Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reconstruction of Fluorescence Molecular Tomography via a Fused LASSO Method Based on Group Sparsity Prior

Objective: The aim of this paper is to improve the reconstruction accuracy in both position and source region of fluorescence molecular tomography (FMT). Methods: The reconstruction of the FMT is challenging due to its serious ill-posedness and ill-condition. Currently, to obtain the fluorescent sources accurately, more a priori information of the fluorescent sources is utilized and more efficient and practical methods are proposed. In this paper, we took the group sparsity of the fluorescent sources as a new type of priori information in the FMT, and proposed the fused LASSO method (FLM) for FMT. The FLM based on group sparsity prior not only takes advantage of the sparsity of the fluorescent sources, but also utilizes the structure of the sources, thus making the reconstruction results more accuracy and morphologically similar to the sources. To further improve the reconstruction efficiency, we adopt Nesterov's method to solve the FLM. Results: Both heterogeneous numerical simulation experiments and in vivo mouse experiments were carried out to verify the property of the FLM. The results have verified the superiority of the FLM over conventional methods in tumor detection and tumor morphological reconstruction. Furthermore, the in vivo experiments had demonstrated that the FLM has great potential in preclinical application of the FMT. Significance: The reconstruction method based on group sparsity prior has a great potential in the FMT study, it can further improve the reconstruction quality, which has practical significance in preclinical research.
Methods of Assessment of the Corneas of the Eyes Laboratory Rabbits Exposed to Solar Ultraviolet‐B Radiation

The goal of this review was to identify and discuss the specialized methods that have been used to assess the corneas of the eyes of living rabbits exposed to the damaging effects of ultraviolet‐B (UV‐B). From publications reviewed between 1916 and 2018, both albino and pigmented rabbits were used, usually being young adults weighing between 2 and 2.5 kg, and with many recent studies carried out under sedation. Older assessments were generally based on the use of in vivo slitlamp examinations, sometimes with the use of fluorescein or rose bengal to identify damaged cells, supported by light microscopy (histology) of excised corneas. In later years (after 1960), these structural studies have included in vivo and ex vivo specular microscopy, transmission and scanning electron microscopy as well as impression cytology. Early studies included measurements of the thickness of excised corneal specimens but in vivo pachymetry methods were widely used from the 1980s. Other assessments have included measurement of light transmission spectra of excised corneas, measures of metabolites in isolated corneas or staining corneal specimens for enzyme activities. While a wide range of specialized methods have been used, most of them have provided only descriptions of the effects of UV‐B.
Homocysteine‐Lowering Treatment and the Risk of Fracture: Secondary Analysis of a Randomized Controlled Trial and an Updated Meta‐Analysis

High plasma homocysteine is a risk factor for osteoporotic fractures. Several studies have assessed the possible preventive effect of homocysteine‐lowering B‐vitamin treatment on the risk of fracture with inconclusive results. In the current study, we include new results from the Aspirin Folate Polyp Prevention Study (AFPPS) together with an updated meta‐analysis of randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Our objective was to determine whether there is an association between homocysteine‐lowering B‐vitamin treatment and the risk of fracture. The AFPPS trial was performed between 1994 and 2004 in nine clinical centers in the United States, and 1021 participants were randomized to a daily folic acid dose of 1 mg (n = 516) or placebo (n = 505). The main outcome was fracture of any type. In addition, we analyzed the risk of hip fracture. In the meta‐analysis, studies were identified following a search strategy in electronic database and by hand searching. Risk ratio with 95% confidence interval (CI) was chosen for pooled analyses. In the AFPPS, no statistically significant association was found between folic acid treatment and fractures of any type (risk ratio [RR] = 0.95; 95% CI 0.61–1.48) or hip fracture (RR = 0.98; 95% CI 0.25–3.89). In the meta‐analysis, six RCTs were included with a total of 36,527 participants. For interventions including folic acid and/or vitamin B12, the pooled RR for treatment was 0.97 (95% CI 0.87–1.09) for fractures of any type (n = 1199) and 1.00 (95% CI 0.81–1.23) for hip fractures (n = 335). In conclusion, no association was found between homocysteine‐lowering treatment with B vitamins (folic acid and vitamin B12) and the risk of fracture. © 2018 The Authors. JBMR Plus is published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of American Society for Bone and Mineral Research.
Predicting the Impact of Functional Approximation: from Component- to Application-Level

Approximate Computing (AxC) trades off between the level of accuracy required by the user and the actual precision provided by the computing system to achieve several optimizations such as performance improvement, energy and area reduction etc. Several AxCtechniques have been proposed so far in the literature. They work at different abstraction levels and propose both hardware and software implementations. The common issue of all existing approaches is the lack of a methodology to estimate the impact of a given AxC technique on the application-level accuracy. In this paper we propose a probabilistic approach to predict the relation between component-level functional approximation and application-level accuracy. Experimental results on a set of benchmark applications show that the proposed approach is able to estimate the approximation error with good accuracy and very low computation time.
Learning to Segment Inputs for NMT Favors Character-Level Processing

Most modern neural machine translation (NMT) systems rely on presegmented inputs. Segmentation granularity importantly determines the input and output sequence lengths, hence the modeling depth, and source and target vocabularies, which in turn determine model size, computational costs of softmax normalization, and handling of out-of-vocabulary words. However, the current practice is to use static, heuristic-based segmentations that are fixed before NMT training. This begs the question whether the chosen segmentation is optimal for the translation task. To overcome suboptimal segmentation choices, we present an algorithm for dynamic segmentation, that is trainable end-to-end and driven by the NMT objective. In an evaluation on four translation tasks we found that, given the freedom to navigate between different segmentation levels, the model prefers to operate on (almost) character level, providing support for purely character-level NMT models from a novel angle.
Intergroup social influence on emotion processing in the brain

Significance People’s emotions are heavily influenced by others around them. While previous studies have increased our understanding of the neuroscience of social influence in various contexts, such as music ratings and facial attraction, less is known about the neural basis of social influence on emotion processing and whether the human brain is able to track information from two different sources, such as ingroup and outgroup members. We address these two gaps in the literature by showing that the brain is able to differentially track, on a trial-by-trail basis, social influence of emotions deriving from ingroup and outgroup members. Results contribute to our understanding of the neural representations subserving everyday behaviors, such as people’s influence on others’ emotions. Emotions usually occur in a social context; yet little is known about how similar and dissimilar others influence our emotions. In the current study, we examined whether ingroup and outgroup members have differential influence on emotion processing at the behavioral and neural levels. To this end, we recruited 45 participants to rate a series of images displaying people engaged in different emotional contexts. Participants then underwent an fMRI scan where they viewed the same images along with information on how ingroup and outgroup members rated them, and they were asked to rate the images again. We found that participants shifted their emotions to be more in alignment with the ingroup over the outgroup, and that neural regions implicated in positive valuation [ventral striatum (VS) and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC)], mentalizing [dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), and temporal pole], as well as emotion processing and salience detection (amygdala and insula), linearly tracked this behavior such that the extent of neural activity in these regions paralleled changes in participants’ emotions. Results illustrate the powerful impact that ingroup members have on our emotions.
Intraoperative Neurophysiological Monitoring in Surgical Treatment of Spinal Dural Arteriovenous Fistulas: Technique and Results

Objective and Background: Data on intraoperative neurophysiological monitoring (IOM) during surgery of spinal dural arteriovenous fistulas (SDAVFs) are lacking. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the role of IOM during microsurgery for SDAVFs. Materials and Methods: From March 2007 to March 2013, 12 patients had microsurgery with IOM for SDAVFs. The IOM included somatosensory-evoked potentials, motor-evoked potentials (MEPs), and – in selected cases – D-Waves. All patients were evaluated at admission and at follow-up (6, 12, and 24 months) with Aminoff–Logue Disability Scale for Gait-Aminoff–Logue Disability Scale (G-ALS) and Micturition-Aminoff–Logue Disability Scale (M-ALS). Statistical Analysis Used: Logistic regression was used for detecting the clinical risk factors influencing neurological functions after the treatment. Results: During surgery, we registered the absence of significant modifications of evoked potentials in nine cases (75%), while improvement of MEPs occurred in three cases (25%). No false-negative case was registered, and IOM predicted the absence of new postoperative neurological deficit in all patients. At 24-month follow-up, nine patients improved their overall neurological status, while three patients remained stable. At univariate analysis, Aminoff–Logue Disability Scales for Gait and Micturition (G + M-ALS) score at 24-month follow-up was directly associated with the duration of symptom before the surgery (P = 0.024), preoperative G-ALS (P = 0.02), M-ALS (P = 0.022), and G + M-ALS scores (P = 0.045), and improvement of IOM after occlusion of the fistula (P = 0.025). Conclusions: In our series, no significant worsening of evoked potentials occurred and subsequently the surgical strategy was not changed by IOM. However, no false-negative case was registered, and IOM predicted the absence of new postoperative neurological deficit in all patients. Patients with improvement of IOM parameters after occlusion of the fistula had greater chances of postsurgical improvement at the univariate analysis.
Motion Deblurring via Using Generative Adversarial Networks for Space-Based Imaging

In some missions of NanoSats, we find images captured are disturbed by motion blur which caused under the situation that NanoSats work in low-earth orbit at high speeds. In this paper, we address the problem of deblurring images degraded due to space-based imaging system shaking or movements of observing targets. We propose a motion deblurring strategy via using Generative Adversarial Networks(GAN) to realize an end-to-end image processing without kernel estimation in orbit. We combine Wasserstein GAN(WGAN) and loss function based on adversarial loss and perceptual loss to optimize the result of deblurred image. The experimental results on the two different datasets prove the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed strategy which outperforms the state-of-the-art blind deblurring algorithms using for remote sensing images both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Nucleus Reuniens Is Required for Encoding and Retrieving Precise, Hippocampal-Dependent Contextual Fear Memories in Rats

The nucleus reuniens (RE) is a ventral midline thalamic nucleus that interconnects the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and hippocampus (HPC). Considerable data indicate that HPC–mPFC circuits are involved in contextual and spatial memory; however, it is not clear whether the RE mediates the acquisition or retrieval of these memories. To examine this question, we inactivated the RE with muscimol before either the acquisition or retrieval of pavlovian fear conditioning in rats; freezing served as the index of fear. We found that RE inactivation before conditioning impaired the acquisition of contextual freezing, whereas inactivation of the RE before retrieval testing increased the generalization of freezing to a novel context; inactivation of the RE did not affect either the acquisition or expression of auditory fear conditioning. Interestingly, contextual conditioning impairments were absent when retrieval testing was also conducted after RE inactivation. Contextual memories acquired under RE inactivation were hippocampal independent, insofar as contextual freezing in rats conditioned under RE inactivation was insensitive to intrahippocampal infusions of the NMDA receptor antagonist aminophosphonovalerate. Together, these data reveal that the RE supports hippocampal-dependent encoding of precise contextual memories that allow discrimination of dangerous contexts from safe contexts. When the RE is inactive, however, alternate neural systems acquire an impoverished contextual memory that is expressed only when the RE is off-line. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT The midline thalamic nucleus reuniens (RE) coordinates communication between the hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex, brain areas that are critical for contextual and spatial memory. Here we show that temporary pharmacological inactivation of RE impairs the acquisition and precision of contextual fear memories after pavlovian fear conditioning in rats. However, inactivating the RE before retrieval testing restored contextual memory in rats conditioned after RE inactivation. Critically, we show that imprecise contextual memories acquired under RE inactivation are learned independently of the hippocampus. These data reveal that the RE is required for hippocampal-dependent encoding of precise contextual memories to support the discrimination of safe and dangerous contexts.
A Recursive Decomposition Method for Large Scale Continuous Optimization

Cooperative co-evolution (CC) is an evolutionary computation framework that can be used to solve high-dimensional optimization problems via a “divide-and-conquer” mechanism. However, the main challenge when using this framework lies in problem decomposition. That is, deciding how to allocate decision variables to a particular subproblem, especially interacting decision variables. Existing decomposition methods are typically computationally expensive. In this paper, we propose a new decomposition method, which we call recursive differential grouping (RDG), by considering the interaction between decision variables based on nonlinearity detection. RDG recursively examines the interaction between a selected decision variable and the remaining variables, placing all interacting decision variables into the same subproblem. We use analytical methods to show that RDG can be used to efficiently decompose a problem, without explicitly examining all pairwise variable interactions. We evaluated the efficacy of the RDG method using large scale benchmark optimization problems. Numerical simulation experiments showed that RDG greatly improved the efficiency of problem decomposition in terms of time complexity. Significantly, when RDG was embedded in a CC framework, the optimization results were better than results from seven other decomposition methods.
The frequency architecture of brain and brain body oscillations: an analysis

Research on brain oscillations has brought up a picture of coupled oscillators. Some of the most important questions that will be analyzed are, how many frequencies are there, what are the coupling principles, what their functional meaning is, and whether body oscillations follow similar coupling principles. It is argued that physiologically, two basic coupling principles govern brain as well as body oscillations: (i) amplitude (envelope) modulation between any frequencies m and n, where the phase of the slower frequency m modulates the envelope of the faster frequency n, and (ii) phase coupling between m and n, where the frequency of n is a harmonic multiple of m. An analysis of the center frequency of traditional frequency bands and their coupling principles suggest a binary hierarchy of frequencies. This principle leads to the foundation of the binary hierarchy brain body oscillation theory. Its central hypotheses are that the frequencies of body oscillations can be predicted from brain oscillations and that brain and body oscillations are aligned to each other. The empirical evaluation of the predicted frequencies for body oscillations is discussed on the basis of findings for heart rate, heart rate variability, breathing frequencies, fluctuations in the BOLD signal, and other body oscillations. The conclusion is that brain and many body oscillations can be described by a single system, where the cross talk – reflecting communication – within and between brain and body oscillations is governed by m : n phase to envelope and phase to phase coupling.
Autoimmune heparin‐induced thrombocytopenia of delayed onset: a clinical challenge

Heparin‐induced thrombocytopenia (HIT) usually appears at 5 to 10 days after initiation of heparin. Autoimmune HIT can arise after discontinuation of heparin treatment (delayed‐onset HIT) or without any preceding heparin exposure (spontaneous HIT syndrome).
Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Neuropsychological Correlates of Subcortical Vascular Dementia

Common understanding of dementia is mostly based on the Alzheimer's disease model. However, in subcortical vascular dementia (SVaD), several other cognitive and behavioral dysfunctions predominate over what is commonly noticed in Alzheimer's disease. There are inconsistencies in literature regarding the profile of cognitive impairments in vascular dementia. Objective: In the current study, different cognitive functions pertaining to different lobes of the brain along with neuropsychiatric symptoms we explored in a holistic manner. Materials and Methods: A sample of 12 patients diagnosed with SVaD without any comorbidity were recruited for the study. All the patients underwent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanning and different standardized neuropsychological tests were administered. Results: Patients reported various neuropsychiatric symptoms with varied severity, mostly falling in moderate range, reflecting organic personality change. Most of the cognitive functions pertaining to different lobes of the brain were impaired with parietal lobe being intact mostly. Comparison of MRI findings and neuropsychological findings revealed that there is involvement of cortical functions with the impairment in subcortical structure. Conclusion: These findings emphasis need to look beyond clinical diagnosis and MRI findings for better rehabilitation of the patients by including cognitive dysfunction as well as emotional disturbances prominent in SVaD which might me quite distressing for caretakers.
A review of dietary exposure and toxicological information on epoxidised soybean oil (ESBO) in food-contact applications

ABSTRACT Plasticisers have a long history of use in the industrial manufacture and processing of polymers for the purpose of increasing the flexibility and strength of the material. Approximately, 80–90% of the plasticiser market is devoted to the production of PVC, a highly versatile thermoplastic used to produce both rigid and flexible articles. Many types of plasticisers, including ortho-phthalate esters (OPE), can be added to PVC to impart flexibility. Recently, alternatives to OPEs, such as epoxy esters and aliphatic adipates, are becoming more prevalent for use in PVC-based food-contact articles. Epoxidised soybean oil (ESBO) is used as a plasticiser in flexible PVC for many food-contact articles, including food packaging and food processing equipment, from which it can potentially migrate into food and become a component of an individual’s daily diet. The purpose of this review is to provide an update on the US dietary exposure and toxicological information on ESBO used in PVC-based food-contact articles. The cumulative dietary concentration (CDC) and cumulative estimated daily intake (CEDI) for ESBO from its use as a plasticiser in PVC-based food-contact articles (i.e. gaskets for glass jar lids and film wraps) was calculated to be 2.6 mg/kg (i.e. ppm) and 0.13 mg/kg bw/d, respectively, for the general population. Some regulatory agencies have reported safety levels for ESBO, and the most conservative no observed adverse effect level (NOAEL) was identified to be 100 mg/kg bw/d (i.e. 2000 ppm) based on a two-year feeding study in rats. The current CEDI is well below these levels, supporting the safe use of ESBO in food-contact applications.
Adaptive Fuzzy Control of Stochastic Nonlinear Systems With Fuzzy Dead Zones and Unmodeled Dynamics

This paper focuses on an input-to-state practical stability problem for a class of stochastic nonlinear systems with unmodeled dynamics and fuzzy dead zones. A feasible adaptive fuzzy control method is proposed for the developed stochastic system with the slope of dead zone being certain or fuzzy. Based on stochastic small-gain theorem and backstepping technique, the closed-loop system is guaranteed to be input-state-practically stable in probability. The main contributions of this paper lie in that the considered system is more general, and the modified Lemma 2 makes the presentation of the formulas in lemma consistent with their application forms. Finally, two simulation examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Primary Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease with a Mediterranean Diet Supplemented with Extra-Virgin Olive Oil or Nuts.

To the Editor: At the time of the publication of the first PREDIMED (Prevención con Dieta Mediterránea) trial results in 2013,1 the relative reduction of 30% in the risk of cardiovascular events among participants assigned to a Mediterranean diet seemed to be an effect size that was “too good to be true” for a dietary pattern.2 The trial results were recently retracted and republished (June 21 issue)3 after exclusion of study sites that violated randomization principles. However, the large effect size remained the same, as well as the existence of other sources of bias. First, imbalances in medical care may have taken place after randomization. During the first 3 years of the trial, the group of participants assigned to a Mediterranean diet had quarterly visits at the centers, unlike the group assigned to the control diet (performance bias). Second, this open study was not blinded for end-points assessors (ascertainment bias). Finally, the trial was truncated with a number of events below the safety threshold against inflation of effect size.4 Enthusiasm regarding the Mediterranean diet does not seem proportional to the level of evidence (allegiance bias), and future research is necessary to clarify the real effect of enjoying the great Mediterranean cuisine.