Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pre‐ and Postnatal Lung Development: An Updated Species Comparison

The purpose of this review is to give an outline of respiratory tract morphological and functional development with an emphasis on perinatal and postnatal maturational processes. In view of the rising need for qualitative and quantitative data for the development of pediatric pharmaceuticals, a comparison of the human situation to experimental animal models is made, and functional data as well as suitable models for human airway diseases and functional testing are presented. Birth Defects Research 109:1519–1539, 2017. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
High‐Dose Chemotherapy with Peripheral Blood Stem Cell Support for Operable Locally Advanced Noninflammatory Carcinoma of the Breast

▪ Abstract: The purpose of this study was to determine outcomes for patients with operable noninflammatory stage IIIA/B locally advanced breast cancer (LABC) with positive axillary lymph nodes receiving high‐dose chemotherapy (HDC) with peripheral blood stem cell (PBSC) support. One hundred fifteen patients with LABC who were no evidence of disease (NED) after initial surgery received standard dose induction chemotherapy, chemotherapy for mobilization of PBSC, and high‐dose cyclophosphamide, thiotepa, and carboplatin with PBSC support for adjuvant therapy. Following hematopoietic recovery, all patients were scheduled to receive radiation therapy and tamoxifen was administered if the primary tumor was estrogen receptor/progesterone receptor (ER/PR) positive. Eighty‐eight percent of patients were admitted to the hospital following HDC for a median of 11 days (range 3–26) and 12% were treated entirely as outpatients. There was one treatment‐related death (0.9%) from infection occurring on day 8 after HDC. Forty‐four (38%) have relapsed at a median of 20 months (range 10–55) from diagnosis, 11 (10%) with local‐regional and 33 (28%) with metastatic disease. The probabilities of overall (OS) and event‐free survival (EFS) for all 115 patients at 3 years were 0.73 and 0.61, respectively, with a median follow‐up of 42 months (range 10–89) from diagnosis. In univariate and multivariate analyses, no factors could be identified that were statistically predictive for OS or EFS. However, there were trends for patients with ER/PR‐negative primary tumors to have worse OS (p = 0.16) and EFS (p = 0.10) than patients with ER/PR‐positive tumors. This adjuvant combined modality strategy incorporating HDC is safe and compares favorably to historical studies of neoadjuvant or adjuvant treatment for LABC. Further attempts to improve outcomes of patients with LABC receiving HDC are warranted. ▪
Flexible UV sensor based on nanostructured ZnO thin film SAW device

Flexible ultraviolet (UV) light sensor was developed using ZnO thin film based surface acoustic wave (SAW) deposited onto low cost, commercial and thin aluminum foil (50 um thickness). ZnO nanorods were further grown on the surface of the device by a simplified hydrothermal process for enhancing the sensitivity. The zero order antisymmetric (A0) and symmetric (S0) lamb wave modes were identified at 13 MHz and 30 MHz respectively. These modes were used to obtain their frequency responses at various UV light intensities. UV sensing performance was investigated at different flexible/bending positions. The results showed good sensitivity in various flexible positions, moreover, the nanorods improved the sensitivity of the sensor by 59% and 44% for A0 and S0 modes, respectively. In addition, they possessed very good repeatability and stability, hence they have great potential for flexible and wearable UV light sensing applications.
A Polypeptide Bacteriophage Receptor: Modified Cell Wall Protein Subunits in Bacteriophage-Resistant Mutants of Bacillus sphaericus Strain P-1

Bacillus sphaericus strain P-1 has previously been shown to have a tetragonally arrayed (T layer) protein which forms the outer layer of the cell wall. The T layer was quantitatively extracted from whole cells by 6 M urea, and the T layer subunits were purified by electrophoresis of the extracts on acrylamide gels containing 0.1% sodium dodecyl sulfate or 6 M urea. Using ethylene diacrylate cross-linked gels, the T layer was found to make up 16% of the total cellular protein. A virulent bacteriophage which is inactivated by purified T layer was isolated from soil. Twenty-four phage-resistant mutants were isolated, of which 17 had T layer subunits of increased mobility on sodium dodecyl sulfate acrylamide gels. No mutants devoid of T layer were found. Mutants were grouped into six classes according to the molecular weight of their T layer subunits. These ranged from that of the wild type, 150,000 down to 86,000. Two mutants from different classes were examined in detail. Cells of the mutant strains did not adsorb phage nor did cell walls isolated from these mutants inactivate phage. The amino acid composition of the T layers from mutants differed little from that of the wild-type T layer.
Neuropsychiatric symptoms, quality of sleep and quality of life in patients diagnosed with nasal septal deviation.

OBJECTIVES This study aims to evaluate the psychiatric symptoms, quality of sleep, quality of life and the predictive factors affecting quality of sleep in patients diagnosed with nasal septal deviation (NSD). PATIENTS AND METHODS Forty male patients (mean age 22.3±1.4 years; range 21 to 26 years) who admitted to the otorhinolaryngology (ORL) clinic of the Ağrı Military Hospital and diagnosed with NSD as a result of a through ORL examination between February 2009 and April 2009 and 36 healthy volunteer (mean age 21.7±1.0 years; range 21 to 25 years) controls, were included in this study. Pre- and postoperative evaluations were performed using the Quality of Life Scale (Short Form-36/SF-36), the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) and the Symptom Check List Revised (SCL-90-R). RESULTS All patients and controls completed pre- and postoperative evaluations. No complications occurred. There was a statistically significant difference between the groups in the quality of sleep measures, in the SCL-90-R subscales of somatization, obsession, interpersonal sensitivity, depression, anxiety, phobic anxiety, hostility, paranoid thought, and psychoticism, additional scales and in physical health dimension of SF-36 Quality of Life Scale. CONCLUSION Psychiatric symptoms are more common in patients with nasal septal deviation when compared to healthy controls. The impairments in nasal breathing in patients with NSD may cause a decline in the physical dimension of quality of life and a marked impairment in sleep quality.
Cigarette smoke–induced induction of antioxidant enzyme activities in airway leukocytes is absent in active smokers with COPD

Background Oxidative injury to the airway has been proposed as an important underlying mechanism in the pathogenesis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). As the extent of oxidant-mediated damage is dependent on the endogenous antioxidant defences within the airways, we examined whether COPD was associated with deficiencies in the antioxidant network within the respiratory tract lining fluids (RTLFs) and resident airway leukocytes. We hypothesised that COPD would be associated with both basal depression of antioxidant defences and impaired adaptive antioxidant responses to cigarette smoke. Methods Low molecular weight and enzymatic antioxidants together with metal-handling proteins were quantified in bronchoalveolar lavage fluid and airway leukocytes, derived from current (n=9) and ex-smoking COPD patients (n=15), as well as from smokers with normal lung function (n=16) and healthy never smokers (n=13). Results Current cigarette smoking was associated with an increase in ascorbate and glutathione within peripheral RTLFs in both smokers with normal lung function compared with healthy never smokers and in COPD smokers compared with COPD ex-smokers. In contrast, intra-cellular antioxidant enzyme activities (glutathione peroxidase, glutathione reductase, and catalase) were only up-regulated in smokers with normal lung function compared with healthy never smokers and not in actively smoking COPD patients relative to COPD ex-smokers. Conclusions We found no evidence of impaired basal antioxidant defences, within either the RTLFs or airway leukocytes in stable ex-smoking COPD patients compared with healthy never smoking controls. Current cigarette smoking induced an up-regulation of low molecular weight antioxidants in the RTLFs of both control subjects with normal lung function and patients with COPD. Importantly, the present data demonstrated a cigarette smoke–induced increase in intra-cellular antioxidant enzyme activities only within the smokers with normal lung function, implying that patients with COPD who continue to smoke will experience enhanced oxidative stress, prompting disease progression.
Altered Regional Brain Communities during High Order Cognitive Processes: Relation to Vigilance Decrement

Understanding modular organization between brain regions can provide deeper insight into the complex neural mechanisms associated with processes like vigilance decrement. Distinct but interacting modules in brain connectivity networks have been known to support integration of specific mechanisms relevant in high-order cognitive processes. To investigate the neuronal mechanisms associated with vigilance decrement, we conducted an experiment where the participants performed a driving task. EEG graph metrics within communities, like clustering coefficient (Cintra), efficiency (Eintra), density (Dintra), and between communities, like intermodule density (Dinter), were computed from the source-localized surface brain signals. Further, we also calculated the nodal out degree to investigate the difference in information flow in the brain during vigilance decrement. Increase in the intermodule density, Dinter, was observed from the left fronto-parietal cluster to the right temporo-parietal cluster. Moreover, significant reduction in the intramodule metrics, Eintra and Cintra was observed in the right temporo- parietal cluster. Thus, our findings signify a flexible topographical architecture to compensate the hub disruption effect caused due to decline in vigilance.
Identifying Functional Brain Connectivity Patterns for EEG-Based Emotion Recognition

Previous studies on EEG-based emotion recognition mainly focus on single-channel analysis, which neglect the functional connectivity between different EEG channels. This paper aims to explore the emotion associated functional brain connectivity patterns among different subjects. We proposed a critical subnetwork selection approach and extracted three topological features (strength, clustering coefficient, and eigenvector centrality) based on the constructed brain connectivity networks. The experimental results of 5-fold cross validation on a public emotion EEG dataset called SEED indicate that the common connectivity patterns associated with different emotions do exist, where the coherence connectivity is significantly higher at frontal site in the alpha, beta and gamma bands for the happy emotion, at parietal and occipital sites in the delta band for the sad emotion, and at frontal site in the delta band for the neutral emotion. In addition, the results demonstrate that the topological features considerably outperform the conventional power spectral density feature, and the decision-level fusion strategy achieves the best classification accuracy of 87.04% and the corresponding improvement of 3.78% in comparison with the state-of-the-art using the differential entropy feature on the same dataset.
Influenza Virus Protein PB1-F2 Inhibits the Induction of Type I Interferon by Binding to MAVS and Decreasing Mitochondrial Membrane Potential

ABSTRACT PB1-F2 is a small, 87- to 90-amino-acid-long protein encoded by the +1 alternate open reading frame of the PB1 gene of most influenza A virus strains. It has been shown to contribute to viral pathogenicity in a host- and strain-dependent manner, and we have previously discovered that a serine at position 66 (66S) in the PB1-F2 protein increases virulence of the 1918 and H5N1 pandemic viruses. Recently, we have shown that PB1-F2 inhibits the induction of type I interferon (IFN) at the level of the MAVS adaptor protein. However, the molecular mechanism for the IFN antagonist function of PB1-F2 has remained unclear. In the present study, we demonstrated that the C-terminal portion of the PB1-F2 protein binds to MAVS in a region that contains the transmembrane domain. Strikingly, PB1-F2 66S was observed to bind to MAVS more efficiently than PB1-F2 66N. We also tested the effect of PB1-F2 on the IFN antagonist functions of the polymerase proteins PB1, PB2, and PA and observed enhanced IFN inhibition by the PB1 and PB2 proteins in combination with PB1-F2 but not by the PA protein. Using a flow cytometry-based assay, we demonstrate that the PB1-F2 protein inhibits MAVS-mediated IFN synthesis by decreasing the mitochondrial membrane potential (MMP). Interestingly, PB1-F2 66S affected the MMP more efficiently than wild-type PB1-F2. In summary, the results of our study identify the molecular mechanism by which the influenza virus PB1-F2 N66S protein increases virulence.
Use of Integer Genetic Algorithm for Optimal Allocation and Sizing of the Shunt Capacitor Banks in the Radial Distribution Networks

This paper deals with algorithm for placement and sizing of the shunt capacitor banks in distribution networks of radial structure. In this paper algorithm for optimal placement and sizing of shunt capacitor banks is based on load flow calculation algorithm and integer genetic algorithm. Firstly, paper describes the problem of optimal placement and sizing of the shunt capacitor banks with constrains. Also, paper describes algorithm for the calculation of the load flow in the radial distribution networks. Used integer genetic algorithm is also presented. Proposed algorithm was verified on the IEEE 34 bus test distribution network. Finally, practical application of the proposed algorithm was demonstrated on one real 10 kV distribution network in Bosnia & Herzegovina.
High entropy secrecy generation from wireless CIR

The physical characteristics of wireless channels, in particular the channel impulse response (CIR), have become an attractive source of shared secrecy between two communicating parties for many wireless applications. However, ensuring high-entropy secret bits from the CIR may not be always feasible, including in IoT and/or indoor environments, where the coherence time may not be easy to obtain, or mobility is limited. Many techniques have been developed to resolve the above problems, including privacy amplification for higher entropy output, and pre-processing for data distillation. In this paper, we develop a framework for extracting entropy from sequentially arriving channel impulse response observation samples, and propose algorithms for both online and offline versions of the problem. We fully characterize the optimal solutions to these problems through a series of analytic results, and establish the optimality of our proposed online and offline algorithms, namely A_EMSON and A_EMSOFF to solve the problem. We also verify the performance of the algorithms through comparisons with the existing related techniques, and evaluate their capability to ensure high-entropy under different channel models using MATLAB simulations.
Therapist Verbal Behavior Early in Treatment: Relation to Successful Completion of Parent–Child Interaction Therapy

We examined the role of specific therapist verbal behaviors in predicting successful completion of Parent–Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) in 22 families, including 11 families that successfully completed treatment and 11 that discontinued treatment prematurely. The children were 3 to 6 years old and diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder (ODD). Chamberlain et al.'s (1986) Therapy Process Code (TPC) was used to measure therapist verbalizations during therapist–parent interactions during the initial clinical interview and the second treatment session. Results indicated that therapists' use of the categories Question, Facilitate, and Support during these sessions accurately predicted treatment dropout versus completion for 73% of families. Findings suggest that the early therapist–parent relationship in PCIT may be critical to successful treatment completion.
The unique cytoarchitecture of human pancreatic islets has implications for islet cell function

The cytoarchitecture of human islets has been examined, focusing on cellular associations that provide the anatomical framework for paracrine interactions. By using confocal microscopy and multiple immunofluorescence, we found that, contrary to descriptions of prototypical islets in textbooks and in the literature, human islets did not show anatomical subdivisions. Insulin-immunoreactive β cells, glucagon-immunoreactive α cells, and somatostatin-containing δ cells were found scattered throughout the human islet. Human β cells were not clustered, and most (71%) showed associations with other endocrine cells, suggesting unique paracrine interactions in human islets. Human islets contained proportionally fewer β cells and more α cells than did mouse islets. In human islets, most β, α, and δ cells were aligned along blood vessels with no particular order or arrangement, indicating that islet microcirculation likely does not determine the order of paracrine interactions. We further investigated whether the unique human islet cytoarchitecture had functional implications. Applying imaging of cytoplasmic free Ca2+ concentration, [Ca2+]i, we found that β cell oscillatory activity was not coordinated throughout the human islet as it was in mouse islets. Furthermore, human islets responded with an increase in [Ca2+]i when lowering the glucose concentration to 1 mM, which can be attributed to the large contribution of α cells to the islet composition. We conclude that the unique cellular arrangement of human islets has functional implications for islet cell function.
Toward Universal Word Sense Disambiguation Using Deep Neural Networks

Traditionally, approaches based on neural networks to solve the problem of disambiguation of the meaning of words (WSD) use a set of classifiers at the end, which results in a specialization in a single set of words—those for which they were trained. This makes impossible to apply the learned models to words not previously seen in the training corpus. This paper seeks to address a generalization of the problem of WSD in order to solve it through deep neural networks without limiting the method to a fixed set of words, with a performance close to the state-of-the-art, and an acceptable computational cost. We explore different architectures based on multilayer perceptrons, recurrent cells (Long Short-Term Memory–LSTM and Gated Recurrent Units–GRU), and a classifier model. Different sources and dimensions of embeddings were tested as well. The main evaluation was performed on the Senseval 3 English Lexical Sample. To evaluate the application to an unseen set of words, learned models are evaluated in the completely unseen words of a different corpus (Senseval 2 English Lexical Sample), overcoming the random baseline.
Dispersion Diagram of a Novel Multi Band EBG Structure Using FDTD/GPOF Technique

The problem of surface waves usually degrades the performance of planar circuits and antennas, to reduce its effects, the electromagnetic band gap (EBG) structures are applied to suppress these undesired waves at certain bands. In this paper a novel multi band planar structure is simulated using finite difference time domain where the eigen frequencies are captured using the generalized pencil of function (GPOF) technique. By plotting the dispersion diagram of the structure, a surface wave propagation at 1.92-3.05GHz, 3.77-4.48GHz and 4.65-5.78GHz bands is prohibited, thus making the proposed structure suitable for WLAN requirements.
Efficient multi-view 3D video multicast with depth image-based rendering in LTE networks

With the recent emergence of naked-eye 3D mobile devices and various 3D-enabled laptops, service providers are now faced with the opportunity to provide mobile 3D video streaming in LTE networks. Different from traditional single-view 3D videos, multi-view 3D videos allow users to choose preferred view angles and thus are promising for new applications, such as free-viewpoint television (FTV). Enabling multi-view 3D video services may also overwhelm the network when transmitting all views of every video. Fortunately, depth-image-based rendering (DIBR) allows each mobile client to synthesize the desired view from a nearby left view and right view, so that not all views of a video are necessary to be transmitted. Nevertheless, we need to carefully choose the transmitted views to limit the video distortion and minimize the bandwidth consumption. In this paper, we formulate a new optimization problem, called View and MCS Selection Problem (VMS) to minimize the bandwidth consumption for multi-view 3D video multicast in LTE networks. An algorithm, called View and MCS Aggregation (VMAG) is proposed to find the optimal solution of VMS. Simulation results manifest that the bandwidth consumption can be effectively reduced by over 30%.
Information Security Policy Perceived Compliance Among Staff in Palestine universities: An Empirical Pilot study

In today’s interconnected world, universities recognize the importance of protecting their information assets from internal and external threats. Being the possible insider threats to Information Security, employees are often coined as the weakest link. Both employees and organizations should be aware of this raising challenge. Understanding staff perception of compliance behaviour is critical for universities wanting to leverage their staff capabilities to mitigate Information Security risks. Therefore, this research seeks to get insights into staff perception based on factors adopted from several theories by using proposed constructs i.e. "perceived" practices/policies and "perceived" intention to comply. Drawing from the General Deterrence Theory, Protection Motivation Theory, Theory of Planned Behaviour and Information Reinforcement, within the context of Palestine universities, this paper integrates staff awareness of Information Security Policies (ISP) countermeasures as antecedents to “perceived” influencing factors (perceived sanctions, perceived rewards, perceived coping appraisal, and perceived information reinforcement). The empirical study is designed to follow a quantitative research approaches, use survey as a data collection method and questionnaires as the research instruments. Partial least squares structural equation modelling is used to inspect the reliability and validity of the measurement model and hypotheses testing for the structural model. The research covers ISP awareness among staff and seeks to assert that information security is the responsibility of all academic and administrative staff from all departments. Overall, our pilot study findings seem promising, and we found strong support for our theoretical model.