Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The step length able-bodied human tend to choose during stable straight forward level walking

Where the foot placement human tend to choose during stable level walking and what the intrinsic relationship between step length, step time, walking velocity and ankle moment are still unclear. The aim of this study is to investigate these issues. In this paper, human body is modeled as a linear inverted pendulum model (LIPM) with finite-sized foot, according to which the stable step length (SSL) and the stable velocity point (SVP) is derived. Biped gait simulations suggest that to keep the stability of step-to-step transition velocity with the lowest ankle energy consumption, human need to choose SSL to guarantee the foot placements locate at the SVP. The stable walking kinematic data collected from fifteen healthy young adults are analyzed in this paper. Analysis results show that real foot placements are very close to SVP $(R^{2}=0.99956)$ and the mean absolute errors between real foot placement and SVP are below 34 mm (about 6.1% of the average step length). Our main findings are that able-bodied human tend to choose SSL and place foot at SVP to maintain the stability of step-to-step transition velocity during stable level walking. Because of the imprecision of human motor control system, the error between real foot placement and SVP will always exist during stable walking. But due to the ankle effect, human can remain stable gait even though foot placement deviate from SVP within a range by applying ankle moment to reduce the step-to-step transition velocity fluctuation caused by the error between foot placement and SVP.
Fault Diagnosis in Unknown Discrete Event Systems via Critical Tree

In this paper, we propose an approach based on the critical tree to solve the fault diagnosis problem under the circumstances that the system model is unknown but its previous running-logs are available. First of all, we introduce the critical tree and explain its structure in detail. Secondly, we present the construction algorithm of the critical tree, and prove that it has a polynomial-time complexity both over time and space. Moreover, we show how to use the critical tree to diagnose the faults of the system. Finally, a comparative experiment is performed, and the results show that our approach has advantages both in efficiency and accuracy over Christopher’s approach.
Passivity-Based Stable Human-Robot Cooperation with Variable Admittance Control

For human-robot cooperation, admittance control is the most commonly used interaction control scheme which could mask the nonlinear robot dynamics and is easy to implement in practice. However, the instability during interaction may arise when human operator stiffens one’s arm, making the user feel the undesired vibration and even abandon the cooperative tasks. To overcome the drawbacks of the constant admittance control, a novel adaptive filtering methodology to detect the abnormal oscillatory interaction forces is presented. Consequently, admittance parameters are online adjusted to preserve the system passivity in order to suppress the high-frequency oscillation and guarantee the stability of the coupled human-robot system. Finally, the performance and effectiveness of the proposed method is validated through experiment on an industrial robot.
MR Fully Compatible and Safe FBG Breathing Sensor: A Practical Solution for Respiratory Triggering

This publication describes an original simple low-cost MR fully-compatible and safe fiber-optic breathing sensor (FOBS), which can be used for respiratory triggering and for monitoring the development of respiratory rate within the MR environment and can, thus, serve as prevention from the hyperventilation syndrome. The sensor is created by encapsulation of the Bragg grating into conventional nasal oxygen cannulas. The sensor is immune to minor patient movements, thus limiting movement artifacts to a minimum. Thanks to this fact it can be used for the retrospective/prospective respiratory gating. The sensor is immune to electromagnetic interference (EMI) and can thus be used in any magnetic field (1.5T, 3T, and 7T). The sensor prototype has been tested in both laboratory and real magnetic resonance (3T) environments relative to conventional pneumatic respiration references (PRR). The data measured were statistically evaluated using the objective Bland-Altman method (BAM) and the functionality of the proposed solution was confirmed. Respiratory Triggering functionality was confirmed by the radiologic doctors on the basis of analyzing images using the most used respiratory triggered T2 TSE 3D sequences and by objective method using the Blind/Referenceless Image Spatial Quality Evaluator (BRISQUE).
Increasingly Specialized Perception Network for Fine-Grained Visual Categorization of Butterfly Specimens

Existing fine-grained categorization methods predominantly conquer challenges independently, while neglecting the fact that patch proposal and feature extraction can reinforce each other. This necessitates to extract the domain-specific representations and localize key (most discriminative) patches alternately, since implicit to fine-grained specialization is the existence of an entry-category visual shared among all categories. In this study, an increasingly specialized perception convolutional neural network (ISP-CNN) is proposed, focusing on a butterfly domain at sub-species level due to the biosystematics structure. Its pipeline is an coarse-to-fine specialization that hierarchically extracts fine-scale features and proposes distinctive patches at multiple scales. Specifically, the framework consists of two highlights, i.e., hierarchical learning support vector machines (HL-SVMs) and patch proposal sub-networks (PPNs). Depending on the confidences obtained in HL-SVMs, the samples are classified at appropriate subset (i.e., sub-family, genus, and sub-species). Then the PPNs zoom the images to shift the focus on the most representational patches by taking previous predictions of HL-SVMs as a reference, while a finer scale network takes as input an amplified attended region from previous scales with gradual steps. As for self-optimization, ISP-CNN is driven by a patch-level loss and a class-level loss, to mutually learn patch proposals and decisions. For effectness verification, a total of 19,368 lab-made images of butterfly specimens spanning 48 sub-species are utilized as testing samples, while 116,208 augmented images are employed for training. ISP-CNN delivers the better or comparable performance, i.e., validation accuracy achieves 93.67% and testing accuracy achieves 92.13%, which outperforms state-of-the-arts.
A Carrier-Based PWM Strategy Providing Neutral-Point Voltage Oscillation Elimination for Multi-Phase Neutral Point Clamped 3-Level Inverter

General pulse width modulation (PWM) model for multi-phase neutral point (NP) clamped (NPC) 3-level inverter (3LI) is described. A novel PWM strategy for $N$ -phase NPC 3LI with unconditional NP voltage balance is proposed as well as its carrier-based realization, in which PWM sequences are generated by comparing a single carrier wave with double modulation waves. The proposed PWM strategy is consistent with the principle of virtual space vector PWM (VSVPWM). However, the mechanism of NP voltage balance under the proposed PWM strategy is based on precisely calculating and executing level 1 action time of each phase, which may be influenced by some non-ideal factors. To avoid that, an active NP voltage control for the proposed PWM strategy is put forward. Then 3-phase and 5-phase NPC 3LIs are built as examples to verify the correctness of the proposed PWM strategy. Finally, the experimental results indicate that the proposed PWM strategy has better NP voltage control abilities.
On-board Drowsiness Detection using EEG: Current Status and Future Prospects

Drowsiness is a transition of psychophysiological state from alert towards sleep causing degradation in concentration, thereby increasing the response time. Drowsy driving is one of the leading causes of accidents in transportation sector. An on-board warning system which helps drivers with essential feedback about the onset of drowsiness by continuously monitoring divers’ psychophysiological state can help to reduce the drowsy driving related accidents. Physiological signals are found to be most effective for continuous monitoring and better detection of drowsiness. Among all the frequently used physiological signals, Electroencephalogram (EEG), a record of the electrical activities of the brain, showed the strongest relation with drowsiness. Hence, EEG is widely considered as a reliable measure for drowsiness, fatigue, and performance evaluation. In this paper, EEG analysis for drowsiness studies, current findings and future directions of this field are briefly reviewed. Power spectral density (PSD) based features are found to be the most commonly used features for EEG based drowsiness studies. EEG low-frequency bands (delta, theta, and alpha), especially alpha band, shows an increase in band power during the drowsy state compared to alert state. In contrast, high-frequency bands (beta and gamma), specifically beta band shows a decrease in band power during drowsiness. In terms of brain regions, frontal, parietal, and occipital are suggestively informative, especially, alpha from occipital and beta from frontal are two potential indicators. Therefore, identifying informative brain regions with specific frequency bands will help to reduce the number of electrodes required to develop an effective EEG based drowsiness detection and warning system.
Stability Investigation of Car-trailer Combinations considering Steering System Stiffness

The yaw instability of car-trailer combinations (CTCs) is indicated by the body sway of the towing car and/or the trailer. Experimental study shows that the steering system characteristics do have an influence on the stability of CTCs, although this effect is still not clear. The complexity of the dynamic coupling between the towing car and the trailer makes this problem more challenging. The influence of the steering system stiffness on the stability of CTCs is the focus of this paper. In this paper, a theoretical model in horizontal plane with 6 DOFs of CTCs has been established by Lagrange equation. The rotation of the steering column, the movement of the rack and the rotation of the steering wheel around the king pin are three DOFs considered in the steering system model. The tire property is considered as nonlinear. The dynamic stability of CTCs is indicated by the system dynamic critical speed. Through theoretical analysis and the simulation study, the effect chain between the steering system stiffness and the body sway of CTCs could be revealed.
Estimating Berg Balance Scale and Mini Balance Evaluation System Test Scores by Using Wearable Shoe Sensors

Measuring humans' functional balance is important for clinical estimation of fall risk. Although many clinical assessments, such as Berg Balance Scale and Mini Balance Evaluation System Test, are available to test the functional balance, the results are affected by the skills of different operators. This paper proposes an objective approach to access the functional balance by a wearable sensor system embedded in the shoe and a hip accelerometer. Support Vector Machine regression models are built with numerical features selected by mRMR algorithm to estimate the scores of the clinical assessments. Leave one out cross validation is employed to evaluate the regression models. The approach is validated on a group of 30 seniors ($76\pm 10.5$ years old), containing fallers and non-fallers. The results show that the wearable sensor system has a capability to estimate the Berg Balance Scale and Mini Balance Evaluation System Test scores with absolute mean errors and standard deviations $6.07\pm 3.76$ and $5.45\pm 3.65$, respectively, and demonstrates high agreement with falls history based risk assessment.
Non-Invasive Inference of Minute Ventilation Using Wearable ECG and Gaussian Process Regression

Continuous assessment of air pollutant exposure is vital for patients with chronic pulmonary diseases such as asthma, bronchitis, and emphysema. The effective dose of such exposure is directly proportional to the minute ventilation, aka respiratory minute volume (VE). Spirometry – still the clinical standard for measuring VE – is highly invasive and not suitable for continuous use in most applications. This paper presents a novel non-invasive method toward continuous assessment of VE using a chest-mount wearable ECG sensor. Data are collected from 25 healthy subjects while performing ambulatory and sedentary activities and physical exercises. The ECG signal is processed to overcome challenges associated with baseline drifting, noisy skin contact, and motion artifacts, and to extract robust and explanatory ECG features. These features are used to train and evaluate multiple regression models, among which, the Gaussian process regression models achieve the lowest error in both learning and inferring VE from the wearable ECG signal. The impacts of inter- and intrapersonal variations on the model performance are shown to reveal the potential of the proposed method for continuous monitoring of pollutant exposure risk in respiratory health applications.
Property Investigation on the Additive White Gaussian Noise After Sub-Nyquist Sampling

The sub-Nyquist sampling (SNS) has emerged as an appealing technique for wideband signal sampling and has found its applications in many areas, such as, cognitive radios, radar and medical imaging, etc. However, existing SNS based approaches generally assume that the output noise of SNS (termed as SNS noise) is generated as the additive white Gaussian noise without considering the SNS effect. To give more insights on the noise after SNS, we propose a generalized modulated converter to represent existing prevalent SNS systems and give an analysis on statistics of the SNS noise in terms of the proposed SNS system. The noise folding factor and the uncorrelated and white keeping properties are derived and concluded from the derived statistics, in which the former is used to show the noise enhancement by SNS and the latter describes the SNS noise uncorrelation and equal power intensity in different frequencies, respectively. In the final, simulation results validate the derived results and conclusions.
Principles and procedures for blood cultures : approved guideline

Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute document M47-A—Principles and Procedures for Blood Cultures; Approved Guideline addresses the laboratory detection of bacteremia and fungemia by use of blood cultures. Included in this guideline are recommendations for the: 1) clinical importance of blood cultures; 2) specimen collection and transportation; 3) critical factors in the recovery of pathogens from blood specimens; 4) special topics, including pediatric blood cultures, catheter-related bloodstream infections, infective endocarditis, patients receiving antimicrobial therapy, rare and fastidious pathogens, and test of cure; 5) reporting results; 6) interpreting blood culture results; 7) safety issues; and 8) quality assurance. Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI). Principles and Procedures for Blood Cultures; Approved Guideline. CLSI document M47-A (ISBN 1-56238-641-7). Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute, 950 West Valley Road, Suite 2500, Wayne, Pennsylvania 19087 USA, 2007. The Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute consensus process, which is the mechanism for moving a document through two or more levels of review by the health care community, is an ongoing process. Users should expect revised editions of any given document. Because rapid changes in technology may affect the procedures, methods, and protocols in a standard or guideline, users should replace outdated editions with the current editions of CLSI documents. Current editions are listed in the CLSI catalog and posted on our website at www.clsi.org. If your organization is not a member and would like to become one, and to request a copy of the catalog, contact us at: Telephone: 610.688. 0100; Fax: 610.688. 0700; E-Mail: customerservice@clsi.org; Website: www.clsi.org.
Scintigraphic determination of small intestinal transit time of water in man

A method utilizing a lactulose solution to measure small intestinal transit time (SITT) has been previously reported. Lactulose is a non-absorbable sugar and is known to increase SITT. In order to determine the extent to which lactulose accelerates SITT, a group of 4 normal male volunteers were studied after the ingestion of 150cc of water to which 100 uCi of 111-In was added. To provide adequate caloric intake, as occurs physiologically, the water was drunk while ingesting a solid meal. The subject was then placed supine under a 15 inch gamma camera. Data were collected and stored in a computer at one frame every 3 minute for 240 minutes. If activity was not present in the cecal region by this time, the subject was allowed to move about for 15 minutes and then repositioned under the gamma camera. Data were first viewed in a movie format. Regions of interest were selected over the cecum and ascending colon. The time of first appearance of radioactivity in the region of the cecum was taken as the SITT. Each subject was studied on three separate occasions. The mean (+- SEM) SITT for each of the separate studies was 248 +- 58 min., 240more » +- 47 min. and 232 +- 54 min. respectively (pless than or equal toNS). Two previously studied groups of normal volunteers had a mean SITT of approximately 80 minutes. Water appears to have a significantly slower SITT when ingested with a solid meal when compared to lactulose. Clinically, the potential to use water as a test for SITT would not seem to be as attractive or practical as using lactulose as the test substance. « less
Understanding consumer liking of beef using hierarchical cluster analysis and external preference mapping.

BACKGROUND This study was conducted to assess if there are differences in consumer liking of beef. Samples were collected from different groups and analyses were conducted, including quantitative descriptive analysis, consumer panels and instrumental analyses. Palatability traits, such as aroma liking (AL), tenderness (TE), juiciness (JU), flavour liking (FL) and overall liking (OL) were rated by consumers. RESULTS Warner Bratzler shear force was negatively associated with tender mouthfeel and consumer tenderness score. Cluster analysis identified 4 groups of clusters, which were described as "easily-pleased", "bull beef liker", "tender beef liker" and "fastidious" consumers. Cluster group 2 awarded higher score for bulls and located in a separate region on external preference map. CONCLUSION External preference mapping showed the association between consumer liking of beef and sensory attributes. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Should Sagittal Spinal Alignment Targets for Adult Spinal Deformity Correction Depend on Pelvic Incidence and Age?

STUDY DESIGN Retrospective analysis OBJECTIVE. : Determine whether deformity corrections should vary by pelvic incidence (PI). SUMMARY OF BACKGROUND DATA Alignment targets for deformity correction have been reported for various radiographic parameters. The T1 pelvic-angle (TPA) has gained in applications for ASD surgical-planning since it directly measures spinal alignment separate from pelvic- and lower-extremity compensation. Recent studies have demonstrated that ASD corrections should be age specific. METHODS A prospective database of consecutive ASD patients was analyzed in conjunction with a normative spine database. Clinical measures of disability included the Oswestry Disability Index (ODI) and SF-36 Physical Component Score (PCS). Baseline relationships between TPA, age, PI and ODI/SF-36 PCS scores were analyzed in the ASD and asymptomatic patients. Linear regression modeling was used to determine alignment targets based on PI and age-specific normative SF-36-PCS values. RESULTS 903 ASD patients (mean 53.7y) and 111 normative subjects (mean 50.7y) were included. Patients were subanalyzed by PI: low, medium, high (<40, 40-75, >75); and age: elderly(>65y, n = 375) middle age(45-65y, n = 387) and young(18-45y, n = 141). TPA and SRS-Schwab parameters correlated with age and PI in ASD and normative subjects (r = .42, p < .0001). ODI correlated with PCS(r = .71, p < .0001). Linear regression analysis using age-normative SF-36-PCS values demonstrated that ideal spinopelvic alignment is less strict with increasing PI and age. CONCLUSIONS Targets for ASD correction should vary by age and PI. This is demonstrated in both asymptomatic and ASD subjects. Using age-normative SF-36 PCS values, alignment targets are described for different age and PI categories. High-PI patients do not require as rigorous realignments to attain age-specific normative levels of health status. As such, sagittal spinal alignment targets increase with increasing age as well as PI. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE 3.
Optimising streptozotocin dosing to minimise renal toxicity and impairment of stomach emptying in male 129/Sv mice

The streptozotocin (STZ)-induced diabetic mouse model has been extensively used as a model for diabetes and diabetic nephropathy, but it is still influenced by many off-target toxic effects and large variation in diabetes induction. Therefore, the aim of this study was to compare different STZ dosing regimens to optimise animal welfare and minimise unwanted effects of STZ measured by acute renal toxicity, impairment of stomach emptying and weight loss. Male 129/Sv mice were injected with 1 × 50, 1 × 100, 1 × 125, 1 × 150, 1 × 200, 5 × 50, 2 × 100 and 2 × 125 mg/kg STZ or vehicle and euthanized 24 hours after the last injection. All STZ doses were found to induce significant enlargement of the stomach. All multiple doses of STZ increased the albumin:creatinine ratio significantly, and immunohistochemical staining of KIM-1 and Ki-67 was increased by 5 × 50 and 2 × 100 mg/kg STZ. Renal gene expression of Cdkn1a, KIM-1, NGAL and MCP-1 was increased by most of the STZ doses. No difference was found between the double intermediate dose of 2 × 100 mg/kg and the multiple low dose of 5 × 50 mg/kg regarding either stomach enlargement or kidney injury. However, the reduced fasting periods and injections in the 2 × 100 mg/kg STZ group could have lowered the impact on the general condition measured as change in body weight. This shows that the double intermediate dose is a good alternative to the recommended multiple low dose for diabetes induction in these mice. The STZ-induced mouse model has again proven to be a model with large variations affecting both animal welfare and model robustness.
Gestational diabetes mellitus and risk of incident primary cancer: A population‐based retrospective cohort study

Increasing evidence suggests that individuals with diabetes are at greater risk of cancer overall and specific subtypes of cancer.1 Obesity, sedentary lifestyle, hyperinsulinemia, hyperglycemia and chronic inflammation have been proposed as the pathophysiological underpinnings of these associations. 2 Similar behaviours, and physiological changes operate in women with gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM). Epidemiological studies investigating the association of GDM and malignancy have produced mixed results.