Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Challenges With the Development of Biomaterials for Sustainable Tissue Engineering

The field of tissue engineering has tantalizingly offered the possibility of regenerating new tissue in order to treat a multitude of diseases and conditions within the human body. Nevertheless, in spite of significant progress with in vitro and small animal studies, progress toward realizing the clinical and commercial endpoints has been slow and many would argue that ultimate goals, especially in treating those conditions which, as yet, do not have acceptable conventional therapies, may never be reached because of flawed scientific rationale. In other words, sustainable tissue engineering may not be achievable with current approaches. One of the major factors here is the choice of biomaterial that is intended, through its use as a “scaffold,” to guide the regeneration process. For many years, effective specifications for these biomaterials have not been well-articulated, and the requirements for biodegradability and prior FDA approval for use in medical devices, have dominated material selection processes. This essay argues that these considerations are not only wrong in principle but counter-productive in practice. Materials, such as many synthetic bioabsorbable polymers, which are designed to have no biological activity that could stimulate target cells to express new and appropriate tissue, will not be effective. It is argued here that a traditional ‘scaffold’ represents the wrong approach, and that tissue-engineering templates that are designed to replicate the niche, or microenvironment, of these target cells are much more likely to succeed.
Semantics-Aligned Representation Learning for Person Re-identification

Person re-identification (reID) aims to match person images to retrieve the ones with the same identity. This is a challenging task, as the images to be matched are generally semantically misaligned due to the diversity of human poses and capture viewpoints, incompleteness of the visible bodies (due to occlusion), etc. In this paper, we propose a framework that drives the reID network to learn semantics-aligned feature representation through delicate supervision designs. Specifically, we build a Semantics Aligning Network (SAN) which consists of a base network as encoder (SA-Enc) for re-ID, and a decoder (SA-Dec) for reconstructing/regressing the densely semantics aligned full texture image. We jointly train the SAN under the supervisions of person re-identification and aligned texture generation. Moreover, at the decoder, besides the reconstruction loss, we add Triplet ReID constraints over the feature maps as the perceptual losses. The decoder is discarded in the inference and thus our scheme is computationally efficient. Ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our design. We achieve the state-of-the-art performances on the benchmark datasets CUHK03, Market1501, MSMT17, and the partial person reID dataset Partial REID. Code for our proposed method is available at: this https URL.
Laryngeal Preservation Strategies in Locally Advanced Laryngeal and Hypopharyngeal Cancers

For long, the treatment of locoregionally advanced laryngeal and hypopharyngeal squamous cell cancers (SCC) consisted of either total laryngectomy (TL) or definitive radiotherapy (RT). The development of induction cisplatin plus 5-fluorouracil (PF) and the correlation between chemosensitivity and radiosensitivity in previously untreated patients opened a new era of treatment aiming at laryngeal preservation (LP). The fundamental concept was to employ induction PF in order to select patients for subsequent treatment with either TL or RT according to tumor response to PF. The first two trials (VALGSG for laryngeal SCC and EORTC 24891 for hypopharyngeal SCC) concluded that such an approach could preserve nearly 60% of larynx without deleterious impact on survival. The EORTC 24954 trial compared 4 cycles of induction PF followed by RT in good responders vs. alternating PF-RT in laryngeal and hypopharyngeal SCC. There was no significant difference in 5-year overall survival with a functional larynx between the two arms (31 vs. 35%). The GORTEC 2000-01 trial compared induction PF to induction PF plus docetaxel (TPF) both followed by RT in good responders in larynx and hypopharynx SCC. The 5-year LP was significantly higher in the TPF arm (60 vs. 39%) but without a difference in survival. The RTOG 91-11 trial compared induction PF followed by RT in good responders vs. concurrent chemoradiotherapy (chemo-RT) vs. RT alone in laryngeal SCC. There was no significant difference in 5-year laryngectomy-free survival between the patients treated with induction chemotherapy (44%) vs. those treated with chemo-RT (47%), both being superior to RT alone (34%). At 5 years, LP was superior with chemo-RT: 84 vs. 71% with induction PF. Two phase II trials explored the role of cetuximab (E) in LP in laryngeal and hypopharyngeal SCC. The TREMPLIN trial compared RT+E or chemo-RT (RT + P) after TPF. The DeLOS-II trial compared TPE followed by RT+E vs. TP followed by RT. However, these trials failed to indicate an advantage for the incorporation of E in the treatment paradigm. To date, two approaches for LP have been validated: induction TPF followed by RT for laryngeal and hypopharyngeal SCC and concurrent chemo-RT for laryngeal SCC. An ongoing trial (SALTORL) is comparing these two approaches, induction TPF and chemo-RT, in laryngeal/ hypopharyngeal SCC.
Deep multi-class learning from label proportions

We propose a learning algorithm capable of learning from label proportions instead of direct data labels. In this scenario, our data are arranged into various bags of a certain size, and only the proportions of each label within a given bag are known. This is a common situation in cases where per-data labeling is lengthy, but a more general label is easily accessible. Several approaches have been proposed to learn in this setting with linear models in the multiclass setting, or with nonlinear models in the binary classification setting. Here we investigate the more general nonlinear multiclass setting, and compare two differentiable loss functions to train end-to-end deep neural networks from bags with label proportions. We illustrate the relevance of our methods on an image classification benchmark, and demonstrate the possibility to learn accurate image classifiers from bags of images.
Cross-Cultural Measurement Invariance of Scales Assessing Stigma and Attitude to Seeking Professional Psychological Help

There has been a growing interest in research on stigma and attitude toward psychotherapy, and these variables are expected to show cross-cultural variations. The Stigma Scale for Receiving Psychological Help (SSRPH), the Self-Stigma of Seeking Help (SSOSH) and the Inventory of Attitudes to Seeking Mental Health Services (IASMHS) are widely used and this study examined their measurement invariance as this is a prerequisite for use in cross-cultural studies. Data were collected online from groups of Chinese students in China (n = 413) and German students in Germany (n = 416). Confirmatory factor analyses in single samples and measurement invariance testing in a multi-group framework were conducted to test the cross-group equivalence. Findings demonstrate that the SSRPH and the modified model of IASMHS had partial scalar measurement invariance, but the SSOSH showed cultural variance in factor structure. Comparisons of latent means indicated no differences between the two groups with respect to the social stigma attached to professional psychological help, but a higher psychological openness of Chinese students toward help-seeking. Findings are discussed from intercultural and methodological perspectives. In the future, intercultural cooperation should be promoted in order to develop a cross-culturally valid concept of stigma against psychological help that could be used as the basis for intercultural comparison and developing interventions to reduce stigma.
Beyond the Concept of Winter-Summer Leaves of Mediterranean Seasonal Dimorphic Species

One of the dominant growth forms in Mediterranean ecosystems is represented by seasonally dimorphic (semi-deciduous) species. Seasonal dimorphism has been long considered as a key adaptation to the seasonality of the Mediterranean type of climate for shrub species inhabiting the Mediterranean Basin (batha, phrygana andmaquis shrublands, Orshan, 1964;Margaris, 1975, 1977; Margaris et al., 1984; Christodoulakis et al., 1990; Gratani and Crescente, 1997; Kyparissis et al., 1997; Díaz Barradas et al., 1999), Californian chaparral (Westman, 1981;Mooney andMiller, 1985), Chilean matorral (Montenegro et al., 1979) and South African Cape karroid shrublands (Westman, 1981). The main feature of seasonal dimorphic species is the development of two well-defined leaf cohorts during a growing season, the so-called “winter” and “summer” leaves (Westman, 1981, Nilsen et al., 1986; Aronne and De Micco, 2001), hereafter referred as WL and SL, respectively. Nevertheless, there is evidence that seasonal dimorphism can be flexible (Orshan and Zand, 1962; Orshan, 1964; Westman, 1981; Kyparissis et al., 1997; Palacio et al., 2006, 2008; Puglielli et al., 2017, in press; Puglielli and Varone, 2018), so that the extent of differences between WL and SL, as well as the number of cohorts during a growing season, depend on species and environmental conditions at a given site. For instance, the existence of an intermediate step between WL and SL (generally called spring leaves) has been suggested in previous studies on seasonal dimorphic species (e.g., Palacio et al., 2006; de Dato et al., 2013; Puglielli et al., in press). At any rate, the flexibility of seasonal dimorphism can result in leaves to be formed under different prevailing environmental conditions due to the seasonality of the Mediterranean climate and significant changes in leaf traits are expected between leaves formed in different periods during a given growing season (Morales et al., 2014; Niinemets, 2014). The presence of multiple leaf cohorts during a growing season should be reflected by a great degree of intraindividual variability in leaf traits, but this has never been analyzed in an explicit way.
Cross-modal Variational Auto-encoder with Distributed Latent Spaces and Associators

In this paper, we propose a novel structure for a cross-modal data association, which is inspired by the recent research on the associative learning structure of the brain. We formulate the cross-modal association in Bayesian inference framework realized by a deep neural network with multiple variational auto-encoders and variational associators. The variational associators transfer the latent spaces between auto-encoders that represent different modalities. The proposed structure successfully associates even heterogeneous modal data and easily incorporates the additional modality to the entire network via the proposed cross-modal associator. Furthermore, the proposed structure can be trained with only a small amount of paired data since auto-encoders can be trained by unsupervised manner. Through experiments, the effectiveness of the proposed structure is validated on various datasets including visual and auditory data.
String-to-String Interpretations with Polynomial-Size Output

String-to-string MSO interpretations are like Courcelle's MSO transductions, except that a single output position can be represented using a tuple of input positions instead of just a single input position. In particular, the output length is polynomial in the input length, as opposed to MSO transductions, which have output of linear length. We show that string-to-string MSO interpretations are exactly the polyregular functions. The latter class has various characterizations, one of which is that it consists of the string-to-string functions recognized by pebble transducers. Our main result implies the surprising fact that string-to-string MSO interpretations are closed under composition.
Association Between Kinetics of Early Biofilm Formation and Clonal Lineage in Escherichia coli

Background Escherichia coli biofilm formation has mostly been assessed in specific pathogenic E. coli groups. Here, we assessed the early biofilm formation (EBF), i.e., adhesion stage, using the BioFilm Ring Test® on 394 E. coli clinical isolates (EC) [196 consecutively isolated (CEC) in 2016 and 198 ESBL-producing E. coli (ESBLEC) isolated in 2015]. Then, biofilm-forming ability was contrasted with phylogroups, clonotypes (fumC-fimH), and sequence types (STs), all being used to define clones, virulence factors (VF), and FimB. Result According to both biofilm production levels at 2, 3, and 5 h, and EBF kinetics over 5 h, CEC and ESBLEC isolates segregated into three EBF groups: strong (G1), moderate (G2), and weak (G3) producers. At 2 h, strong producers were more frequent among CEC (n = 28; 14.3%) than among ESBLEC (n = 8; 4%) (P = 0.0004). As CEC and ESBLEC isolates showed similar individual EBF kinetics in each group, a comparison of isolate features between each group was applied to gathered CEC and ESBLEC isolates after 2 h of incubation, 2 h being the most representative time point of the CEC and ESBLEC isolate segregation into the three groups. Phylogroup B2 displayed by 51.3% of the 394 isolates was more frequent in G1 (77.8%) than in G3 (47.6%) (P = 0.0006). The 394 isolates displayed 153 clones, of which 31 included at least three isolates. B2-CH14-2-ST127, B2-CH40-22-ST131, B2-CH52-5/14-ST141, and E-CH100-96-ST362 clones were associated with G1 (P < 0.03) and accounted for 41.7% of G1 isolates. B2-CH40-30-ST131 clone was associated with G3 (P < 0.0001) and accounted for 25.5% of G3 isolates. VF mean was higher among G1 than among G3 isolates (P < 0.001). FimB-P2 variant was associated with G1 (P = 0.0011) and FimB-P1 variant was associated with G3 (P = 0.0023). Clone, some VF, and FimB were associated with EBF, with clonal lineage being able to explain 72% of the variability of EBF. Conclusion Among our 394 isolates, <10% are able to quickly and persistently produce high biofilm levels over 5 h. These isolates belong to a few clones previously described in various studies as dominant gut colonizers in mammalians and birds and comprised the B2-CH40-22-ST131 clone, i.e., the ancestor of the globally disseminated B2-CH40-30-ST131 clone that is the dominant clone among the weak biofilm producers.
Genomic Analyses of Transport Proteins in Ralstonia metallidurans

Ralstonia (Wautersia, Cupriavidus) metallidurans (Rme) is better able to withstand high concentrations of heavy metals than any other well-studied organism. This fact renders it a potential agent of bioremediation as well as an ideal model organism for understanding metal resistance phenotypes. We have analysed the genome of Rme for genes encoding homologues of established and putative transport proteins; 13% of all genes in Rme encode such homologues. Nearly one-third of the transporters identified (32%) appear to function in inorganic ion transport with three-quarters of these acting on cations. Transporters specific for amino acids outnumber sugar transporters nearly 3 : 1, and this fact plus the large number of uptake systems for organic acids indicates the heterotrophic preferences of these bacteria. Putative drug efflux pumps comprise 10% of the encoded transporters, but numerous efflux pumps for heavy metals, metabolites and macromolecules were also identified. The results presented should facilitate genetic manipulation and mechanistic studies of transport in this remarkable bacterium.
The Effects of Creatine Supplementation on Repeated Upper‐and Lower‐Body Wingate Performance

Nineteen physically active men supplemented their diet with 20 g per day creatine monohydrate (Cr group) or placebo (Pl group) for 6 days. Before and after supplementation, subjects performed 3 arm Wingates (AW1, AW2, and AW3) and 3 leg Wingates (LW1, LW2, and LW3) on consecutive days. Win-gates were separated by 2 minutes each. Mean power (MP), peak power (PP), and percent decrease (%D) were compared between and within groups. MP did not change significantly for arms or legs. PP did not change significantly for legs. PP increased significantly in the Cr group (AW1) and for the Pl group (AW1 and AW3). MP and PP were not significantly different between groups. The %D increased significantly in the Pl group (AW1, AW3, and LW3). For the Cr group, %D decreased significantly (pre vs. post) and was significantly lower than for the Pl group (LW2-post). Results suggest that short-term Cr supplementation does not enhance MP and PP during repeated upper-and lower-body Wingate tests when not accompanied by an increase in body weight. However, changes in %D suggest possible ergogenic effects.
A Novel High-Gain Tetrahedron Origami

In this letter, a novel high-gain tetrahedron origami antenna is introduced. The antenna comprises a triangular-shaped monopole, a reflector, and two parasitic strip directors on a paper substrate. The directors and the reflector are employed to increase the antenna gain. The step-by-step origami folding procedure is presented in detail. The proposed design of antenna is verified by both simulations and measurements with a fabricated prototype. The antenna exhibits a 10-dB impedance bandwidth of 66% (2–4 GHz) and a peak gain of 9.5 dBi at 2.6 GHz.
Optimal partition of QoS requirements for many-to-many connections

The problems related to supporting multicast connections with quality of service (QoS) requirements are studied. We investigate the problem of optimal resource allocation in the context of performance dependent costs. In this context each network element can offer several QoS guarantees, each associated with a different cost. This is a natural extension to the commonly used bi-criteria model, where each link is associated with a single delay and a single cost. This framework is simple yet strong enough to model many practical interesting networking problems. The fundamental multicast resource allocation problem under this framework is how to optimally allocate QoS requirements on the links of the multicast tree. One needs to partition the end-to-end QoS requirement along the various paths in a tree. The goal is to satisfy the end-to-end QoS requirement with minimum cost. Previous studies under this framework considered single-source multicast connections, where the end-to-end QoS requirement is specified from the source to all other multicast group members. In this paper we extend these results to the more general, and considerably harder case of multicast sessions, where the end-to-end requirement hold for every path between any two multicast group members. Our aim is to provide rigorous solutions, with proven performance guarantees, by way of algorithmic analysis. The problem under investigation is NP hard for general cost functions, thus we first present a pseudopolynomial exact solution. From this solution we derive two efficient /spl epsi/-approximate solutions. One achieves optimal cost, but may violate the end-to-end delay requirement by a factor of (1 + /spl epsi/), and the other strictly obeys the bounds and achieves a cost within a factor of (1+/spl epsi/) of the optimum. Furthermore, we present improved results for discrete cost functions, and give a simple linear-time exact polynomial solution for a specific, and practically interesting, family of convex cost functions.
Neural network gain-scheduling sliding mode control for three-dimensional trajectory tracking of robotic airships

This article proposed a novel control approach for trajectory tracking of robotic airships. First, the nonlinear dynamics model of a robotic airship is derived and formulated. Second, a sliding mode controller is designed to track the commanded trajectory for its robustness against parametric variations and external disturbances. To address the chattering problem results from the sliding mode controller, a radial basis function neural network is adopted to construct the neural network self-gain-scheduling sliding mode controller in which the control gains are scheduled synchronously with the sliding surface via radial basis function neural network according to the learning algorithm, with switching sliding surface and its differential as radial basis function neural network inputs and control gains as radial basis function neural network outputs. In addition, the stability and convergence of the closed-loop controller are proven using the Lyapunov stability theorem. Finally, the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed controller are demonstrated via numerical simulations. Contrasting simulation results indicate that the neural network self-gain-scheduling sliding mode controller attenuates the chattering effectively and has better performance against the sliding mode controller.
COMPARATIVE VALUE OF BROMSULPHALEIN, SERUM PHOSPHATASE, PROTHROMBIN TIME, AND INTRAVENOUS GALACTOSE TOLERANCE TESTS IN DETECTING HEPATIC DAMAGE PRODUCED BY CARBON TETRACHLORIDE.

Although tests of liver function have been studied for many years, it is only recently that any intensive comparative studies have been made (1 to 3). Liver function studies are performed (a) to detect hepatic damage, (b) to aid in prognosis and assist in determining any surgical risk, (c) to differentiate obstructive from nonobstructive jaundice. The detection of hepatic damage is complicated by the large number of functional activities performed by the liver. As various functions of the liver will be affected to different degrees by a given type of damage, the results of a liver function test will depend upon which function is tested. Thus, while a given test is positive, others may be negative. This has led to the general concept of a dissociation of liver functions and liver function tests. Although tests of hepatic function are used on experimental animals, no experimental comparison has been made of the newer liver function tests. In this investigation, 5 liver function tests were studied in dogs receiving small doses of carbon tetrachloride, twice a week, to ascertain (a) the comparative sensitivity of the tests in detecting hepatic damage, (b) the constancy, or change in value, of a test as the doses of carbon tetrachloride were continued, (c) whether or not association or dissociation of the liver function tests was present.
DECOMPOSING STAR FORMATION AND ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEUS WITH SPITZER MID-INFRARED SPECTRA: LUMINOSITY FUNCTIONS AND CO-EVOLUTION

We present Spitzer 7–38 μm spectra for a 24 μm flux-limited sample of galaxies at z ∼ 0.7 in the COSMOS field. The detailed high-quality spectra allow us to cleanly separate star formation (SF) and active galactic nucleus (AGN) in individual galaxies. We first decompose mid-infrared luminosity functions (LFs). We find that the SF 8 μm and 15 μm LFs are well described by Schechter functions. AGNs dominate the space density at high luminosities, which leads to the shallow bright-end slope of the overall mid-infrared LFs. The total infrared (8–1000 μm) LF from 70 μm selected galaxies shows a shallower bright-end slope than the bolometrically corrected SF 15 μm LF, owing to the intrinsic dispersion in the mid-to-far-infrared spectral energy distributions. We then study the contemporary growth of galaxies and their supermassive black holes (BHs). Seven of the thirty-one luminous infrared galaxies with Spitzer spectra host luminous AGNs, implying an AGN duty cycle of 23% ± 9%. The time-averaged ratio of BH accretion rate and SF rate matches the local MBH − Mbulge relation and the MBH − Mhost relation at z ∼ 1. These results favor co-evolution scenarios in which BH growth and intense SF happen in the same event but the former spans a shorter lifetime than the latter. Finally, we compare our mid-infrared spectroscopic selection with other AGN identification methods and discuss candidate Compton-thick AGNs in the sample. While only half of the mid-infrared spectroscopically selected AGNs are detected in X-ray, ∼90% of them can be identified with their near-infrared spectral indices.