Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Glioblastoma Treatments: An Account of Recent Industrial Developments

The different drugs and medical devices, which are commercialized or under industrial development for glioblastoma treatment, are reviewed. Their different modes of action are analyzed with a distinction being made between the effects of radiation, the targeting of specific parts of glioma cells, and immunotherapy. Most of them are still at a too early stage of development to firmly conclude about their efficacy. Optune, which triggers antitumor activity by blocking the mitosis of glioma cells under the application of an alternating electric field, seems to be the only recently developed therapy with some efficacy reported on a large number of GBM patients. The need for early GBM diagnosis is emphasized since it could enable the treatment of GBM tumors of small sizes, possibly easier to eradicate than larger tumors. Ways to improve clinical protocols by strengthening preclinical studies using of a broader range of different animal and tumor models are also underlined. Issues related with efficient drug delivery and crossing of blood brain barrier are discussed. Finally societal and economic aspects are described with a presentation of the orphan drug status that can accelerate the development of GBM therapies, patents protecting various GBM treatments, the different actors tackling GBM disease, the cost of GBM treatments, GBM market figures, and a financial analysis of the different companies involved in the development of GBM therapies.
Tracking the Continuous Dynamics of Numerical Processing: A Brief Review and Editorial

Many recent studies in numerical cognition have moved beyond the use of purely chronometric techniques in favor of methods which track the continuous dynamics of numerical processing. Two examples of such techniques include eye tracking and hand tracking (or computer mouse tracking). To reflect this increased concentration on continuous methods, we have collected a group of 5 articles that utilize these techniques to answer some contemporary questions in numerical cognition. In this editorial, we discuss the two paradigms and provide a brief review of some of the work in numerical cognition that has profited from the use of these techniques. For both methods, we discuss the past research through the frameworks of single digit number processing, multidigit number processing, and mental arithmetic processing. We conclude with a discussion of the papers that have been contributed to this special section and point to some possible future directions for researchers interested in tracking the continuous dynamics of numerical processing.
A Tutorial for Information Theory in Neuroscience

Abstract Understanding how neural systems integrate, encode, and compute information is central to understanding brain function. Frequently, data from neuroscience experiments are multivariate, the interactions between the variables are nonlinear, and the landscape of hypothesized or possible interactions between variables is extremely broad. Information theory is well suited to address these types of data, as it possesses multivariate analysis tools, it can be applied to many different types of data, it can capture nonlinear interactions, and it does not require assumptions about the structure of the underlying data (i.e., it is model independent). In this article, we walk through the mathematics of information theory along with common logistical problems associated with data type, data binning, data quantity requirements, bias, and significance testing. Next, we analyze models inspired by canonical neuroscience experiments to improve understanding and demonstrate the strengths of information theory analyses. To facilitate the use of information theory analyses, and an understanding of how these analyses are implemented, we also provide a free MATLAB software package that can be applied to a wide range of data from neuroscience experiments, as well as from other fields of study.
Effects of Rotation and Magnetic Field on the Revival of a Stalled Shock in Supernova Explosions

We investigate axisymmetric steady solutions of (magneto)hydrodynamics equations that approximately describe accretion flows through a standing shock wave onto a protoneutron star and discuss the effects of rotation and magnetic field on the revival of the stalled shock wave in supernova explosions. We develop a new powerful numerical method to calculate the two-dimensional steady accretion flows self-consistently. We first confirm the results of preceding papers that there is a critical luminosity of irradiating neutrinos, above which there exists no steady solution in spherical models. If a collapsing star is rotating and/or has a magnetic field, the accretion flows are no longer spherical owing to the centrifugal force and/or Lorentz force, and the critical luminosity is modified. In fact, we find that the critical luminosity is reduced by about 50%–70% for very rapid rotations; the rotation frequencies are 0.2–0.45 s−1 at the radius of r = 1000 km (equivalent to spin periods ∼0.5–0.22 ms at r = 10 km) and about 20%–50% for strong toroidal magnetic fields (the strengths of which are 1.0 × 1012–3.0 × 1012 G at r = 1000 km), depending on the mass accretion rate. These results may also be interpreted as the existence of a critical specific angular momentum or critical magnetic field, above which there exists no steady solution and the standing shock wave will be revived for a given combination of mass accretion rate and neutrino luminosity.
Role of social normative beliefs as a moderating factor in smoking intention among adolescent girls in Korea

In this study, we investigated the relationship between risk-taking tendency and smoking intention as moderated by social normative beliefs among Korean female adolescents. A cross-sectional study was conducted with 274 female adolescents in middle school. Multiple regression and simple slope analyses were employed to test the moderating effects of social normative beliefs regarding smoking on the relationship between risk-taking tendency and smoking intention. Results determined that risk-taking tendency, social normative beliefs regarding smoking, and their interaction were significant factors influencing smoking intention among adolescents. Risk-taking tendency was associated with greater smoking intention among adolescents, with higher than average social normative beliefs regarding smoking. However, risk-taking tendency was not significantly associated with smoking intention for adolescents with lower than average social normative beliefs regarding smoking. In conclusion, social normative beliefs regarding smoking moderated the relationship between risk-taking intention and smoking intention among Korean female adolescents. Unique sociocultural perceptions about smoking behaviors of adolescents need to be reflected in smoking-prevention and -cessation programs.
Longitudinal Associations Among Maternal Depressive Symptoms, Child Emotional Caretaking, and Anxious/Depressed Symptoms in Pediatric Cancer

Research has shown that children experience increased emotional distress when engaging in emotional caretaking of a parent. The current study is the first to examine this process in families in which the source of the stress is the child’s illness. Prospective associations were tested among mothers’ depressive symptoms near the time of their child’s cancer diagnosis, mothers’ expressed distress and their child’s emotional caretaking during an interaction task, and child anxious/depressed symptoms at 1 year postdiagnosis. Families (N = 78) were recruited from two pediatric hospitals soon after their child’s (Ages 5–18) new diagnosis or relapse of cancer. Mothers reported on their own depressive symptoms and their child’s anxious/depressed symptoms near the time of diagnosis or recurrence (Time 1) and 1 year later (Time 3). At Time 2 (4 months after Time 1), mother–child dyads completed a video-recorded discussion of their experience with cancer that was coded for observed maternal expressed distress (anxiety, sadness) and observed child emotional caretaking. Maternal expressed distress during the interaction was significantly related to more emotional caretaking behaviors by both boys and girls. Results of a moderated mediation model showed that child emotional caretaking at Time 2 significantly mediated the relation between maternal depressive symptoms at Time 1 and child anxious/depressed symptoms at Time 3 for girls but not for boys. The findings suggest that children’s emotional caretaking behaviors contribute to subsequent anxious/depressed symptoms for girls, but not for boys, with cancer.
Targeting modifiable risk factors in age-related macular degeneration in optometric practice in Sweden

Purpose The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which ophthalmologists and optometrists in Sweden recommend the use of nutritional supplements, changes in diet, or smoking cessation to patients who are at risk of or with signs of age-related macular degeneration (AMD). In addition, this study also examined how these practitioners rate the strength of evidence for nutritional supplements in AMD management and which sources of information they consult to determine supplement recommendations for the prevention or treatment of AMD. Methods This study implemented a cross-sectional design using data from a questionnaire. All Swedish optometrists and ophthalmologists who were registered in the membership databases of their respective professional organizations were invited to participate. The questionnaire contained 18 forced choice questions and one free text question and was organized into the following four sections: use of nutritional supplements, dietary advice, smoking and eye diseases, and strength of evidence and the sources of information regarding nutritional supplement interventions. Results The response rate was 40.3% for optometrists and 5% for ophthalmologists. Optometrists were more likely than ophthalmologists to recommend nutritional supplements in AMD and provided significantly more advice about diet than did the ophthalmologists for both patients at risk for AMD and those with established disease. The ophthalmologists were more likely than the optometrists to rely on the findings from the age-related eye disease studies of AMD regarding treatment with and selection of supplements and to recommend smoking cessation. Conclusion Common evidence-based strategies for AMD management among eye care professionals would presumably be beneficial for AMD patients. Targeted education and implementation strategies may be needed.
Modelling Cloud Federation: A Fair Profit Distribution Strategy Using the Shapley Value

Cloud computing provides software (Software as a Service), platform (Platform as a Service) and infrastructure (Infrastructure as a Service) services to its users by integrating IT resources into a large-scale and scalable resource pool through the virtualisation technology. However, the single cloud resource provider model currently implemented by many providers may fail short to meet the dynamic nature of cloud users' requirements. Cloud federation can mitigate this issue by optimising cloud resource allocation through sharing and re-usability of available resources. This paper revisit the problem of cloud engineering by tackling the key issue of the fair distribution of profit between cloud resource providers, which, to the best of our knowledge, has only been scarcely addressed by the research and practitioners' community. We propose a method that enables the cloud federation to map the contribution of resources of the participants to the federations into a quality of service metric used to achieve a cloud federation. Building upon a federation game implementation, we reveal the possibilities and benefits of different federation compositions using the Shapley value of each resource provider as a way of implementing a fair profit sharing strategy. Using extensions of the CloudSim package, we present simulation results that demonstrate the fairness of our proposed method and strategy.
Automated nasopharyngeal carcinoma segmentation in magnetic resonance images by combination of convolutional neural networks and graph cut

Accurate and reliable segmentation of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) in medical images is an import task for clinical applications, including radiotherapy. However, NPC features large variations in lesion size and shape, as well as inhomogeneous intensities within the tumor and similar intensity to that of nearby tissues, making its segmentation a challenging task. The present study proposes a novel automated NPC segmentation method in magnetic resonance (MR) images by combining a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) model and a 3-dimensional (3D) graph cut-based method in a two-stage manner. First, a multi-view deep CNN-based segmentation method is performed. A voxel-wise initial segmentation is generated by integrating the inferential classification information of three trained single-view CNNs. Instead of directly using the CNN classification results to achieve a final segmentation, the proposed method uses a 3D graph cut-based method to refine the initial segmentation. Specifically, the probability response map obtained using the multi-view CNN method is utilized to calculate the region cost, which represents the likelihood of a voxel being assigned to the tumor or non-tumor. Structure information in 3D from the original MR images is used to calculate the boundary cost, which measures the difference between the two voxels in the 3D neighborhood. The proposed method was evaluated on T1-weighted images from 30 NPC patients using the leave-one-out method. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method is effective and accurate for NPC segmentation.
French Canadian translation and the validity and inter-rater reliability of the ISTAP Skin Tear Classification System.

OBJECTIVE To adapt the International Skin Tear Advisory Panel (ISTAP) skin tear classification system into French Canadian, and to test the content validity and inter-rater reliability of the translated version. METHOD Phase one included the translation of the ISTAP skin tear classification system into French Canadian, using a forward-back translation method. Following this the translated version was tested for content validity and inter-rater reliability with registered nurses from a French acute care hospital in Ottawa, Canada. RESULTS The French Canadian translation of the ISTAP skin tear classification system was evaluated by 92 nurses without in-depth wound care training. The adapted version obtained a substantial level of agreement between users, (Fleiss' Kappa = 0.69). CONCLUSION The study tested the content validity and inter-rater reliability of the French Canadian version of the ISTAP skin tear classification system. The results support previous studies and further validate the classification system as a reliable method for classifying skin tears. The study supports ISTAP's goal of establishing a global language for describing and documenting skin tears.
Heated-Up Softmax Embedding

Metric learning aims at learning a distance which is consistent with the semantic meaning of the samples. The problem is generally solved by learning an embedding for each sample such that the embeddings of samples of the same category are compact while the embeddings of samples of different categories are spread-out in the feature space. We study the features extracted from the second last layer of a deep neural network based classifier trained with the cross entropy loss on top of the softmax layer. We show that training classifiers with different temperature values of softmax function leads to features with different levels of compactness. Leveraging these insights, we propose a "heating-up" strategy to train a classifier with increasing temperatures, leading the corresponding embeddings to achieve state-of-the-art performance on a variety of metric learning benchmarks.
Infrared Pedestrian Segmentation Through Background Likelihood and Object-Biased Saliency

Pedestrian segmentation in infrared images is a challenging problem due to low SNR and inhomogeneous luminance distribution. In this paper, we first introduce background prior and object-center prior into infrared pedestrian segmentation, and propose a robust and efficient saliency-based scheme, which aims to obtain the accurate pedestrian object. First, background likelihood is developed to abstract the object representation based on the Gaussian mixture model soft decomposition. Second, by combining the shape information and the infrared character of the pedestrians, kernel density estimation-based foreground estimation is proposed to obtain the saliency iteratively with better adaptable for the fuzzy contour of the infrared object. Third, pedestrian boundary weight is employed to integrate the above two saliency maps for more intact and accurate results. Finally, pedestrians can be easily segmented from the infrared images, through any existing segmentation methods, as simple as the Otsu threshold method, on the obtained final saliency map. Extensive experiments on real infrared images captured by intelligent transportation systems demonstrate that our saliency algorithm consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art saliency detection methods, in terms of higher precision, F-measure, and lower mean absolute error. The effectiveness of our proposed segmentation algorithm is also evaluated by comparisons with the existing infrared segmentation methods and yields more precise and intact pedestrian regions.
Does early onset asthma increase childhood obesity risk? A pooled analysis of 16 European cohorts

The parallel epidemics of childhood asthma and obesity over the past few decades have spurred research into obesity as a risk factor for asthma. However, little is known regarding the role of asthma in obesity incidence. We examined whether early-onset asthma and related phenotypes are associated with the risk of developing obesity in childhood. This study includes 21 130 children born from 1990 to 2008 in Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, The Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the UK. We followed non-obese children at 3–4 years of age for incident obesity up to 8 years of age. Physician-diagnosed asthma, wheezing and allergic rhinitis were assessed up to 3–4 years of age. Children with physician-diagnosed asthma had a higher risk for incident obesity than those without asthma (adjusted hazard ratio (aHR) 1.66, 95% CI 1.18–2.33). Children with active asthma (wheeze in the last 12 months and physician-diagnosed asthma) exhibited a higher risk for obesity (aHR 1.98, 95% CI 1.31–3.00) than those without wheeze and asthma. Persistent wheezing was associated with increased risk for incident obesity compared to never wheezers (aHR 1.51, 95% CI 1.08–2.09). Early-onset asthma and wheezing may contribute to an increased risk of developing obesity in later childhood. Children who have asthma or wheezing in early childhood may be at a higher risk of developing obesity http://ow.ly/HfKw30lhF3X
DIFS: Distributed Interest Forwarder Selection in Vehicular Named Data Networks

In this paper, we propose a distributed interest forwarder selection (DIFS) scheme that mitigates the interest broadcast storm in vehicular named data networks. In DIFS, a vehicle sends an interest packet piggybacking its location, distance to the neighbors, and speed. In this case, the immediate neighbors do not have the requested content and rank themselves to be an eligible interest forwarder by using multiple attributes. Additionally, every intermediate vehicle uses a digital map to be selected as forwarders in both (forward and backward) directions of the consumer. Simulations show that DIFS satisfies more interest packets with less delay as compared with the recent forwarding solutions.
Distance associated heterophoria measured with polarized Cross test of MKH method and its relationship to refractive error and age

Purpose Due to the expansion of modern optotype liquid crystal display with the help of positive polarization, measurement of heterophorias (HTFs) by means of polarization, and thus partial dissociation of perceptions, has become more and more accessible. Our aims were to establish the prevalence of distance associated HTF by measuring with polarized Cross test of MKH [measuring and correcting methodology after H-J Haase] method and its association with age and refractive error in clinical population of wide age range. Methods A cross-sectional study was carried out with 170 clinical subjects aged 15–78 years with an average age of 40.7±16.62 years. All the participants had best-corrected visual acuity better than 20/25, stereopsis ≤60 second of arc, no heterotropia, not undergone vision therapy, and had no eye disease. The distance associated HTF was measured with the Cross test of the MKH methodology. The quantification of associated HTF was acquired by means of Risley rotary prism. Results The occurrence of distance associated HTF was found in 71.2% of participants. Of the total, 36.5% of the cases had esophoria (EP), 9.4% EP and hyperphoria, 10.6% exophoria (XP), 7.1% XP and hyperphoria, 7.6% hyperphoria, and 28.8% orthophoria. The mean distance horizontal associated HTF was +0.76±2.38 Δ. With EP, the mean value was +2.47±2.18 Δ, and with XP, −2.1±1.72 Δ. There was no correlation observed between the amount of distance associated HTF and age. There was no effect of the type and amount of a refractive error on the amount of distance associated HTF. Conclusion A high occurrence of distance associated HTF was revealed while performing the polarized Cross test of MKH method. The relationship between the degree of associated HTF and refractive error and age was not proved.
Dynamic Range-Only Localization for Multi-Robot Systems

The localization problem for multi-robot teams has been extensively studied with the goal of obtaining precise positioning information, such as required by a variety of robotic applications. This paper proposes a dynamic localization approach that exploits multiple robots equipped with range-only ultra-wideband sensors to create and maintain a common self-adaptive coordinate system. For 2-D localization, we use three robots with relative range measurements to build a global coordinate system. We recursively apply an extended Kalman filter, which results in accurate position estimates over time. We also propose a reconfiguration approach that prevents error accumulation from ultra-wideband sensors. The applicability of our approach is tested through a campaign of simulations, which show promising results.
Urdu Optical Character Recognition Systems: Present Contributions and Future Directions

This paper gives an across-the-board comprehensive review and survey of the most prominent studies in the field of Urdu optical character recognition (OCR). This paper introduces the OCR technology and presents a historical review of the OCR systems, providing comparisons between the English, Arabic, and Urdu systems. Detailed background and literature have also been provided for Urdu script, discussing the script’s past, OCR categories, and phases. This paper further reports all state-of-the-art studies for different phases, namely, image acquisition, pre-processing, segmentation, feature extraction, classification/recognition, and post-processing for an Urdu OCR system. In the segmentation section, the analytical and holistic approaches for Urdu text have been emphasized. In the feature extraction section, a comparison has been provided between the feature learning and feature engineering approaches. Deep learning and traditional machine learning approaches have been discussed. The Urdu numeral recognition systems have also been deliberated concisely. The research paper concludes by identifying some open problems and suggesting some future directions.