Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluating of Spatial and Contrast Resolution Ability of 2D Microwave Imaging System

Microwave Imaging method can be applicable for early brain stroke detection and can help to eliminate the time between onset of the stroke and its treatment. Base on variation in dielectric parameters of stroke-hit part of the brain and its surroundings the haemorrhagic or ischemic stroke can be differentiate, respectively. The goal of this contribution is to evaluate spatial and contrast resolution of 2D MWI system designed at CTU FBME based on synthetic, numerical data. These results can help to better define MWI method in terms of imaging technique and can provide a great base for future experimental evaluation of spatial and contrast resolution ability of MWI systems. Also, can provide information which will be valuable for determination of ideal operating frequency for MWI method or frequency range, respectively.
Non-Thermal Bio-Compatible Plasma Induces Osteogenic Differentiation of Human Mesenchymal Stem/Stromal Cells With ROS-Induced Activation of MAPK

The application of non-thermal bio-compatible plasma (NBP) for stem cell differentiation is promising in tissue engineering. However, the differentiation efficiency of NBP treatment on various types of human tissue-derived stem cells and the underlying mechanisms is yet understood. This study is the first time to investigate the role of NBP in inducing differentiation and its potential molecular mechanism by using human bone marrow-derived stem cells (hBMSCs) and human periodontal ligament-derived stem cells (hPDLSCs). Our results showed that NBP promote osteogenic differentiation of hPDLSCs more effectively than hBMSCs under the same treatment condition, indicating a tissue-dependent manner of NBP interacts with stem cells. Furthermore, an increase of intracellular reactive oxygen species (ROS) production of hPDLSCs and antioxidant enzymes activation was observed after NBP treatment. Particularly, mitogen-activated protein kinases (MAPKs) level was also increased and in consistent with ROS level increase. Taken together, this study revealed that with NBP induction, hPDLSCs is a more suitable stem cell source than hBMSCs for bone regeneration and tissue engineering, and ROS-induced activation of MAPKs are possibly involved in the osteogenic differentiation process.
Effect of Lightning Strike on Electrical Towers

In this paper, the simulation of an electrical tower exposed to a lightning wave using Transmission Line theory is presented. It consists on representing the tower body and the cross-arms by vertical, horizontal and inclined transmission lines, respectively, and analysing it as a radial network. This approach permits the computation of the induced currents and voltages by the lightning, at any point of tower. For the indirect effect of lightning, we propose to replace the exciting electromagnetic “EM” field by equivalent current generators connected at the extremities of the all tower elements. Some simulation results and conclusions are also presented.
A Miniaturized Surface Mount Compatible Quasi-elliptic Response Bandpass Filter Using Multilayer Substrates

In this paper, a miniaturized UHF band second-order quasi-elliptic response bandpass filter (BPF) is proposed. Traditional UHF transmission line filter suffers from large circuit size and large footprint area. For the purpose of miniaturization, spiral quarter-wavelength short-circuited resonators is used in this BPF filter design. For further footprint reduction, the proposed filter is implemented by stacking multilayer substrates. Coplanar waveguide (CPW) transmission lines are used as input and output ports on the same layer, which can be compatible with surface mounting technology (SMT) effectively. It is observed from simulation and measured results that the return loss and insertion loss at a center frequency of 433 MHz are about 15 dB and 0.7 dB, respectively, with a fractional bandwidth of 19%. Two transmission zeros are located on both sides of the passband. A good agreement is obtained between the simulated and measured results.
Design and Characteristics of an Etching Field Limiting Ring for 10kV SiC Power Device

For ultra-high voltage SiC devices of 10kV and above, the length of conventional FLR even reaches up to millimeters, which impedes the miniaturization and development in ultra-high voltage applications. In this paper, a novel termination structure of the Etching Uniform Field Limiting Ring (EU-FLR) for 10kV SiC power device is proposed and analyzed based on the theory of charge field modulation. The blocking capability achieves at 14.2kV and the EU-FLR exhibits a reduction of more than 30% in size compared with the conventional FLRs. The voltage efficiency factor η1 of EU-FLR is 90% and the area efficiency factor η2 is 17.8V/μm, respectively. The influence of the pivotal structural parameters of EU-FLRs on termination protection efficiency has been analyzed and researched by TCAD Silvaco.
Post-processing time-aware optimal scheduling of single robotic cluster tools

Integrated circuit chips are produced on silicon wafers. Robotic cluster tools are widely used since they provide a reconfigurable and efficient environment for most wafer fabrication processes. Recent advances in new semiconductor materials bring about new functionality for integrated circuits. After a wafer is processed in a processing chamber, the wafer should be removed from there as fast as possible to guarantee its high-quality integrated circuits. Meanwhile, maximization of the throughput of robotic cluster tools is desired. This work aims to perform post-processing time-aware scheduling for such tools subject to wafer residency time constraints. To do so, closed-form expression algorithms are derived to compute robot waiting time accurately upon the analysis of particular events of robot waiting for single-arm cluster tools. Examples are given to show the application and effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.
Multiphysics Modelling of Membrane Electroporation in Irregularly Shaped Cells

Electroporation is a non-thermal electromagnetic phenomenon widely used in medical diseases treatment. Different mathematical models of electroporation have been proposed in literature to study pore evolution in biological membranes. This paper presents a nonlinear dispersive multiphysic model of electroporation in irregular shaped biological cells in which the spatial and temporal evolution of the pores size is taken into account. The model solves Maxwell and asymptotic Smoluchowski equations and it describes the dielectric dispersion of cell media using a Debye-based relationship. Furthermore, the irregular cell shape has been modeled using the Gielis superformula. Taking into account the cell in mitosis phase, the electroporation process has been studied comparing the numerical results pertaining the model with variable pore radius with those in which the pore radius is supposed constant. The numerical analysis has been performed exposing the biological cell to a rectangular electric pulse having duration of $10\ \mu\mathrm{s}$. The obtained numerical results highlight considerable differences between the two different models underling the need to include into the numerical algorithm the differential equation modeling the spatial and time evolution of the pores size.
A Novel Scalable Series MIM Capacitor Model for MMIC Applications

With the development of the wireless communication and integrated circuits, Integrated passive devices (IPDs) have gained more and more application in radio frequency (RF) integrated circuit and monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs). Among IPDs, MIM capacitor is a key passive component, widely used in DC-bias circuit, decoupling, etc. Therefore, the accuracy and practicability of the capacitance model is one of the key factors for the success of circuits design.However, since the MIM capacitor has many parasitic effects at high frequencies, it no longer exhibits pure capacitor characteristics anymore, thus, in high frequency circuit design, a simplified equivalent circuit model that can accurately characterizes the components is essential for the successful design of the circuit.As SiC-based GaN devices exhibit the advantages of high temperature and high power in millimeter wave applications, more and more integrated circuit use SiC-based GaN devices and components. With regards to this we produced a series of MIM capacitors of different sizes with air-bridges have been fabricated on 4H–SiC substrate. Also, we proposed a novel of simple broadband, based on the physical parameter equivalent circuit model of MIM capacitor structure.Based on the traditional equivalent circuit model, we introduce the corresponding components that characterize the skin effect and loss of the metal. The lumped element model is a simplified physical based model with broadband and high precision, and parameter extraction is given. To verify the accuracy and versatility of the model, we compared the measured and model simulated results of a series of MIM capacitors of different sizes. The results show that the model can accurately fit the S-parameters between measured and simulated in operating frequency range. In addition, the model shows good scalability as well.
Real-Time Driving Scene Semantic Segmentation

Real-time understanding of surrounding environment is an essential yet challenging task for autonomous driving system. The system must not only deliver accurate result but also low latency performance. In this paper, we focus on the task of fast-and-accurate semantic segmentation. An efficient and powerful deep neural network termed as Driving Segmentation Network (DSNet) and a novel loss function Object Weighted Focal Loss are proposed. In designing DSNet, our goal is to achieve the best capacity with constrained model complexity. We design efficient and powerful unit inspired by ShuffleNet V2 and also integrate many successful techniques to achieve excellent balance between accuracy and speed. DSNet has 0.9 million of parameters, achieves 71.8% mean Intersection-over-Union (IoU) on Cityscapes validation set, 69.3% on test set, and runs 100+ frames per second (FPS) at resolution $640\times 360$ on NVIDIA 1080Ti. In order to improve performance on minor and hard objects which are crucial in driving scene, Object Weighted Focal Loss (OWFL) is proposed to deal with the serious class imbalance issue in pixel-wise segmentation task. It could effectively improve the overall mean IoU of minor and hard objects by increasing loss contribution from them. Experiments show that DSNet performs 2.7% points higher on minor and hard objects compared with fast-and-accurate model ERFNet under similar accuracy. These traits imply that DSNet has great potential for practical autonomous driving application.
Abating carbon emissions by means of utility-scale photovoltaics and storage: the Duke Energy Progress/Carolinas case study

This study explores the performance of the Duke Energy Progress/Carolinas (DEC/DEP) electric power system under eighty-five configurations combining different capacities of utility-scale photovoltaics (PV) and energy storage (lithium-ion batteries). The different configurations include PV installations capable of providing 5% to 25% of the systems energy and batteries with varying power capacities and storage of 2, 4, and 6 hours. A cost-based production model comprised of a day-ahead unit commitment and a real-time economic dispatch simulates the optimal operation of all the generation resources necessary to supply hourly demand and reserve requirements during the year 2016. The model represents in detail the generation fleet of the system, including 221 nuclear, natural gas, coal and hydro power generators accounting for an installed capacity of 37.8 GW. Results indicate that minimum carbon abatement costs for the configurations studied are obtained when the power capacity of the batteries is~12.5% of the PV capacity. For levels of PV penetration (measured as expected annual share of energy) above 17%, higher decarbonization targets are better pursued with increased storage capacity than with more PV. For more ambitious targets (e.g. $> 30\%$), carbon dioxide emissions reductions require increases in both PV and storage capacity. Like previous studies this analysis confirms the decreasing marginal value of storage especially in systems that already have important shares of low carbon generation, such as DEC/DEP where ~50% of the generation is provided by nuclear plants.
Major infections in children with nephrotic syndrome

Background: Infections remain an important cause of mortality and morbidity in children with nephrotic syndrome. It triggers the onset of disease or relapses and may also be responsible for a poor response to steroid therapy. Understanding the type and severity of infections is important in the appropriate management of these children. This study was conducted to determine the frequency and type of major infections in children with nephrotic syndrome. Methods: A longitudinal descriptive study was conducted in a tertiary center, in children between 1 and 12 years with nephrotic syndrome satisfying the International Study of kidney disease in children (ISKDC) criteria, from March 2013 to September 2014. Major infections were defined as infections affecting deep organs and tissues which warrant hospitalization. Results: A total of 246 children with nephrotic syndrome were enrolled, of whom 46 children developed 48(19.6%) episodes of major infections. Thirteen (27%) major infections occurred in the initial episode and 35(73%) in relapse cases. Pneumonia (41.7%) was the commonest infection, followed by urinary tract infection (25%), septicemia (16.7%), spontaneous bacterial peritonitis (8.3%), cellulitis (4.2%), perinephric abscess (2.1%) and pulmonary tuberculosis (2.1%). Two children had multiple infections. Methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus was the causative organism in 5 children with septicemia. A 24% of bacterial isolates were multidrug resistant. Conclusions: Major infections remain an important complication of nephrotic syndrome in children, especially during relapses. Drug resistant organisms should be considered while treating major infections in these children.
A Text Normalization Method for Speech Synthesis Based on Local Attention Mechanism

This paper proposes a deep learning model based on a recurrent neural network (RNN) to solve the problem of text normalization for speech synthesis. Traditional rule-based models cannot take advantage of contextual information and do not handle text outside of rules well, while deep learning-based models can handle these problems better. Based on the seq2seq neural network, we construct a new text-normalized deep learning model that considers the context of words in sentences by using the gated recurrent unit (GRU) and local attention mechanism. In recent years, seq2seq has made many achievements in different fields of natural language processing. Our research proves that well-constructed small network models in specific application fields can also achieve meaningful results. In our small network, the local attention mechanism is used to reduce the computational complexity without decreasing accuracy. In the experiments, we compared our model with the attention-based model proposed by Sproat, the without attention model and the attention model. Experimental results show that our method reduces the network scale while gathering the main context information, overcomes the defect of high complexity of the traditional attention mechanism model, and achieves higher accuracy. It can also be seen from experiments that the most important related words are relatively close to the target word in text normalization.
Analisis Beban Kerja Mental, Fisik Serta Stres Kerja Pada Perawat Secara Ergonomi Di RSUD Dr. Achmad Mochtar Bukittinggi

This study aims to determine the level of mental and physical workload and work stress to the nurses in Dr. AchmadMochtar Hospital in Bukittinggi. This research is a descriptive study, which the research looking for a variable value without connect it with other variables. The file in this study conducted by questionnaire. The result of the descriptive analysis of physical workload indicates the light category which is 100-200 kcal/hour. For the mental workload is average at 67,51 for ICU/ICCU, 76,42 for rooms KB IGD, and 77,64 for the room IGD each of which fall into the average category. And for stress in work shows the number 113,38 that can be categorized in average. Based on theses results, it can be concluded that the workload of mental, physical, and work stress is have no significant effect to the nurses during activity, but it should be noted to avoid increasement on those variables. Keywords: workload of mental, workload of physical, work stress
EU Insights – Perceptions on the human health impact of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and antibiotics use in animals across the EU

Tackling antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in animal farming and its impact on public health is a key priority for EFSA and other public health authorities in Europe. This study is a contribution to the joint effort by EFSA and EU member state authorities to address the issue. Focusing on the EU farming sector, it documents perceptions of the risks of AMR, associated behaviours, and the reasons and rationales behind them. Consumers, veterinarians and (pig and poultry) farmers in a sample of European countries were surveyed using a combination of methods (online survey, semi-structured interviews). The evidence gathered can inform communication strategies at national and EU level to increase awareness where these are designed to inform risk perception and change behaviours in relation to the use of antibiotics in animal farming and antibiotics’ impact on human health. © ICF, 2017
Repetition Rate Adjustable Dual-wavelength Solitons Fiber Laser Based on Highly Nonlinear Fiber

A dual-wavelength soliton fiber ring laser with adjustable repetition rate was reported. Through adding highly nonlinear fiber (HNLF) as nonlinear medium in the fiber ring cavity, the dual-wavelength bright-dark soliton pair can be formed. The 1st to 4th, 5th to 8th and 9th to 11th harmonics bright-dark solitons pairs were obtained by rotating the Polarization controller (PC) when the power are 160 mW, 230 mW and 340 mW, respectively. In order to investigate the influence of loss on the laser system, a variable optical attenuator (VOA) was embedded in the ring laser cavity. Then the dual-wavelength with Kelly sidebands was obtained by properly adjusting the PC and VOA. The center wavelengths of the dual-wavelength laser were located at 1557.8 nm and 1568.5 nm and the 3 dB bandwidths of two wavelengths are 2.2 nm and 2.1 nm, respectively. The spacing between the two wavelengths was 10.7 nm. Due to the existence of nonlinearity, the 1st to 22th harmonics bright solitons sequence (corresponding to the repetition rate tunable from 196.8 kHz to 4.33 MHz) was obtained by increasing the pump power. The intervals of bright-dark solitons pair and bright solitons all were $5.08\ \mu\mathrm{s}$, which corresponds to fundamental repetition rates are 196.8 kHz. The signal-to-noise ratio of the bright solitons was approximately 58 dB, which means the operation of laser was stable.
Physical activity intervention using Fitbits in an introductory college health course

Objective: This study took the form of an intervention examining change in physical activity and quality of experience among students in an introductory health course who were asked to wear a Fitbit activity monitor throughout the semester. Method: College students (N = 56) took part in this controlled trial. Students enrolled in an introductory health course (Education + Fitbit; n = 24) were asked to purchase a Fitbit and wear it throughout the semester. This activity monitor purchase replaced the textbook requirement to reduce the financial burden for students. Change in objectively measured physical activity within this group was compared to students enrolled in a traditional introductory health course (Education Only; n = 14) and students enrolled in an introductory humanities course (Control; n = 18). To assess objectively measured physical activity, all participants wore a sealed pedometer for one week at the beginning and end of the semester. Students in the Education + Fitbit group also provided written feedback on their experience with the Fitbit. Results: A 2 × 3 repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed a significant interaction between time and group, F(2, 53) = 3.957, p = . 025. Post hoc analysis of this interaction indicated that students in the Education + Fitbit group significantly increased (p = .014) objectively measured physical activity by 1,078 steps/day, whereas physical activity in Education Only and Control groups did not significantly change. Qualitative data demonstrated that student experiences with the Fitbit were resoundingly positive. Conclusion: Replacing a textbook requirement with requiring a commercially available activity monitor in an introductory health course may be an effective and enjoyable strategy to increase physical activity among US college students.
Dairy and Fruit Listed as Main Ingredients Improve NRF8.3 Nutrient Density Scores of Children's Snacks

Background: The US Food and Drug Administration has modified its regulations on nutrient content claims by considering healthy dietary ingredients as well as nutrients. Objective: To assess the relation between dairy and fruit as main ingredients in children's snacks and the Nutrient Rich Food (NRF8.3) nutrient density score. Methods: Commonly consumed children's snacks in the United States, Canada, France, and the United Kingdom (n = 261) were assigned into USDA What We Eat in America (WWEI) categories. Nutrient composition data came from industry websites, open-source government databases (USDA Standard Reference SR28; CIQUAL), and back-of-pack food labels. Nutrient density was calculated using the Nutrient Rich Food Index NRF8.3. Snacks with dairy or fruit as the first listed ingredient (n = 115) were compared to those that listed neither (n = 146). Snacks that contained fruits-vegetables-nuts (FVN) (n = 88) were compared to those that did not (n = 173). Results: NRF8.3 scores were higher for snacks listing dairy or fruit as main ingredients. Dairy or fruit when listed as the first ingredient were associated with higher percent daily values of protein, fiber, calcium, vitamin A, vitamin C, and vitamin D, lower saturated fat content and a 30-point increment in NRF8.3 scores. The presence of FVN was associated with a 22-point increment in NRF8.3 scores. Conclusion: The correspondence between back-of-pack food ingredients and the nutrient based NRF8.3 scores suggests that ingredients can also be used to communicate the nutritional value of foods to the consumer. Dairy and fruit, when listed as first ingredients, were an important component of the NRF8.3 nutrient density score.