Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Leftovers in seed dispersal: ecological implications of partial seed consumption for oak regeneration

1. Successful seed dispersal by animals is assumed to occur when undamaged seeds arrive at a favourable microsite. Most seed removal and dispersal studies consider only two possible seed fates, predation or escape intact. Whether partial consumption of seeds has ecological implications for natural regeneration is unclear. We studied partial consumption of seeds in a rodent-dispersed oak species. 2. Fifteen percent of dispersed acorns were found partially eaten in a field experiment. Most damage affected only the basal portion of the seeds, resulting in no embryo damage. Partially eaten acorns had no differences in dispersal distance compared to intact acorns but were recovered at farther distances than completely consumed acorns. 3. Partially eaten acorns were found under shrub cover unlike intact acorns that were mostly dispersed to open microhabitats. 4. Partially eaten acorns were not found buried proportionally more often than intact acorns, leading to desiccation and exposure to biotic agents (predators, bacteria and fungi). However, partial consumption caused more rapid germination, which enables the acorns to tolerate the negative effects of exposure. 5. Re-caching and shrub cover as microhabitat of destination promote partial seed consumption. Larger acorns escaped predation more often and had higher uneaten cotyledon mass. Satiation at seed level is the most plausible explanation for partial consumption. 6. Partial consumption caused no differences in root biomass when acorns experienced only small cotyledon loss. However, root biomass was lower when acorns experienced heavy loss of tissue but, surprisingly, they produced longer roots, which allow the seeds to gain access sooner to deeper resources. 7.Synthesis. Partial consumption of acorns is an important event in the oak regeneration process, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Most acorns were damaged non-lethally, without decreasing both dispersal distances and the probability of successful establishment. Faster germination and production of longer roots allow partially eaten seeds to tolerate better the exposure disadvantages caused by the removal of the pericarp and the non-buried deposition. Consequently, partially consumed seeds can contribute significantly to natural regeneration and must be considered in future seed dispersal studies.
Volumetry based biomarker speed of growth: Quantifying the change of total tumor volume in whole-body magnetic resonance imaging over time improves risk stratification of smoldering multiple myeloma patients

The purpose of this study was to improve risk stratification of smoldering multiple myeloma patients, introducing new 3D-volumetry based imaging biomarkers derived from whole-body MRI. Two-hundred twenty whole-body MRIs from 63 patients with smoldering multiple myeloma were retrospectively analyzed and all focal lesions >5mm were manually segmented for volume quantification. The imaging biomarkers total tumor volume, speed of growth (development of the total tumor volume over time), number of focal lesions, development of the number of focal lesions over time and the recent imaging biomarker ‘>1 focal lesion’ of the International Myeloma Working Group were compared, taking 2-year progression rate, sensitivity and false positive rate into account. Speed of growth, using a cutoff of 114mm3/month, was able to isolate a high-risk group with a 2-year progression rate of 82.5%. Additionally, it showed by far the highest sensitivity in this study and in comparison to other biomarkers in the literature, detecting 63.2% of patients who progress within 2 years. Furthermore, its false positive rate (8.7%) was much lower compared to the recent imaging biomarker ‘>1 focal lesion’ of the International Myeloma Working Group. Therefore, speed of growth is the preferable imaging biomarker for risk stratification of smoldering multiple myeloma patients.
BCI-Based Strategies on Stroke Rehabilitation with Avatar and FES Feedback

Stroke is the leading cause of serious and long-term disability worldwide. Some studies have shown that motor imagery (MI) based BCI has a positive effect in poststroke rehabilitation. It could help patients promote the reorganization processes in the damaged brain regions. However, offline motor imagery and conventional online motor imagery with feedback (such as rewarding sounds and movements of an avatar) could not reflect the true intention of the patients. In this study, both virtual limbs and functional electrical stimulation (FES) were used as feedback to provide patients a closed-loop sensorimotor integration for motor rehabilitation. The FES system would activate if the user was imagining hand movement of instructed side. Ten stroke patients (7 male, aged 22-70 years, mean 49.5+-15.1) were involved in this study. All of them participated in BCI-FES rehabilitation training for 4 weeks.The average motor imagery accuracies of the ten patients in the last week were 71.3%, which has improved 3% than that in the first week. Five patients' Fugl-Meyer Assessment (FMA) scores have been raised. Patient 6, who has have suffered from stroke over two years, achieved the greatest improvement after rehabilitation training (pre FMA: 20, post FMA: 35). In the aspect of brain patterns, the active patterns of the five patients gradually became centralized and shifted to sensorimotor areas (channel C3 and C4) and premotor area (channel FC3 and FC4). In this study, motor imagery based BCI and FES system were combined to provided stoke patients with a closed-loop sensorimotor integration for motor rehabilitation. Result showed evidences that the BCI-FES system is effective in restoring upper extremities motor function in stroke. In future work, more cases are needed to demonstrate its superiority over conventional therapy and explore the potential role of MI in poststroke rehabilitation.
To Trust Or Not To Trust A Classifier

Knowing when a classifier's prediction can be trusted is useful in many applications and critical for safely using AI. While the bulk of the effort in machine learning research has been towards improving classifier performance, understanding when a classifier's predictions should and should not be trusted has received far less attention. The standard approach is to use the classifier's discriminant or confidence score; however, we show there exists an alternative that is more effective in many situations. We propose a new score, called the trust score, which measures the agreement between the classifier and a modified nearest-neighbor classifier on the testing example. We show empirically that high (low) trust scores produce surprisingly high precision at identifying correctly (incorrectly) classified examples, consistently outperforming the classifier's confidence score as well as many other baselines. Further, under some mild distributional assumptions, we show that if the trust score for an example is high (low), the classifier will likely agree (disagree) with the Bayes-optimal classifier. Our guarantees consist of non-asymptotic rates of statistical consistency under various nonparametric settings and build on recent developments in topological data analysis.
Determination of the relationship between doxorubicin resistance and Wnt signaling pathway in HeLa and K562 cell lines

Activation of the Wnt signaling in some types of cancer and its relation with chemotherapy resistance is a very interesting issue that has been emphasized in recent years. Although, it is known that increase in the activity of β-catenin is important in blast transformation and drug resistance, the underlying mechanisms are still unclear. In this study, changes in the expression levels of 186 genes that are thought to be important in drug resistance and Wnt signaling pathways were determined by using qPCR method in doxorubicin-sensitive and -resistant HeLa and K562 cell lines. It has been observed that the genes involved in the Wnt signaling pathways are involved in more changes in HeLa/Dox cells (36 genes) than in the K562/Dox cells (17 genes). Genes important for the development of cancer resistance have been found to be significantly different in expression levels of 18 genes in HeLa/Dox cells and 20 genes in K562/Dox cells. In both cell lines, the expression of ABCB1 gene was significantly increased to 160 and 103 fold, respectively. However, despite the resistance to same drug in HeLa and K562 cell lines, it appears that the expression levels of different oncogenes and genes involved in Wnt signaling pathways have been altered. It has been found that although resistance develops to the same drug in both cell lines, the expression levels of different genes have changed. If functional analysis of these genes is performed on patient population groups, these molecules may become candidates for novel therapeutic target molecules.
Scene Classification in Indoor Environments for Robots using Context Based Word Embeddings

Scene Classification has been addressed with numerous techniques in computer vision literature. However, with the increasing number of scene classes in datasets in the field, it has become difficult to achieve high accuracy in the context of robotics. In this paper, we implement an approach which combines traditional deep learning techniques with natural language processing methods to generate a word embedding based Scene Classification algorithm. We use the key idea that context (objects in the scene) of an image should be representative of the scene label meaning a group of objects could assist to predict the scene class. Objects present in the scene are represented by vectors and the images are re-classified based on the objects present in the scene to refine the initial classification by a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). In our approach we address indoor Scene Classification task using a model trained with a reduced pre-processed version of the Places365 dataset and an empirical analysis is done on a real-world dataset that we built by capturing image sequences using a GoPro camera. We also report results obtained on a subset of the Places365 dataset using our approach and additionally show a deployment of our approach on a robot operating in a real-world environment.
A comparative study on the advancement of text steganography techniques in digital media

One of the common practices applied to ensure secrecy in the modern day is through an information hiding technique known as steganography, which dates back to the ancient Greece. This study investigates digital steganography and its techniques that primarily focus on text steganography. At the same time, it also attempts to present a distinctive classification in dealing with steganography based on each technique. Three types of steganography classifications were discussed, that consist of the type of carrier file, natural key used, and the embedding techniques. Text steganography can then be further separated into three categories: format based methods, random and statistical generation, and linguistics method. Techniques belonging to each category were studied, and comparisons between each technique are introduced by highlighting the findings. This study also confirmed that there are three principal factors that need to be further explored and taken into account in the design of future steganographic systems, which are the capacity, high transparency, and security.
Cardiothyreosis: Risk Factors and Clinical Profile

Introduction: The diagnosis of cardiothyreosis is based on the presence of the association of thyrotoxicosis and various cardiovascular disorders such as heart failure, coronary artery disease, rhythm or conduction disorders. Data are limited on this entity in Africa which a frequency of 10% to 33% among hyperthyroidism. We aimed to evaluate these risk factors and describe its diagnostic features in Abass Ndao Hospital Center of Dakar. Patients and Methods: It was a descriptive and analytical cross sectional study conducted from 1 January 2010 to 31 December 2014, including all cases of hyperthyroidism with cardiothyreosis. Epidemiological data, cardiovascular risk factors and characteristics of cardiothyreosis were evaluated. Results: 150 cases of cardiothyreosis were collected with a prevalence of 9.8% among 1517 hyperthyroidism. Mean age was 42.6 ± 9 years and sex ratio 0.33. It was a Graves’ disease in 82.2% of cases. Time limit of cardiothyreosis appearance was 27 ± 41 months and cardiothyreosis was inaugural in 46.6%. Electrocardiogram showed an arrhythmia (38.7%), coronary insufficiency (8%). On echocardiography assessment, impairment of left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) was found in 18.5%. Of these, it was 34.7% of arrhythmia, 8.6% of coronary insufficiency and 65.2% of heart failure. Among patients with pulmonary artery hypertension (PAH) (57.3%), there were a rhythm disorder (38%), coronary insufficiency (5.6%) and heart failure (78.8%). Female gender was the only one at risk of arrhythmia (p = 0.01) and impaired of left ventricular ejection fraction (p = 0.007). Existence of a free T4 > 50 pmol/L (p = 0.05) were only at risk of developing pulmonary artery hypertension. Conclusion: Cardiothyreosis is a significant complication. These discovery methods call for more early diagnosis and appropriate treatment. Female gender and severity of thyrotoxicosis seem to precipitate the clinical picture. Echocardiography remains an indispensable tool for assessing cardiac consequences.
In vitro and in silico liver models : Current trends , challenges and opportunities 1

Andrey Poloznikov, Irina Gazaryan, Maxim Shkurnikov, Sergey Nikulin, Oxana Drapkina, Ancha Baranova and Alexander Tonevitsky Hertsen Moscow Oncology Research Institute, Branch of the National Medical Research Radiological Center, Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation, Moscow, Russia; Far Eastern Federal University, Vladivostok, Russia; Dmitry Rogachev National Medical Research Center of Pediatric Hematology, Oncology and Immunology, Moscow, Russia; Department of Cell Biology and Anatomy, School of Medicine, New York Medical College, Valhalla, NY, USA; Department of Chemistry and Physical Sciences, Dyson College, Pace University, Pleasantville, NY, USA; Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Dolgoprudny, Moscow, Russia; National Research Center for Preventive Medicine of the Ministry of Healthcare of the Russian Federation, Moscow, Russia; School of Systems Biology, George Mason University (GMU), Fairfax, VA, USA; Federal State Budgetary Institution “Research Centre for Medical Genetics”, Moscow, Russia; Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia; art photonics GmbH, Berlin, Germany
Responsiveness of Health Professionals to Postabortion Care at a Regional Level Hospital in Ghana: A Qualitative Study of Patients' Self-Reports

Background The responsiveness of health professionals to patients in the provision of abortion services is essential to influencing patients' perceptions and expectations regarding the quality of medical care to be received and their general satisfaction. This, in turn, determines if patients will revisit a particular health facility to access abortion services. In this study, we examine the responsiveness of health professionals in providing postabortion care at a regional level health facility in Ghana. Methods Qualitative data collected from 20 female patients who assessed abortion services at a regional level health facility in Ghana were used. The sample was achieved through saturation while a systematic qualitative orientated text analysis was adopted in analysing the data. Results Health professionals were responsive to postabortion care at the facility. Most women who sought postabortion care at the facility were referred from other health facilities which could not handle such cases. Other reasons include satisfaction with services received on previous visits to the hospital. We also realized, however, that postabortion services were not covered by the National Health Insurance Scheme. Conclusions All hospitals across the country should be equipped with the basic equipment and personnel to conduct and manage abortions. This would reduce not only referrals but also possible maternal deaths. Abortion services should also be added to the services covered by the country's National Health Insurance Scheme.
Phenotypic plasticity of anuran larvae: environmental variables influence body shape and oral morphology in Rana temporaria tadpoles

Environmental variables shaped the morphology of tadpoles of the common frog, Rana temporaria , in various ways at the Pyrenean locality Circo de Piedrafita. Examining only specimens in similar developmental stages, those from small ponds (with higher temperature and higher tadpole density) had lower growth rates, lower relative tail height, lower relative body width and fewer labial keratodonts and keratodont rows. The variation in keratodonts may have been caused by heterochrony related to the slower growth rate. The number of lingual papillae also differed between ponds but was not related to pond size. Higher predator densities caused a higher percentage of damaged tails and a lower relative tail length in specimens with apparently intact tails, probably as a result of incomplete regeneration after mutilations earlier in development.
Differential Relations Between Delay Discounting and Distress Tolerance as a Function of Opportunity Cost and Alcohol Use

Delay discounting refers to one process by which an individual devalues delayed outcomes. Typical discounting tasks provide no information about events during delays to larger-later rewards. Imposing opportunity costs during the delay increases how steeply delayed rewards are discounted (P. S. Johnson, Herrmann, & Johnson, 2015). The present research evaluated whether distress tolerance (i.e., one’s ability to tolerate distressing emotions and events) is related to discounting rates when opportunity costs are low, high, or unspecified. In a sample of predominantly female college students, we partially replicated that delay discounting was related to distress tolerance when opportunity costs were unspecified (significant relations confined to particular facets of distress tolerance), but distress tolerance was not related to delay discounting when opportunity costs were specified as low or high. The nature of the relation between distress tolerance and discounting when opportunity costs were unspecified was clarified by a significant interaction between alcohol use and distress tolerance; distress tolerance was unrelated to delay discounting except among participants with problematic alcohol use. Further research is needed to characterize relations between alcohol use, distress tolerance, and delay discounting and inform prevention and treatment efforts in at-risk populations.
Single-Frequency Ultrasound-Based Respiration Rate Estimation with Smartphones

Respiration monitoring is helpful in disease prevention and diagnosis. Traditional respiration monitoring requires users to wear devices on their bodies, which is inconvenient for them. In this paper, we aim to design a noncontact respiration rate detection system utilizing off-the-shelf smartphones. We utilize the single-frequency ultrasound as the media to detect the respiration activity. By analyzing the ultrasound signals received by the built-in microphone sensor in a smartphone, our system can derive the respiration rate of the user. The advantage of our method is that the transmitted signal is easy to generate and the signal analysis is simple, which has lower power consumption and thus is suitable for long-term monitoring in daily life. The experimental result shows that our system can achieve accurate respiration rate estimation under various scenarios.
Quality of Life in Fitness Centers Goers

The purpose of this study was to verify the association between physical activity frequency and quality of life among fitness centers goers. Participants were 299 individuals of both genders, who attended eight fitness centers. For the collect of sociodemographic data, weekly frequency, duration and time of practice of physical activity, a biosociodemographic questionnaire was used. The quality of life was measured using the WHOQOL-100 questionnaire. Numerical variables were described as mean ± standard deviation or median (25 percentile—75 percentile) and categorical variables as absolute or relative frequency. The associations between quality of life and weekly frequency of physical activity were evaluated using the Spearman correlation coefficient. Comparisons between quality of life and gender, age group, duration of training, schooling and socioeconomic level were tested through analysis of variance and the Tukey post hoc test. A probability value of P ≤ 0.05 was considered statistically significant. Of the total number of respondents, 62.2% were women; 54.9% practiced physical activity four or more times a week and 69.6% had practice lasting up to 90 minutes. There were statistically significant differences between the duration of physical activity in terms of physical, psychological, independence and facet 25, which evaluates the general quality of life. Subjects with prolonged frequency (0.3%) obtained the best scores in relation to the domains, physical and psychological. Men had a higher score than women in the psychological domain and level of independence. There were no statistically significant differences in quality of life among the different age groups. It’s concluded that the more active people are, the better their quality of life is.
PROMIS Peer Relationships Short Form: How Well Does Self-Report Correlate With Data From Peers?

Objective To examine the psychometric properties of the Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS®) peer relationships short form (PR-SF), including association with peer-reported friendships, likeability, and social reputation. Method 203 children (Mage = 10.12 years, SD = 2.37, range = 6-14) in Grades 1-8 completed the 8-item PR-SF and friendship nominations, like ratings, and social reputation measures about their peers during 2 classroom visits approximately 4 months apart, as part of a larger study. A confirmatory factor analysis, followed by an exploratory factor analysis, was conducted to examine the factor structure of the PR-SF. Spearman correlations between the PR-SF and peer-reported outcomes evaluated construct validity. Results For the PR-SF, a 2-factor solution demonstrated better fit than a 1-factor solution. The 2 factors appear to assess friendship quality (3 items) and peer acceptance (5 items). Reliability was marginal for the friendship quality factor (.66) but adequate for the acceptance factor (.85); stability was . 34 for the PR-SF over 4 months. The PR-SF (8 items) and acceptance factor (5 items) both had modest but significant correlations with measures of friendship (rs = .25-.27), likeability (rs = .21-.22), and social reputation (rs = .29-.44). Conclusions The PR-SF appears to be measuring two distinct aspects of social functioning. The 5-item peer acceptance scale is modestly associated with peer-reported friendship, likeability, and social reputation. Although not a replacement for peer-reported outcomes, the PR-SF is a promising patient-reported outcome for peer relationships in youth.
How Teachers Perceiv e Their Classroom Environments and Student Goal Orientation: A Look into High School Biology Classrooms in Kenya

Aims: To examine teachersand observersperceptions of classroom climate and goal orientation in high school biology classrooms in Kenya. Study Design: A mixed design utilizing quantitative and qualitative approach. Place and Duration of Study:A boysand girlsboarding high schools in Kenya, observed between May and July of 2010. Methodology: Participants included 12 biology teachers from two same se