Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Antithrombin Population Pharmacokinetics in Pediatric Ventricular Assist Device Patients.

OBJECTIVES Describe the pharmacokinetics of antithrombin in pediatric patients undergoing ventricular assist device therapy and provide dosing recommendations for antithrombin in this population. DESIGN A retrospective population pharmacokinetic study was designed. SETTING Large tertiary care children's hospital Subject inclusion criteria consisted of less than 19 years old. PATIENTS Subjects less than 19 years old undergoing therapy with a HeartWare ventricular assist device (HeartWare, Framingham, MA) or Berlin EXCOR ventricular assist device (Berlin GmbH, Berlin, Germany), who received a dose of antithrombin with a postdose antithrombin activity level from January 1, 2011, to June 30, 2017. INTERVENTIONS Population pharmacokinetic analysis and simulation using NONMEM v.7. 4 (Icon, PLC, Dublin, Ireland). MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS A total of 41 patients met study criteria (median age, 5.8 years [interquartile range, 1.6-9.9 yr]), and 53.7% underwent therapy with the pulsatile Berlin EXCOR pediatric ventricular assist device (Berlin Heart GmbH, Berlin, Germany). All patients received unfractionated heparin continuous infusion at a mean ± SD dose of 29 ± 14 U/kg/hr. A total of 181 antithrombin doses (44.1 ± 24.6 U/kg/dose) were included, and baseline antithrombin activity levels were 77 ± 12 U/dL. Antithrombin activity levels were drawn a median 19.9 hours (interquartile range, 8.8-41.6 hr) after antithrombin dose. A one-compartment proportional error model best fit the data, with allometric scaling of fat-free mass providing a better model fit than actual body weight. Unfractionated heparin and baseline antithrombin were identified as significant covariates. A 50 U/kg dose of antithrombin had a simulated half-life 13.2 ± 6.6 hours. CONCLUSIONS Antithrombin should be dosed on fat-free mass in pediatric ventricular assist device patients. Unfractionated heparin dose and baseline antithrombin activity level should be considered when dosing antithrombin in pediatric ventricular assist device patients.
Toward a clinical text encoder: pretraining for clinical natural language processing with applications to substance misuse

OBJECTIVE Our objective is to develop algorithms for encoding clinical text into representations that can be used for a variety of phenotyping tasks. MATERIALS AND METHODS Obtaining large datasets to take advantage of highly expressive deep learning methods is difficult in clinical natural language processing (NLP). We address this difficulty by pretraining a clinical text encoder on billing code data, which is typically available in abundance. We explore several neural encoder architectures and deploy the text representations obtained from these encoders in the context of clinical text classification tasks. While our ultimate goal is learning a universal clinical text encoder, we also experiment with training a phenotype-specific encoder. A universal encoder would be more practical, but a phenotype-specific encoder could perform better for a specific task. RESULTS We successfully train several clinical text encoders, establish a new state-of-the-art on comorbidity data, and observe good performance gains on substance misuse data. DISCUSSION We find that pretraining using billing codes is a promising research direction. The representations generated by this type of pretraining have universal properties, as they are highly beneficial for many phenotyping tasks. Phenotype-specific pretraining is a viable route for trading the generality of the pretrained encoder for better performance on a specific phenotyping task. CONCLUSIONS We successfully applied our approach to many phenotyping tasks. We conclude by discussing potential limitations of our approach.
Dairy Product Intake in Older Adults across Europe Based On the SHARE Database

Abstract Objective: To evaluate dairy intake patterns in older adults across Europe. Methods: We conducted cross-sectional analysis using data from the fourth wave (2011/2012) of the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) database. Prevalence rates regarding the number of weekly servings of dairy in individuals ≥50 years old were calculated for 16 European countries. Results: The overall prevalence rate of daily dairy product intake in Europe was 66.95% (CI95%: 66.28–67.63%). Global prevalence in men was 63.35% (CI95%:62.37–64.35%) and in women 69.80% (CI95%:68.86–70.71%). Among men, this type of intake was highest in Denmark (84.89% [CI95%: 79.11–90.66%]) and lowest in Poland (26.15% [CI95%: 22.71–29.58%]). Among women, the highest prevalence was found in Spain (89.51% [CI95%: 85.16–93.86%]) and the lowest in Poland (31.33% [CI95%: 27.05–35.61%]). The overall prevalence rate of dairy product intake less than once a week was 3.99% (CI95%: 3.83–4.16%). In terms of gender, men in Hungary (11.02% [CI95%: 9.16–12.89%]) and women in Slovenia (8.76% [CI95%: 7.26–10.25%]) had the lowest such intake. Conclusions: Dairy intake is very heterogeneous across Europe, with overall intake levels lower than recommended. Differences were also observed between genders, with a lower intake in men, and with age, with the intake lower in older individuals.
Implementation of personal response units in very large lecture classes: Student perceptions

This article reports on a large scale implementation of personal response units in three introductory science courses at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. An online survey of students was conducted to gather their perceptions on the uses of the devices, triangulated by participant observation of the classes and email interviews with the instructors. Although the students' perceptions were generally favourable, problems associated with implementation were widespread. Advantages and disadvantages of the technology are discussed along with suggestions for its use.
Real-time computer control using pattern recognition of the electromyogram

A real-time system is discussed which recognizes users gestures using neural networks for pattern recognition of the electromyogram (EMG). A novel application for dynamic computer control is presented. In addition to gesture recognition, an estimate of muscular exertion is provided to facilitate control of continuously varying parameters. The use of this system for a real-time graphical user interface (GUI) is discussed. In this example the direction of motion of the users arm is detected and used to control a graphical slider, which moves in the direction of the users arm. The speed of the slider is proportional to the muscular exertion. The system described has applications to physically disabled users, and can be adapted to an individuals abilities.
The evaluation of phase acquisition for coherent frequency hopped communication systems

The authors identify a new limiting factor, hop timing error, in regard to the phase coherence for coherent frequency hopped spread spectrum (C-FHSS) communications. A phase-lock system model and the Fokker-Planck equation are applied to examine the phase acquisition process for every hop. The acquisition time in certain cases, including the worst cast, is obtained for evaluating whether the C-FHSS system is practical. The relationship between the system error performance and the acquisition time is established through the phase error tolerance bound. It is shown that the hopping rate is substantially restricted by the acquisition time. <<ETX>>
Statistical learning theory

A comprehensive look at learning and generalization theory. The statistical theory of learning and generalization concerns the problem of choosing desired functions on the basis of empirical data. Highly applicable to a variety of computer science and robotics fields, this book offers lucid coverage of the theory as a whole. Presenting a method for determining the necessary and sufficient conditions for consistency of learning process, the author covers function estimates from small data pools, applying these estimations to real-life problems, and much more.
Time as a medium of reward in three social preference experiments

We use time, rather than money, as the salient component of subjects’ incentives in three workhorse experimental paradigms. The use of waiting time can be interpreted as a special type of real effort condition, in which it is particularly straightforward to achieve experimental control over incentives. The three experiments, commonly employed to study social preferences, are the dictator game, the ultimatum game and the trust game. All subjects in a session earn the same participation fee, but their choices affect the time at which they are permitted to leave the laboratory. Decisions that are associated with greater own payoff translate into the right to depart earlier. The modal proposal in both the dictator and ultimatum games is an equal split of the waiting time. In the trust game, there is substantial trust and reciprocity. Overall, social preferences are evident in time allocation decisions. We compare subjects’ decisions over time and money and find no significant differences in average decisions. The pattern of results suggests that results obtained in the laboratory with money as the medium of reward generalize to other reward media.
Long-distance coarticulatory effects of English /l/ and /r/

This thesis explores the coarticulatory effects of English /! / and /r/, examining their articulatory basis, acoustic manifestation and perceptual relevance. It demonstrates that there are perceptually relevant coarticulatory differences associated with the distinction between /l/ and /r/. Two perceptual experiments, an articulatory experiment and a modelling study were conducted. Both perceptual experiments used a modified gating technique. The first experiment demonstrates that the coarticulatory effects of /l/ and /r/ on surrounding vowels and consonants can sometimes be used by listeners to identify an HI or /r/ which has been deleted and replaced by noise. The second perceptual experiment shows that the cues for an /r/ are more perceptually salient than those for an /l/. The articulatory experiment used simultaneous electromagnetic articulography, electropalatography and acoustic recordings to investigate the coarticulatory effects of /l/ and /r/. In /r/ contexts, relative to /l/ contexts, raising and retraction of the tongue, lip rounding and lowering of F₃ were found, up to two syllables preceding and following the /r/. The extent of this coarticulatory effect is far greater than commonly acknowledged in the coarticulation literature. Phonetic and phonological theories fail to predict or account for effects of this extent. The theory that coarticulation can be modelled as overlap of articulatory gestures was tested in a modelling study. A subset of the articulatory data was modelled numerically using dynamical descriptions of articulatory gestures from an approach developed at Haskins Laboratories. The modelling showed that longdistance coarticulatory effects could not be adequately accounted for by gestural overlap alone. Feature-spreading models, such as Keating's window model of coarticulation, are also unable to account for these effects adequately. The results of this thesis pose a challenge to current phonetic and phonological theory, as they show that coarticulatory effects have greater extent than commonly recognised.
Brain-Computer Interface Control of an Anthropomorphic Robotic Arm

This thesis describes a brain-computer interface (BCI) system that was developed to allow direct cortical control of 7 active degrees of freedom in a robotic arm. Two monkeys with chronic microelectrode implants in their motor cortices were able to use the arm to complete an oriented grasping task under brain control. This BCI system was created as a clinical prototype to exhibit (1) simultaneous decoding of cortical signals for control of the 3-D translation, 3-D rotation, and 1-D finger aperture of a robotic arm and hand, (2) methods for constructing cortical signal decoding models based on only observation of a moving robot, (3) a generalized method for training subjects to use complex BCI prosthetic robots using a novel form of operator-machine shared control, and (4) integrated kinematic and force control of a brain-controlled prosthetic robot through a novel impedance-based robot controller. This dissertation describes each of these features individually, how their integration enriched BCI control, and results from the monkeys operating the resulting system.
Subjective and objective quality assessment of noise reduced speech signals

Summary form only given. Recently, hands-free speech communication is becoming increasingly necessary for teleconferences, in-car telephones, and PC-based IP telephony. Since speech signals acquired by a distant microphone are generally corrupted by ambient noise, noise reduction is indispensable for ensuring speech quality. To investigate the effect of noise reduction on speech quality, the subjective quality assessment of noisy speech signals and noise reduced speech signals was performed. This result confirmed that the difference of noise types gives little effect on the subjective quality and the subjective quality is more sensitive to the speech distortion than the residual noise. This paper also investigated the applicability of the PESQ to the objective quality assessment of noise reduction algorithms. The experimental result showed that the objective quality correlates well with the subjective quality. However, there was the case that the objective quality is lower than the subjective quality in the specific noise reduction algorithms.
Delay-dependent robust /spl Hscr//sub /spl infin// control of uncertain linear systems with input delay

Examines the problems of robust stabilization and robust /spl Hscr//sub /spl infin// control for linear systems with both delayed and non-delayed inputs and subject to norm-bounded parameter uncertainty. The case of a single, constant time-delay is considered. Attention is focused on the design of memoryless state feedback controllers that guarantee either closed-loop stability or closed-loop stability with an /spl Hscr//sub /spl infin// performance for any delay not larger than a given bound and for all admissible uncertainties. The proposed methods are given in terms of linear matrix inequalities and the delay bound can be computed by using the standard LMI techniques.
Optimum Signal Processing: An Introduction

Read more and get great! That's what the book enPDFd optimum signal processing an introduction will give for every reader to read this book. This is an on-line book provided in this website. Even this book becomes a choice of someone to read, many in the world also loves it so much. As what we talk, when you read more every page of this optimum signal processing an introduction, what you will obtain is something great.
Approximation property of multi-layer neural network (MLNN) and its application in nonlinear simulation

Presents the approximation properties of multilayer neural networks (MLNN) and their application in nonlinear simulation and analysis. The authors give a direct proof of the approximation ability for a single input-output MLNN with hidden units with sigmoid activation functions, and also give the relationship between the best polynomial approximation and the number of MLNN hidden units. Based on the analysis, the authors propose an MLNN model with hybrid sigmoid-Gaussian activation functions. To verify the idea, they present experiments and results of nonlinear simulation and analysis by MLNN for a solid-state power amplifier. These results prove that the proposed method has general application in nonlinear engineering simulations. <<ETX>>
Message Passing Techniques For Statistical Physics And Optimization In Complex Systems

Message passing techniques for statistical physics and optimization in complex systems by Lin Bo Adviser: Professor Hernan A. Makse Optimization problem has always been considered as a central topic in various areas of science and engineering. It aims at finding the configuration of a large number of variables with which the objective function is optimal. The close relation between optimization problems and statistical physics through the probability measure of the Boltzmann type has brought new theoretical tools from statistical physics of disordered systems to optimization problems. In this thesis, we use message passing techniques, in particular cavity method, developed in the last decades within spin glass theory to study optimization problems in complex systems. In the study of force transmission in jammed disordered systems, we develop a mean-field theory based on the consideration of the contact network as a random graph where the force transmission becomes a constraint satisfaction problem, with which the constraints enforce force and torque balances on each particle. We thus use cavity method to compute the force distribution for random packings of hard particles of any shape,
Incidence of violence against HIV-infected and uninfected women: Findings from the HIV epidemiology research (HER) study

The effect of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection on the incidence of violence against women was addressed in a prospective cohort of HIV-infected and uninfected women. Participants were enrolled between 1993 and 1995 in four US cities and followed up semiannually through 1998. Among 1,087 women with a total accrual of 2,988 person-years (PY) of follow-up, there were 185 reports of abuse (incidence rate=6.19 per 100 PY). The rate of abuse among HIV-infected women with a CD4+count less than 350 cells/μL was lower than that among HIV-infected women with more CD4+ cells/μL or among uninfected women (4.87, 6.92, and 6.44 per 100 PY, respectively). In multivariate analysis, being separated or divorced, having a history of abuse in adulthood, using marijuana, using crack, and having multiple sex partners were each significantly associated with an elevated abuse rate; being older was inversely associated with abuse. Among HIV-infected women, those with fewer CD4+ cells/μL continued to show a decreased abuse rate (bazard ratio=0.55, 95% CI=0.36, 0.82) after adjustment for these factors. It is important to complement existing and future HIV prevention and intervention strategies with efforts to reduce violence against women.
Frequency hopping CDMA for future cellular radio

A code-division multiple access (CDMA) system based on slow frequency hopping (FH) is proposed. The hopping sequences are selected such that all users of each cell are using mutually orthogonal codes, and intercell correlation of hopping sequences is minimal. FEC and interleaving are used to mitigate the remaining interference. It is shown that with proper selection of system parameters, FH-CDMA enjoys the advantages so far claimed by DS-CDMA, i.e. FH-CDMA capacity benefits from interference averaging and can take advantage of the duty cycle associated with voice activity. It also yields a sectorization capability and one-cell frequency reuse pattern. Moreover, due to the orthogonal operation, the interference from cell co-users is eliminated. Since this is the major source of interference in nonorthogonal systems like DS-CDMA, FH-CDMA yields higher capacity capabilities (35 times AMPS). Other advantages of FH-CDMA with its implementation as a cellular system are discussed. <<ETX>>
A Comprehensive Survey on Sequential Pattern Mining

Mining sequential patterns has been a focused theme in data mining research for over a decade. One of the promising approaches of SPM is mainly deal with finding the behaviour of a sequential pattern that can help in many analyzing applications like predicting next event. There are several efficient algorithms that cope with the computationally expensive task of sequential pattern mining. One of them is Generalized Sequential Pattern (GSP) mining algorithm which is an Apriori-based algorithm used for sequential pattern mining. The GSP algorithm has several deficiencies whenever the database size is large, too many scanning of database when seeking frequent sequences and very large amount of candidate sequences generated unnecessary. PrefixSpan which is pattern growth method outperforms GSP and solves all above problems. Its main idea is to examine only the prefix subsequences with minimum support. This paper investigates these algorithms by classifying study of SPM algorithms.
The effect of ethnicity and maternal birthplace on small-for-gestational-age deliveries to HIV-infected women

ObjectiveTo examine the relative role of ethnicity and maternal birthplace on small-for-gestational-age (SGA) deliveries of a cohort of mothers in New York who were infected with human immunodeficiency virus.MethodsMedicaid claims and linked vital statistics records were examined for 2,525 singleton deliveries to HIV-infected women from 1993 through 1996. We estimated adjusted odds ratios (AORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) of SGA delivery associated with ethnicity (i.e., white, white-Latina, black, and black-Latina) and maternal birthplace (i.e., native US/Puerto Rican vs. foreign born) in a series of multivariate regression models to which we sequentially added demographic, health services, and lifestyle factors (i.e., alcohol, tobacco, and illicit drug use). ResultsOf the deliveries, 10% were SGA. The odds of SGA infants for black and white women did not differ by maternal birthplace. Foreign-born white-Latinas and black-Latinas had lower unadjusted odds of a SGA delivery than their US-born counterparts (OR 0.29, CI 0.14, 0.61 and OR 0.22, CI 0.07, 0.71, respectively). After adjustment for maternal lifestyle characteristics, the odds of SGA delivery were 0.50 (CI 0.23, 1.09) for white-Latina mothers and 0.60 (CI 0.17, 2.08) for black-Latina mothers.ConclusionsSGA outcomes did not differ by maternal birthplace for black and white women. Differences in lifestyle factors appear to contribute to lower odds of SGA delivery for foreign-born versus US-born white- and black-Latina HIV-infected women.
Consumer's intentions to shop medicaments on-line: A survey from Czech Republic market

This paper seeks to identify what are the main determinants of the consumer’s intentions to shop medicaments online in Czech Republic; grounded mainly on theoretical models such as Technology Acceptance Model this research specifically aims to identify whether there are relations between these intentions and perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, perceived risk, past experience, consumer trust and consumer social norms. Second goal is to identify whether there are differences in intentions to buy medicaments online among the main demographic groups based on age, gender, income and education in Czech Republic. The questionnaire survey method was used. Data collected were analysed using correlation and regression analysis to determine the significance of the relationship between the respective variables. Demographic group’s differences were analysed using t-test and analysis of variance. The results showed that the significant relations exist between consumer’s intention to shop medicaments online and all examined variables in Czech Republic. Multiple regression analysis of the model has shown that only perceived risk and perceived usefulness are the significant predictors for intention. There are no significant differences among the demographic groups based on age, gender, income and education.