Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Novelty and Coverage in context-based information filtering

We present a collection of algorithms to filter a stream of documents in such a way that the filtered documents will cover as well as possible the interest of a person, keeping in mind that, at any given time, the offered documents should not only be relevant, but should also be diversified, in the sense not only of avoiding nearly identical documents, but also of covering as well as possible all the interests of the person. We use a modification of the WEBSOM algorithm, with limited architectural adaptation, to create a user model (which we call the "user context" or simply the "context") based on a network of units laid out in the word space and trained using a collection of documents representative of the context. We introduce the concepts of novelty and coverage. Novelty is related to, but not identical to, the homonymous information retrieval concept: a document is novel it it belongs to a semantic area of interest to a person for which no documents have been seen in the recent past. A group of documents has coverage to the extent to which it is a good representation of all the interests of a person. In order to increase coverage, we introduce an "interest" (or "urgency") factor for each unit of the user model, modulated by the scores of the incoming documents: the interest of a unit is decreased drastically when a document arrives that belongs to its semantic area and slowly recovers its initial value if no documents from that semantic area are displayed. Our tests show that these algorithms can effectively increase the coverage of the documents that are shown to the user without overly affecting precision.
Outcomes of Resident-versus attending-performed Tube Shunt Surgeries in a United States Residency Program

ABSTRACT Introduction Glaucoma is a chronic optic neuropathy with increasing global prevalence, necessitating trainees in ophthalmology to be well-trained in the surgical modalities used to manage glaucoma. It is also important to not compromise patient safety and treatment efficacy for training and education. The purpose of our analysis is to compare postoperative outcomes of resident versus (vs.) attending performed tube shunt surgeries (TS). Materials and methods A retrospective, chart review was performed of patients who had undergone TS between 2009 and 2015 at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, USA. Inclusion criteria was patients with a confirmed diagnosis of glaucoma, who underwent either an Ahmed or Baerveldt TS, and had at least two evaluation visits before the surgery to establish baseline characteristics. Exclusion criteria were patients with follow up for less than 1 year. The main outcome measure was the surgical success at 1 year follow up after TS. Surgical success was defined according to recommendations from the Glaucoma Surgical Trials guidelines published by the World Glaucoma Association (WGA): • 20% reduction in IOP and absolute IOP ≤ 21 mm Hg (criteria 1) • 30% reduction in IOP and absolute IOP ≤ 18 mm Hg (criteria 2) Results A total of 120 cases: 60 attending and 60 resident cases that met all the inclusion criteria and none of the exclusion criteria were included. The mean intraocular pressure (IOP) one year post surgery were 15.06 ± 3.55 and 15.21 ± 5.17 mm Hg for attendings and residents respectively (p = 0.422). At the 1 year time point, 87% of resident cases and 95% of attending cases met the qualifications of criteria 1 for success. Kaplan Meier analysis was performed and did not show a significant difference in the outcome (p = 0.325). At the 1 year time point, 80% of attending and resident cases met the qualifications of criteria 2 for success. Kaplan-Meier analysis was performed and did not show a significant difference in the outcome (p = 0.401). There were no differences in complication and failure rates between resident and attending performed cases. Resident-performed cases had a longer intraoperative time in comparison to attending performed cases (p = 0.02). Conclusion Resident-performed surgeries are as effective as attending performed surgeries. Resident-performed TS does not compromise safety and better prepares future physicians to deliver optimal care. Clinical Significance Attendings may consider incorporating more resident performed, attending supervised TS procedures into their clinical practice as surgical training to manage common ophthalmological conditions like glaucoma is essential to residency training. How to cite this article: Thangamathesvaran L, Crane E, Modi K, Khouri AS. Outcomes of Resident-versus attending-performed Tube Shunt Surgeries in a United States Residency Program. J Curr Glaucoma Pract 2018;12(2):53-58.
EMD-Based Feature to Detect Situational Interest in Classroom Settings Using EEG

Student's performance assessment tools had gone through a huge improvement throughout time and reached high levels of reliability and accuracy. According to several studies, situational interest measure can be used to assess and improve student's academic achievement. So far, there is a lack in defining objective measures for situational interest rather than depending on the subjective measures. In this paper, we propose the use of EMD-based feature to detect situational interest in classroom settings using EEG. Several subjective measures: Personal Interest (PI) test, Situational Interest (SI) test and knowledge tests were used to evaluate subjectively student's interest. EEG data were then preprocessed and decomposed using Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) and the resulted Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs) was ranked using t-test to select the most significant ones. Eight features out of the 64 features extracted, were then fed into KNN and SVM classifiers achieving high accuracy of 90% and 100% respectively using features from temporal regions.
Diet‐induced insulin resistance elevates hippocampal glutamate as well as VGLUT1 and GFAP expression in AβPP/PS1 mice

The symptomologies of Alzheimer's disease (AD) develop over decades suggesting modifiable lifestyle factors may contribute to disease pathogenesis. In humans, hyperinsulinemia associated with type 2 diabetes mellitus increases the risk for developing AD and both diseases share similar age‐related etiologies including amyloidogenesis. Since we have demonstrated that soluble Aβ42 elicits glutamate release, we wanted to understand how diet‐induced insulin resistance alters hippocampal glutamate dynamics, which are important for memory formation and consolidation. Eight to twelve‐week‐old C57BL/6J and AβPP/PS1 mice were placed on either a low‐fat diet or high‐fat diet (HFD) for 8 months. A HFD led to significant weight increases as well as impaired insulin sensitivity, glucose tolerance, and learning in both C57BL/6J and AβPP/PS1 mice. AβPP/PS1 low‐fat diet mice had elevated hippocampal basal as well as stimulus‐evoked glutamate release that was further increased with consumption of a HFD. Immunohistochemistry indicated an increase in vesicular glutamate transporter 1 and glial fibrillary acidic protein density in hippocampal subregions corresponding with this elevated extracellular glutamate. While no differences in hippocampal plaque load were observed, the elevated astrogliotic response surrounding the plaques in AβPP/PS1 HFD mice may have been a compensatory mechanism to control plaque accumulation. These data support that AβPP/PS1 mice have chronically elevated extracellular glutamate that is exacerbated by a HFD and that modifiable lifestyle factors such as obesity‐induced insulin resistance can contribute to AD pathogenesis.
Describe and Attend to Track: Learning Natural Language guided Structural Representation and Visual Attention for Object Tracking

The tracking-by-detection framework requires a set of positive and negative training samples to learn robust tracking models for precise localization of target objects. However, existing tracking models mostly treat different samples independently while ignores the relationship information among them. In this paper, we propose a novel structure-aware deep neural network to overcome such limitations. In particular, we construct a graph to represent the pairwise relationships among training samples, and additionally take the natural language as the supervised information to learn both feature representations and classifiers robustly. To refine the states of the target and re-track the target when it is back to view from heavy occlusion and out of view, we elaborately design a novel subnetwork to learn the target-driven visual attentions from the guidance of both visual and natural language cues. Extensive experiments on five tracking benchmark datasets validated the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Frequency Principle in Deep Learning with General Loss Functions and Its Potential Application

Previous studies have shown that deep neural networks (DNNs) with common settings often capture target functions from low to high frequency, which is called Frequency Principle (F-Principle). It has also been shown that F-Principle can provide an understanding to the often observed good generalization ability of DNNs. However, previous studies focused on the loss function of mean square error, while various loss functions are used in practice. In this work, we show that the F-Principle holds for a general loss function (e.g., mean square error, cross entropy, etc.). In addition, DNN's F-Principle may be applied to develop numerical schemes for solving various problems which would benefit from a fast converging of low frequency. As an example of the potential usage of F-Principle, we apply DNN in solving differential equations, in which conventional methods (e.g., Jacobi method) is usually slow in solving problems due to the convergence from high to low frequency.
Tau Accumulation in Clinically Normal Older Adults Is Associated with Hippocampal Hyperactivity

Animal studies demonstrate that hyperactive neurons facilitate early accumulation and spread of tau and amyloid-β proteins in the pathological cascade of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Human neuroimaging studies have linked hippocampal hyperactivity to amyloid-β accumulation, apolipoprotein ε4 (APOE4) and clinical progression from prodromal AD to clinical dementia. The relationship between hippocampal hyperactivity and early AD molecular pathology (amyloid-β and tau accumulation) before clinical symptoms remains to be elucidated. Here, we studied 120 clinically normal older humans (80 females/40 males) enrolled in the Harvard Aging Brain Study. We measured functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) activity during successful memory encoding and amyloid-β accumulation with PiB-positron emission tomography imaging. Additionally, we measured tau accumulation using AV1451 PET imaging in a subset of 87 participants. In this subset, we found that inferior temporal tau accumulation was associated with increased fMRI activity in the hippocampus, but showed no clear association with amyloid. Together, the findings support a hypothetical model of the evolution of preclinical AD that place hippocampal hyperactivity concurrent with spread of tau pathology to neocortical regions before clinical impairment. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT The circumstances under which the hippocampus becomes hyperactive in preclinical stages of Alzheimer's disease (AD) have thus far remained elusive. Recent advances in positron emission tomography (PET) tracers now enable in vivo characterization of amyloid-β and tau accumulation. Here, we combine amyloid and tau PET with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the association between Alzheimer's disease pathology and memory-related brain activity in clinically normal older adults. We found an association between increased hippocampal activity and tau accumulation in the inferior temporal cortex. These data suggest that the pathogenesis of hippocampal hyperactivity occurs concurrent with the spread of tau pathology from the entorhinal cortex to the neocortex, before the clinical manifestations of Alzheimer's disease.
Disrupted Balance of Long- and Short-Range Functional Connectivity Density in Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus: A Resting-State fMRI Study

Previous studies have shown that type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) can accelerate the rate of cognitive decline in patients. As an organ with high energy consumption, the brain network balances between lower energy consumption and higher information transmission efficiency. However, T2DM may modify the proportion of short- and long-range connections to adapt to the inadequate energy supply and to respond to various cognitive tasks under the energy pressure caused by homeostasis alterations in brain glucose metabolism. On the basis of the above theories, this study determined the abnormal functional connections of the brain in 32 T2DM patients compared with 32 healthy control (HC) subjects using long- and short-range functional connectivity density (FCD) analyses with resting-state fMRI data. The cognitive function level in these patients was also evaluated by neuropsychological tests. Moreover, the characteristics of abnormal FCD and their relationships with cognitive impairment were investigated in T2DM patients. Compared with the HC group, T2DM patients exhibited decreased long-range FCD in the left calcarine and left lingual gyrus and increased short-range FCD in the right angular gyrus and medial part of the left superior frontal gyrus (p < 0.05, Gaussian random-field theory corrected). In T2DM patients, the FCD z scores of the medial part of the left superior frontal gyrus were negatively correlated with the time cost in part B of the Trail Making Test (ρ = -0.422, p = 0.018). In addition, the FCD z scores of the right angular gyrus were negatively correlated with the long-term delayed recall scores of the Auditory Verbal Learning Test (ρ = -0.356, p = 0.049) and the forward scores of the Digital Span Test (ρ = -0.373, p = 0.039). T2DM patients exhibited aberrant long-range and short-range FCD patterns, which may suggest brain network reorganization at the expense of losing the integration of long-range FCD to adapt to the deficiency in energy supply. These changes may be associated with cognitive decline in T2DM patients.
A neural network MODIS-CERES narrowband to broadband conversion

Monitoring changes of radiative energy budget at the top of the atmosphere requires satellite measurements with good instrument stability and very high accuracy. With climate monitoring in mind, improving instrument stability has been one of the most important objectives of CERES instrument designs. This study is aimed at assessing such instrument stability objectively by investigating the distributions of radiative fluxes ftom satellite measurements of well defined atmospheric objects. With months of CERES observations on TRMM and TERRA, we have developed a strategy to demonstrate the month-to-month stability of CERES instruments by studying the distributions of deep convective cloud albedos as well as outgoing longwave fluxes. Our study shows that both shortwave and longewave radiative flux distributions of CERES measurements for such objects are practically identical ftom month to month. It also shows very little differences among TRMM CERES, TERRA CERES FM I and FM2. This study also intends to provide an objective stability analysis of narrowband instrument, such as MODIS, in terms of energy budget. First, we develop a neural network model which performs MODIS narrowband radiances to CERES broadband radiance conversions. Then, we study the monthly mean flux distributions derived from the narrowband-broadband conversion. Collocated MODIS and CERES cross track scanning data are used for training the multi-level feedforward back-propagating neural network model with special noise handling characteristics. Other information, such as theoretical radiative transfer calculations are adopted for improving the design of the neural network model as well as filling missing data at certain viewing angular geometry.
The development of Bayesian integration in sensorimotor estimation

If the brain is inherently Bayesian, then behavior should show the signatures of Bayesian computation from an early stage in life without the need for learning. Children should integrate probabilistic information from prior and likelihood distributions to reach decisions and should be as statistically efficient as adults. To test this idea, we examined the integration of prior and likelihood information in a simple position estimation task comparing children aged 6-11 years and adults. During development, estimation performance became closer to the statistical optimum. Children use likelihood information as well as adults but are limited in their use of priors. This finding suggests that Bayesian behavior is not inherent but learnt over the course of development.
Classification and Prediction of Macroinvertebrate Assemblages from Running Waters in Victoria, Australia

We constructed predictive models using 2 macroinvertebrate data sets (for both species and family) from bankside habitats at 49 undisturbed reference sites from 6 Victorian river basins; data were accumulated over 4 to 6 sampling occasions. Classification (by unweighted pair-group arithmetic averaging with the Bray-Curtis association measure) showed 3 site groups were evident at the species level and 4 at the family level. A subset of 5 of 22 environmental variables provided maximum discrimination (using stepwise discriminant analysis) between the 3 species site groups; these variables were: conductivity, altitude, substrate heterogeneity, distance of a site from source, and longitude. Four variables discriminated between the 4 family site groups: conductivity, catchment area upstream of site, mean annual discharge, and latitude. From the discriminant analysis, it was possible to predict the group into which an unknown site (specified only by measurements on the 4 or 5 variables just noted) would be placed and thus the probabilities of occurrence of taxa at this site. To test predictive ability, 4 sites were removed at random from the 2 data sets and the classification and discriminant models were recalculated. This process was repeated 5 times. The identity and number of taxa observed at each of these sites were compared with those predicted with a probability of occurrence >50% and the results expressed as a ratio of numbers observed to numbers expected (O/E). This ratio varied from 0.75 to 1.05 at the species level and from 0.83 to 1.12 at the family level, indicating that the fauna conformed with expectation (O/E near 1.0). To test such predictive models on independent data, O/E ratios were also calculated for family data collected in spring at 18 sites from a basin not used in the original models. Two new discriminant models based on single sets of samples from the reference sites taken in spring were constructed for this purpose. O/E ratios varied from 0.09 to 1.01 for the 18 sites and were inversely correlated (r = -0.4 to -0.8) with a range of water quality variables, the values of which increased as water quality deteriorated. The O/E ratio could thus be considered a sensitive measure of disturbance.
Pupil Responses of Adults With Traumatic Brain Injury During Processing of Speech in Noise

Previous research has shown the effects of task demands on pupil responses in both normal hearing (NH) and hearing impaired (HI) adults. One consistent finding is that HI listeners have smaller pupil dilations at low levels of speech recognition performance (≤50%). This study aimed to examine the pupil dilation in adults with a normal pure-tone audiogram who experience serious difficulties when processing speech-in-noise. Hence, 20 adults, aged 26 to 62 years, with traumatic brain injury (TBI) or cerebrovascular accident (CVA) but with a normal audiogram participated. Their pupil size was recorded while they listened to sentences masked by fluctuating noise or interfering speech at 50% and 84% intelligibility. In each condition, participants rated their perceived performance, effort, and task persistence. In addition, participants performed the text reception threshold task—a visual sentence completion task—that measured language-related processing. Data were compared with those of age-matched NH and HI participants with no neurological problems obtained in earlier studies using the same setup and design. The TBI group had the same pure-tone audiogram and text reception threshold scores as the NH listeners, yet their speech reception thresholds were significantly worse. Although the pupil dilation responses on average did not differ between groups, self-rated effort scores were highest in the TBI group. Results of a correlation analyses showed that TBI participants with worse speech reception thresholds had a smaller pupil response. We speculate that increased distractibility or fatigue affected the ability of TBI participants to allocate effort during speech perception in noise.
Geography and Environment Shape Landscape Genetics of Mediterranean Alpine Species Silene ciliata Poiret. (Caryophyllaceae)

The study of the drivers that shape spatial genetic structure across heterogeneous landscapes is one of the main approaches used to understand population dynamics and responses in changing environments. While the Isolation-by-Distance model (IBD) assumes that genetic differentiation increases among populations with geographical distance, the Isolation-by-Resistance model (IBR) also considers geographical barriers and other landscape features that impede gene flow. On the other hand, the Isolation-by-Environment model (IBE) explains genetic differentiation through environmental differences between populations. Although spatial genetic studies have increased significantly in recent years, plants from alpine ecosystems are highly underrepresented, even though they are great suitable systems to disentangle the role of the different factors that structure genetic variation across environmental gradients. Here, we studied the spatial genetic structure of the Mediterranean alpine specialist Silene ciliata across its southernmost distribution limit. We sampled three populations across an altitudinal gradient from 1850 to 2400 m, and we replicated this sample over three mountain ranges aligned across an E-W axis in the central part of the Iberian Peninsula. We genotyped 20 individuals per population based on eight microsatellite markers and used different landscape genetic tools to infer the role of topographic and environmental factors in shaping observed patterns along the altitudinal gradient. We found a significant genetic structure among the studied Silene ciliata populations which was related to the orography and E-W configuration of the mountain ranges. IBD pattern arose as the main factor shaping population genetic differentiation. Geographical barriers between mountain ranges also affected the spatial genetic structure (IBR pattern). Although environmental variables had a significant effect on population genetic diversity parameters, no IBE pattern was found on genetic structure. Our study reveals that IBD was the driver that best explained the genetic structure, whereas environmental factors also played a role in determining genetic diversity values of this dominant plant of Mediterranean alpine environments.