Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Tracheobronchoplasty for severe tracheobronchomalacia.

Rationale Central airway stabilization with silicone stents can improve respiratory symptoms in patients with severe symptomatic tracheobronchomalacia (TBM) but is associated with a relatively high rate of complications. Surgery with posterior tracheobronchial splinting using a polypropylene mesh has also been used for this condition but to date has not been evaluated prospectively and objectively for patient outcomes. Objectives To evaluate the effect of surgical tracheobronchoplasty on symptoms, functional status, quality of life, lung function, and exercise capacity in patients with severe and symptomatic TBM. Methods A prospective observational study in which baseline measurements were compared to those obtained 3 months after surgical tracheobronchoplasty. Measurements and main results Of 104 referred patients to our complex airway center for severe TBM, 77 had baseline measurements. Of this group, 57 patients had severe malacia and underwent stent placement for central airway stabilization. Of those, 37 patients reported improvement in respiratory symptoms and 35 were considered for surgical tracheobronchoplasty. Two patients were excluded from surgery for medical reasons. Median age was 61 years (range, 39 to 83 years), 20 patients were men, 11 patients (31%) had COPD, 9 patients (26%) had asthma, and 4 patients (11%) had Mounier-Kuhn syndrome. Thirty-three patients (94%) presented with severe dyspnea, 26 patients (74%) with uncontrollable cough, and 18 patients (51%) reported recurrent pulmonary infections. Two patients (3%) presented with respiratory failure requiring mechanical ventilation. After surgery, quality of life scores improved in 25 of 31 patients (p Conclusions In experienced hands, surgical central airway stabilization with posterior tracheobronchial splinting using a polypropylene mesh improves respiratory symptoms, health-related quality of life, and functional status in highly selected patients with severe symptomatic TBM. Trial registration Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier: NCT00550602
Understanding the regulatory and transcriptional complexity of the genome through structure

An expansive functionality and complexity has been ascribed to the majority of the human genome that was unanticipated at the outset of the draft sequence and assembly a decade ago. We are now faced with the challenge of integrating and interpreting this complexity in order to achieve a coherent view of genome biology. We argue that the linear representation of the genome exacerbates this complexity and an understanding of its three-dimensional structure is central to interpreting the regulatory and transcriptional architecture of the genome. Chromatin conformation capture techniques and high-resolution microscopy have afforded an emergent global view of genome structure within the nucleus. Chromosomes fold into complex, territorialized three-dimensional domains in concert with specialized subnuclear bodies that harbor concentrations of transcription and splicing machinery. The signature of these folds is retained within the layered regulatory landscapes annotated by chromatin immunoprecipitation, and we propose that genome contacts are reflected in the organization and expression of interweaved networks of overlapping coding and noncoding transcripts. This pervasive impact of genome structure favors a preeminent role for the nucleoskeleton and RNA in regulating gene expression by organizing these folds and contacts. Accordingly, we propose that the local and global three-dimensional structure of the genome provides a consistent, integrated, and intuitive framework for interpreting and understanding the regulatory and transcriptional complexity of the human genome.
Early Identification of Peer-to-Peer Traffic

To manage and monitor their networks in a proper way, network operators are often interested in identifying the applications generating the traffic traveling through their networks, and doing it as fast (i.e., from as few packets) as possible. State-of-the-art packet-based traffic classification methods are either based on the costly inspection of the payload of several packets of each flow or on basic flow statistics that do not take into account the packet content. In this paper we consider the intermediate approach of analyzing only the first few bytes of the first (or first few) packets of each flow. We propose automatic, machine-learning-based methods achieving remarkably good early classification performance on real traffic traces generated from a diverse set of applications (including several versions of P2P TV and file sharing), while requiring only limited computational and memory resources.
Optimum Steelmaking Cast Plan with Unknown Cast Number Based on the Pseudo TSP Model

An optimum furnace cast plan model for steelmaking continuous casting planning and scheduling with unknown cast number is presented. Based on the analysis of the difficulties to solve the problem, a pseudo travel salesman problem (TSP) model is presented to describe the plan and scheduling model. An improved particle swarm optimization with variant particle is presented to solve the optimum charge plan problem. Simulations have been carried and the results show that the pseudo travel salesman problem is very fit for describe the model. The computation with practical data shows that the model and the solving method are very effective.
A multiple-dose pharmacokinetics of polyethylene glycol recombinant human interleukin-6 (PEG-rhIL-6) in rats

Radiation therapy has been widely applied in cancer treatment. However, it often causes thrombocytopenia (deficiency of white blood cells) as an adverse effect. Recombinant human interleukin-6 (rhIL-6) has been found to be a very effective way against this thrombocytopenia, but IL-6 has low stability in blood, which reduces its efficacy. To increases the stability and half-life of rhIL-6, it was modified by polyethylene glycol (PEG). The pharmacokinetics and the tissue distribution of PEG-rhIL-6 labeled with 125I were examined after subcutaneous injection in rats. The pharmacokinetic pattern of PEG-rhIL-6 was defined with linear-kinetics, and we fitted a one-compartment model with half-lives of 10.44–11.37 h (absorption, t1/2Ka) and 19.77–21.53 h (elimination, t1/2Ke), and peak concentrations at 20.51–21.96 h (tpeak) in rats. Half-lives and tpeak of PEG-rhIL-6 were longer than those of rhIL-6 previously reported. In the present study, for deposition of PEG-rhIL-6 in rats, the tissue distribution examination showed that blood was the major organ involved, rather than liver. However, as to the elimination of PEG-rhIL-6, the major organ was the kidney. The excretion fraction of the injection dose recovered from urine was 23.32% at 192 h after subcutaneous administration. Less than 6% of PEG-rhIL-6 was eliminated via the feces at 192 h. These results indicate that PEG-rhIL-6 is a good candidate drug formulation for patients with cancer.
Deformable Graph Matching

Graph matching (GM) is a fundamental problem in computer science, and it has been successfully applied to many problems in computer vision. Although widely used, existing GM algorithms cannot incorporate global consistence among nodes, which is a natural constraint in computer vision problems. This paper proposes deformable graph matching (DGM), an extension of GM for matching graphs subject to global rigid and non-rigid geometric constraints. The key idea of this work is a new factorization of the pair-wise affinity matrix. This factorization decouples the affinity matrix into the local structure of each graph and the pair-wise affinity edges. Besides the ability to incorporate global geometric transformations, this factorization offers three more benefits. First, there is no need to compute the costly (in space and time) pair-wise affinity matrix. Second, it provides a unified view of many GM methods and extends the standard iterative closest point algorithm. Third, it allows to use the path-following optimization algorithm that leads to improved optimization strategies and matching performance. Experimental results on synthetic and real databases illustrate how DGM outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms for GM. The code is available at http://humansensing.cs. cmu.edu/fgm.
Ecocultural basis of cognition: Farmers and fishermen are more holistic than herders

It has been proposed that social interdependence fosters holistic cognition, that is, a tendency to attend to the broad perceptual and cognitive field, rather than to a focal object and its properties, and a tendency to reason in terms of relationships and similarities, rather than rules and categories. This hypothesis has been supported mostly by demonstrations showing that East Asians, who are relatively interdependent, reason and perceive in a more holistic fashion than do Westerners. We examined holistic cognitive tendencies in attention, categorization, and reasoning in three types of communities that belong to the same national, geographic, ethnic, and linguistic regions and yet vary in their degree of social interdependence: farming, fishing, and herding communities in Turkey's eastern Black Sea region. As predicted, members of farming and fishing communities, which emphasize harmonious social interdependence, exhibited greater holistic tendencies than members of herding communities, which emphasize individual decision making and foster social independence. Our findings have implications for how ecocultural factors may have lasting consequences on important aspects of cognition.
A survey of heuristics for the weighted matching problem

This survey paper reviews results on heuristics for two weighted matching problems: matchings where the vertices are points in the plane and weights are Euclidean distances, and the assignment problem. Several heuristics are described in detail and results are given for worst-case ratio bounds, absolute bounds, and expected bounds. Applications to practical problems and some mathematical complements are also included.
Why and How the Zigzag Edge of Suspended Graphene Sheet where Deformed

The edge of graphene plays an important role in electronic and spintronic properties of graphene. As we know in many article zigzag edge used as stable edge but this edge cannot be true edge. When the graphene sheet is cut, bonds are broken along this line and electrons that participate in bond be free, so there is electron density gradient along the edge. Because of this the carbon atoms along the edge is moved till the stable structure be established. For achieving to this specific structure, density functional theory was used via Gaussian package. The result shows hexagons on the edge are going to deform to pentagon and heptagon by change the kind of bond in this chain. In the other zigzag chain behind the edge we have movement of electron density from one carbon atom to another carbon atom by help of carbon atom that placed between them. So we suggested new edge that can be replacement by zigzag edge in calculation with more less structure energy that identify in experiment method too.
Two-stage scheme for false alarm suppression on fast face detection

This paper describes a novel two-stage scheme for false alarm suppression on fast face detection which is mainly applied on real-time video applications, such as surveillance systems. The new scheme consists of the well-known Viola-Jones framework and face verifier based on eigenfaces for fast face detection while suppressing the false alarm to extremely low. The proposed scheme can be benefited from fusion of both local and global features. Experimental results show that our proposed method is able to overcome the inherent limitation of the Viola-Jones face detector without any compromise in speed.
Nonparametric permutation tests for functional neuroimaging: A primer with examples

Requiring only minimal assumptions for validity, nonparametric permutation testing provides a flexible and intuitive methodology for the statistical analysis of data from functional neuroimaging experiments, at some computational expense. Introduced into the functional neuroimaging literature by Holmes et al. ([ 1996 ]: J Cereb Blood Flow Metab 16:7–22), the permutation approach readily accounts for the multiple comparisons problem implicit in the standard voxel‐by‐voxel hypothesis testing framework. When the appropriate assumptions hold, the nonparametric permutation approach gives results similar to those obtained from a comparable Statistical Parametric Mapping approach using a general linear model with multiple comparisons corrections derived from random field theory. For analyses with low degrees of freedom, such as single subject PET/SPECT experiments or multi‐subject PET/SPECT or fMRI designs assessed for population effects, the nonparametric approach employing a locally pooled (smoothed) variance estimate can outperform the comparable Statistical Parametric Mapping approach. Thus, these nonparametric techniques can be used to verify the validity of less computationally expensive parametric approaches. Although the theory and relative advantages of permutation approaches have been discussed by various authors, there has been no accessible explication of the method, and no freely distributed software implementing it. Consequently, there have been few practical applications of the technique. This article, and the accompanying MATLAB software, attempts to address these issues. The standard nonparametric randomization and permutation testing ideas are developed at an accessible level, using practical examples from functional neuroimaging, and the extensions for multiple comparisons described. Three worked examples from PET and fMRI are presented, with discussion, and comparisons with standard parametric approaches made where appropriate. Practical considerations are given throughout, and relevant statistical concepts are expounded in appendices. Hum. Brain Mapping 15:1–25, 2001. © 2001 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Scheduler support for video-oriented multimedia on client-side virtualization

Virtualization has recently been adopted for client devices to provide strong isolation between services and efficient manageability. Even though multimedia service is not rare for the devices, the virtual machine hosting this service is not guaranteed to receive proper scheduling support from the underlying hypervisor. The quality of multimedia service is often compromised when several virtual machines compete for computing power. This paper presents a new scheduling scheme for the hypervisor to transparently identify if the workload handles multimedia and to provide proper scheduling supports. An implementation of our scheme has shown that the virtual machine hosting a video-oriented application receives propoer CPU scheduling even when other virtual machines host CPU intensive workloads.
A Game-Theoretic Approach to Decentralized Interference-Avoidance Scheduling for Cellular Systems: Algorithm and Equilibria

Dense frequency reuse makes the intercell interference control a crucial issue in cellular systems. Due to large signalling overhead, multicell processing and resource scheduling are not practicable solutions, at least today. We propose a decentralized transmission scheduling scheme where each base station exploits the knowledge of the intercell interference to locally allocate the resources. The idea is inspired by cognitive radio system where each (secondary) user accesses the spectrum according to the level of interference and thus it schedules the transmission over interference-free frequency intervals. Similarly, here each base station schedules the access to time or frequency resource so as to mitigate the generated interference and maximize its goodput. In this decentralized approach, the intercell signalling is replaced by the level of interference estimated locally and independently within each cell. Equilibria are analyzed using game theory with each scheduler acting as a player that locally maximizes its objective (goodput) while interacting (or interfering) with others.
Four-point bending evaluation of dentin-composite interfaces with various stresses.

UNLABELLED Fracture properties of composite-dentin beams bonded with a self-etching adhesive were tested following short term pretreatments to simulate potential degradation mechanisms (thermal cycling, immersion in 5% NaOCl, or fatigue cycling). Beams of rectangular cross-section were shaped to a size of approximately 0.87 x 0.87 x 10 mm and placed in a four-point bending apparatus, with the loading points 1.8 and 7.2 mm apart, with the interface centered between the inner rollers. Testing was performed in Hanks' Balanced Salt Solution at 25 degrees C. Solid dentin and solid composite beams [n = 6] had bending strengths of 164.4 and 164.6 MPa, respectively, under monotonically increasing loads. Bonded beams [n = 6] had strengths of 56.3 MPa. Thermo-cycling (5 degrees to 55 degrees C), NaOCl solution immersion, or 105 of pre-fatigue cycles did not decrease the strength. CONCLUSION Thermal stress, exposure to NaOCL, or 105 cycles of mechanical stress does not decrease bond strength of composite bonded to dentin as tested in four-point bending.
Role of Emx2 in the development of the reciprocal connectivity between cortex and thalamus

Emx2 knockout mice appear to show a shift in the areal identity in the cerebral cortex of Emx2 knockout mice, which is matched with altered distribution of thalamocortical projections (Bishop et al. [2000] Science 288:344–3349; Mallamaci et al. [2000] Nat Neurosci. 3:679–686). We have examined the early establishment of these projections to understand how the altered Emx2 expression results in changes in their cortical targeting. We used carbocyanine dye tracing to visualize thalamocortical and corticofugal projections as well as immunohistochemistry for L1 and TAG‐1, respective markers of the two axonal systems, in wild‐type, heterozygote, and null mutant for Emx2 at embryonic (E) ages ranging from E13.5 to E18.5. These tracing studies demonstrated that, in Emx2 knockout mice, a large proportion of early thalamocortical projections were misrouted at the border between the diencephalon and telencephalon. This abnormality was associated with displaced connectivity of the internal capsule cells at the diencephalic–telencephalic junction. Interestingly, most of the aberrant thalamic projections compensated for the ventral entry to the telencephalon and still ascended to the cortex. Although this early targeting abnormality is associated with the altered Emx2 expression pattern in the cortex, it most probably occurs independently from it, and is related to earlier guidance defects at the diencephalic–telencephalic boundary. These defects might result in the altered and delayed arrival of thalamic projections to the cortex and, thus, contribute to the shifted thalamocortical matching previously observed in the Emx2 knockout mice. J. Comp. Neurol. 451:153–169, 2002. © 2002 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Distributed Authentication of Program Integrity Verification in Wireless Sensor Networks

Security in wireless sensor networks has become important as sensor networks are being used for an increasing number of applications. The severe resource constraints in each sensor make it very challenging to secure sensor networks. Moreover, sensors are usually deployed in hostile and unattended environments, and hence, are susceptible to various attacks, including node capture, physical tampering, and manipulation of the sensor program. The authors of T. Park and K.G. Shin, (2005) proposed a soft tamper-proofing scheme that verifies the integrity of the program in each sensor device, called the program integrity verification (PIV). This paper addresses how to authenticate PIV servers (PIVSes) in a fully-distributed manner. Our distributed authentication protocol of PIVSes (DAPP) uses the Blundo scheme (C. Blundo et al., 1992) and allows sensors to authenticate PIVSes without requiring commonly-used trusted third parties, such as authentication servers (ASes), in the network. We implement and evaluate both the DAPP and the PIV on Mica2 Motes and laptops. We also analyze the security of DAPP under different attack models, demonstrating its capability to deal with various types of attacks
Modeling of Light Intensity-Modulated Fiber-Optic Displacement Sensors

Light-intensity-modulated displacement sensors are currently extensively used in numerous applications. Most such sensors operate by utilizing a pair of adjacent optical fibers and a reflector. This scheme can provide a good sensing outcome, but its performance can be enhanced with the use of only a single optical fiber. Such displacement sensors have the benefits of higher sensitivity and operating range, because they can efficiently collect more light after a reflectance has occurred. Hence, this paper investigates a single optical fiber that emits and collects light while translating and rotating with respect to the main axis of the optical fiber. The Gaussian light-sensing behavior of these two cases is mathematically modeled, giving sensing characteristics such as linearity and sensitivity. Experimental results are presented for verification and validation of the models.
Does psychological stress affect the outcome of in vitro fertilization?

BACKGROUND The aim of the study was to investigate the effect of psychological stress before and during IVF treatment on the outcome of IVF, controlling for known physiological predictors. METHODS This is a prospective, longitudinal study. A total of 166 women were studied during their first IVF treatment. They answered questionnaires concerning psychological and social factors on two occasions. Psychological well-being was measured by the Psychological General Well-Being (PGWB) index and psychological effects of infertility were assessed by 14 items. RESULTS In the analysis of the psychological variables, no differences were found between pregnant and non-pregnant women. The total number of good quality embryos, the number of good quality embryos transferred, and the number of embryos transferred were significantly higher in the pregnant than in the non-pregnant group. In a multivariate analysis, the number of good quality embryos transferred was the only variable that was independently associated with pregnancy. CONCLUSIONS We found no evidence that psychological stress had any influence on the outcome of IVF treatment. When counselling infertile couples, it might be possible to reduce the stress they experience during the treatment procedure by informing them of these findings.
Rendezvous-based access control for medical records in the pre-hospital environment

We present rendezvous-based access control for access control in the pre-hospital environment. Rendezvous-based access control is a simple cryptographic access control method that provides access if and only if patient and health worker meet in the physical world. Access is provided locally and does not depend on connectivity with remote systems. It is therefore suitable in an environment with small mobile devices that have local connectivity but may be disconnected now and then from remote systems. It is designed to protect against aggregation threats without letting the patients carry their own medical data. A system can then be implemented where the tokens carried by the patients are simple and robust which is easily managed. We believe that our mechanism provides a useful alternative to remote access to a centralized system and to patients carrying their own medical record (on a smartcard e.g.).