in patients with subacute low back pain and healthy controls

Abstract Background and aims Body image as an increasing research field has been integrated into pain research within the last years. However, research on cognitive-affective dimensions of body image dependent on different pain groups like acute/subacute and chronic pain patients, and healthy controls is still lacking. Therefore, this study aims to explore three dimensions of body image, namely self-acceptance, physical efficacy, and health in patients with low back pain and healthy controls. The present study is the first to distinguish between patients with low back pain in different stages of pain with regard to the concept of body image. In a second step we investigated the differences in exercise frequency between the three groups. Methods Seventy seven patients (53.2% female) suffering from low back pain and 57 healthy controls (42.1% female) filled in a battery of questionnaires in terms of body image, pain parameters and exercise frequency. Results Main results indicate first that patients suffering from chronic low back pain revealed a more negative body image in all three body image-dimensions than healthy controls. Second, patients suffering from subacute pain revealed a more negative body image of physical efficacy compared to the healthy controls. Conclusions Our results suggest that body image is relevant for the treatment of low back pain, because patients suffering from low back pain revealed a more negative body image than healthy controls. Implications To investigate the cognitive-affective dimensions of body image in different patient groups suffering from low back pain seems to be an important aspect for future research to improve therapy options and prevention of low back pain. Future research should also focus on improvements or on positive aspects of body image in patients with low back pain.