Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
General anesthesia and femoral nerve block versus spinal anesthesia for cemented hip arthroplasty in elderly patients: A randomized controlled trial

ABSTRACT BACKGROUND Traumatic femoral fractures are a prevalent orthopaedic issue in elderly adults. General anaesthesia (GA) vs. spinal anaesthesia are still being discussed as the best anaesthetic method for cemented hip arthroplasty (SA). This study compared the impact of spinal anaesthesia versus general anaesthesia in combination with femoral nerve block on the mean arterial blood pressure (MAP) in patients having cemented hip arthroplasty operations. AIM OF THE STUDY To compare the impact of spinal anaesthesia on elderly patients undergoing cemented hip arthroplasty operations versus general anaesthesia in combination with femoral nerve block on mean arterial blood pressure. PATIENTS AND METHODS The study was registered at Pan African-Clinical Trial Registry.org with ID of (PACTR 202,111,575,647,784). At Ain Shams University Hospital, 60 patients receiving total hip arthroplasty were separated into two equal groups, each comprising 30 patients, for the purpose of this prospective randomised comparison study. Patients in Group (A) underwent spinal anaesthesia, while Group (B) received general anaesthesia together with an ultrasound-guided femoral nerve block. RESULTS This study showed that GA was associated with more stable readings of mean arterial blood pressure (MAP) after anesthesia induction and post cement implantation than SA (p-value = 0.04 and 0.038 respectively). CONCLUSION Patients who received general anesthesia (GA) had more stable hemodynamic parameters especially the mean arterial blood pressure (MAP) than those who received spinal anesthesia (SA).
Masked Face Detection and Recognition System Based on Deep Learning Algorithms

Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and its several variants have developed new habits in our daily lives. For instance, people have begun covering their faces in public areas and tight quarters to restrict the spread of the disease. However, the usage of face masks has hampered the ability of facial recognition systems to determine people's identities for registration authentication and dependability purpose. This study proposes a new deep-learning-based system for detecting and recognizing masked faces and determining the identity and whether the face is properly masked or not using several face image datasets. The proposed system was trained using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with cross-validation and early stopping. First, a binary classification model was trained to discriminate between masked and unmasked faces, with the top model achieving a 99.77% accuracy. Then, a multi-class model was trained to classify the masked face images into three labels, i.e., correctly, incorrectly, and non-masked faces. The proposed model has achieved a high accuracy of 99.5%. Finally, the system recognizes the person's identity with an average accuracy of 97.98%. The visual assessment has proved that the proposed system succeeds in locating and matching faces. © 2023 by the authors.
Single quantum-dot Purcell factor and β factor in a photonic crystal waveguide

A theoretical formalism to calculate the spontaneous emission rate enhancement Purcell factor and propagation mode factor from single quantum dots in a planar-photonic-crystal waveguide is presented. Large Purcell factors for slow light modes, and enormous factors 0.85 over a broadband 10 THz spectral range are subsequently predicted. The local density of photon states is found to diverge at the photonic band edge, but we discuss why this divergence will always be broadened in real samples, most notably due to structural disorder. Applications towards “on-chip” single photon sources are highlighted.
Growth-stimulating and antioxidant effects of vanillic acid on healthy broiler chickens

Background and Aim: Phytobiotics are a safe alternative to feed antibiotics in industrial poultry farming that increases productivity by stimulating various digestive enzymes to reduce the number of pathogenic microorganisms in the intestines and improve antioxidant status and immune response. This study aimed to evaluate the effect of vanillic acid in its pure form and in combination with gamma lactone on weight growth and the physiological parameters of broiler chickens. Materials and Methods: The studies were performed on 120 Arbor Acres broiler chickens (7 days old) that were randomly divided into four groups with five replicates (cages) and six birds per replicate. The control group was fed the basal diet (BD) only. Group I was fed the BD + gamma lactone (average dose 0.07 mL/animal/day). Group II was fed the BD + vanillic acid (average dose 0.07 mL/animal/day). Group III was fed the BD + gamma lactone + vanillic acid in a 1:1 ratio (average dose 0.07 mL/body/day). Live weight of broiler chickens for all group was assessed at the end of each period (age of 7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42 days). At the end of the experiment (on day 42), 10 broilers with an average live weight were selected for blood sampling from the axillary vein. Results: The results showed a growth-promoting effect of vanillic acid when fed with a diet free of synthetic antioxidants. Groups I and II had increased live weights throughout the entire experiment and a significant increase at the end of the experiment (8.2%–8.5%; p ≤ 0.05) compared to the control group. Toxic effects were not found in the biochemical blood serum analyses of Groups II and III. The metabolic processes in the experimental groups were intensified, especially in the enzyme associated with amino acid metabolism (gamma-glutamyl transferase) in Groups I and III (p ≤ 0.05). Vanillic acid, whether fed alone or in combination with gamma lactone, exhibited high antioxidant activities, protected cells from oxidative damage by inducing total antioxidant, catalase, and superoxide dismutase activities (p ≤ 0.05), and reduced the level of malondialdehyde (p ≤ 0.05) measured. No significant changes in the morphological blood parameters were found. Conclusion: The use of vanillic acid alone and in combination with gamma lactone increases the digestive enzyme activities in blood plasma, increases body weight, and has a positive effect on lipid metabolism and the antioxidant status of broiler chickens. These findings indicate the significant potential use of vanillic acid and gamma lactone in poultry due to their antioxidant properties.
European Habitats Directive has fostered monitoring but not prevented species declines

Strong biodiversity declines have been reported across the European Union, especially in insects, despite conservation policy such as the Habitats Directive that aims to halt biodiversity loss. Using 50 years of observational data, we examined indicators for the goals of the Directive in terms of improving monitoring efforts and occupancy trends of butterfly and dragonfly annex species in a central European region. We quantified annual monitoring effort and used occupancy‐detection models to compare species trends for 18 years before and after legal implementation of the Directive. Monitoring efforts increased after implementation, while occupancy trends both improved and deteriorated. Contrary to its main goal, the European Habitats Directive did not prevent a worsening of all annex species’ occupancy trends in the studied region. While the increased monitoring efforts aid biodiversity assessments, more serious broad‐scale conservation measures are needed to halt biodiversity loss across Europe.
Macrocyclic Compounds: Metal Oxide Particles Nanocomposite Thin Films Deposited by MAPLE

Nanocomposite films based on macrocyclic compounds (zinc phthalocyanine (ZnPc) and 5,10,15,20-tetra(4-pyridyl) 21H,23H-porphyrin (TPyP)) and metal oxide nanoparticles (ZnO or CuO) were deposited by matrix-assisted pulsed laser evaporation (MAPLE). 1,4-dioxane was used as a solvent in the preparation of MAPLE targets that favor the deposition of films with a low roughness, which is a key feature for their integration in structures for optoelectronic applications. The influence of the addition of ZnO nanoparticles (~20 nm in size) or CuO nanoparticles (~5 nm in size) in the ZnPc:TPyP mixture and the impact of the added metal oxide amount on the properties of the obtained composite films were evaluated in comparison to a reference layer based only on an organic blend. Thus, in the case of nanocomposite films, the vibrational fingerprints of both organic compounds were identified in the infrared spectra, their specific strong absorption bands were observed in the UV–Vis spectra, and a quenching of the TPyP emission band was visible in the photoluminescence spectra. The morphological analysis evidenced agglomerated particles on the composite film surface, but their presence has no significant impact on the roughness of the MAPLE deposited layers. The current density–voltage (J-V) characteristics of the structures based on the nanocomposite films deposited by MAPLE revealed the critical role played by the layer composition and component ratio, an improvement in the electrical parameters values being achieved only for the films with a certain type and optimum amount of metal oxide nanoparticles.
Accessible saddles on fractal basin boundaries

Abstract For a homeomorphism of the plane, the basin of attraction of a fixed point attractor is open, connected, and simply-connected, and hence is homeomorphic to an open disk. The basin boundary, however, need not be homeomorphic to a circle. When it is not, it can contain periodic orbits of infinitely many different periods.
Cytotoxicity against A549 Human Lung Cancer Cell Line via the Mitochondrial Membrane Potential and Nuclear Condensation Effects of Nepeta paulsenii Briq., a Perennial Herb

The genus Nepeta belongs to the largest Lamiaceae family, with 300 species, which are distributed throughout the various regions of Africa, Asia, India, and America. Along with other plant families distinguished by their medicinal and therapeutic values, the Nepeta genus of Lameaceae remains relatively valuable. Hence, the phytochemicals of N. paulsenii Briq. were extracted using different plant parts, i.e., leaves, stem, roots, flowers, and the whole plant by using various solvents (ethanol, water, and ethyl acetate), obtaining 15 fractions. Each extract of dried plant material was analyzed by FT-IR and GC-MS to identify the chemical constituents. The cytotoxicity of each fraction was analyzed by MTT assay and mitochondrial membrane potential and nuclear condensation assays against lung cancer cells. Among the ethyl acetate and ethanolic extracts, the flowers showed the best results, with IC50 values of 51.57 μg/mL and 50.58 μg/mL, respectively. In contrast, among the water extracts of the various plant segments, the stem showed the best results, with an IC50 value of 123.80 μg/mL. 5-flourouracil was used as the standard drug, providing an IC50 value of 83.62 μg/mL. The Hoechst 33342 stain results indicated apoptotic features, i.e., chromatin dissolution and broken down, fragmented, and crescent-shaped nuclei. The ethanolic extracts of the flowers showed more pronounced apoptotic effects on the cells. The mitochondrial membrane potential indicated that rhodamine 123 fluorescence signals suppressed mitochondrial potential due to the treatment with the extracts. Again, the apoptotic index of the ethanolic extract of the flowers remained the highest. Hence it can be concluded that the flower part of N. paulsenii Briq. was found to be the most active against the A459 human lung cancer cell line.
Challenging the Pleiotropic Effects of Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation in Geriatric Depression: A Multimodal Case Series Study

Background: Although the antidepressant potential of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), the pleiotropic effects in geriatric depression (GD) are poorly investigated. We tested rTMS on depression, cognitive performance, growth/neurotrophic factors, cerebral blood flow (CBF) to transcranial Doppler sonography (TCD), and motor-evoked potentials (MEPs) to TMS in GD. Methods: In this case series study, six drug-resistant subjects (median age 68.0 years) underwent MEPs at baseline and after 3 weeks of 10 Hz rTMS on the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. The percentage change of serum nerve growth factor, vascular endothelial growth factor, brain-derived growth factor, insulin-like growth factor-1, and angiogenin was obtained. Assessments were performed at baseline, and at the end of rTMS; psychocognitive tests were also repeated after 1, 3, and 6 months. Results: Chronic cerebrovascular disease was evident in five patients. No adverse/undesirable effect was reported. An improvement in mood was observed after rTMS but not at follow-up. Electrophysiological data to TMS remained unchanged, except for an increase in the right median MEP amplitude. TCD and neurotrophic/growth factors did not change. Conclusions: We were unable to detect a relevant impact of high-frequency rTMS on mood, cognition, cortical microcircuits, neurotrophic/growth factors, and CBF. Cerebrovascular disease and exposure to multiple pharmacological treatments might have contributed.
DAKRS: Domain Adaptive Knowledge-Based Retrieval System for Natural Language-Based Vehicle Retrieval

Given Natural Language (NL) text descriptions, NL-based vehicle retrieval aims to extract target vehicles from a multi-view multi-camera traffic video pool. Solutions to the problem have been challenged by not only inherent distinctions between textual and visual domains, but also by the complexities of the high-dimensionality of visual data, the diverse range of textual descriptions, a major lack of high-volume datasets in this relatively new field, alongside prominently large domain gaps between training and test sets. To deal with these issues, existing approaches have advocated computationally expensive models to separately extract the subspaces of language and vision before blending them into the same shared representation space. Through our proposed Domain Adaptive Knowledge-based Retrieval System (DAKRS), we show that by taking advantage of multi-modal information in a pretrained model, we can better focus on training robust representations in the shared space of limited labels, rather than on robust extraction of uni-modal representations that comes with increased computational burdens. Our contributions are threefold: (i) An efficient extension of Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP)’s transfer learning into a baseline text-to-image multi-modular vehicle retrieval framework; (ii) A data enhancement method to create pseudo-vehicle tracks from the traffic video pool by leveraging the robustness of baseline retrieval model combined with background subtraction; and (iii) A Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation (SSDA) scheme to engineer pseudo-labels for adapting model parameters to the target domain. Experimental results are benchmarked on Cityflow-NL to obtain 63.20% MRR with 150.0 M of parameters, illustrating our competitive effectiveness and efficiency against state-of-the-arts, without ensembling.
Chemical Inscriptions in Korean Textbooks: Semiotics of Macro- and Microworld.

Thinking about macroscopic phenomena in terms of models based on the idea of microscopic particles (i.e., the particulate theory of matter) is one of the important goals for student learning in chemistry around the world. However, previous research suggests that students do not easily understand phenomena from a particle perspective, although such a perspective has many concrete aspects that ought to assist learners of chemistry. More than the textbooks of other countries, Korean chemistry texts tend to include colorful inscriptions. How, we might ask, do such inscriptions help learners of chemistry? The purpose of this study is to investigate the function and structure of chemical inscriptions in middle school science textbooks by drawing on a semiotic framework. We develop the concept of “chemi (stry)-semiotics'' to unveil the work of reading required to understand chemical inscriptions in the way their authors intended them to be understood. The study began with the assumption that different kinds and functions (structure) of inscriptions constitute different “signs” that are available as sense-making resources in the learning process. We show that the difficulty in understanding the particulate nature of matter may result from the different processes of semiosis (interpretation and meaning making) between inscriptions depicting macroscopic and models based on microscopic particles. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed90:173–201, 2006
Modelling Surface Light Scattering for Inverse Two-Dimensional Reflector Design

We present a novel approach of modelling surface light scattering in the context of two-dimensional reflector design, relying on energy conservation and optimal transport theory. For isotropic scattering in cylindrically or rotationally symmetric systems with in-plane scattering, the scattered light distribution can be expressed as a convolution between a scattering function, which characterises the optical properties of the surface, and a specular light distribution. Deconvolving this expression allows for traditional specular reflector design procedures to be used, whilst accounting for scattering. This approach thus constitutes solving the inverse problem of light scattering, allowing for direct computation of the reflector surface, without the need for design iterations.
The statistical dynamics of homogeneous turbulence

The steady distribution function for homogeneous turbulence is studied starting from Liouville's equation, modified by the introduction of an instantaneously fluctuating external force, which acts as a random source of energy. A new technique for solving Liouville's equation is presented giving a systematic development of the concepts of turbulent diffusion and turbulent viscosity. It amounts to a consistent generalization of the random phase approximation. When the rate of input of energy into the kth Fourier component uk has a power form h|k|−α, the functional form of the mean value 〈 uku−k 〉 can be determined exactly in the limit of large Reynolds number; it is $Ah^{\frac{2}{3}}|\bf K|^ {-{\frac {1}{3}}(5+2 \alpha)}$. Liouville's equation proves an inadequate basis for the steady time-dependent mean $\langle u_k(t)u_{-k}(t^ \prime) \rangle $ and a more general equation is derived. The new equation can be solved in a similar way and shows that the time-dependent correlation starts like a Gaussian in time, then passes through an exponentially decaying state, then eventually has a power dependence $|t-t^\prime|- \gamma^ {|k|}$.
Dynamic modeling and response of rigid embedded cylinders

Following a brief review of the limitations of a popular technique for modeling the soil action in analyses of the dynamic response of deeply embedded cylindrical foundations and structures, the sources of the limitations are identified and a modification is proposed that, while retaining the attractiveness of the original model, defines correctly the action of the system. In the proposed approach, the soil medium is modeled by a series of elastically constrained, rather than unconstrained, thin horizontal layers with a circular hole at the center. The impedances of the constrained layers are established and are then used to evaluate the dynamic response of a rigid vertical cylinder embedded in a uniform viscoelastic stratum of constant thickness and infinite extent in the horizontal direction. The cylinder and the stratum are presumed to be supported on a nondeformable base undergoing a uniform horizontal motion. The effects of both harmonic and earthquake-induced ground motions are considered. The respo.
Convalescent human IgG, but not IgM, from COVID-19 survivors confers dose-dependent protection against SARS-CoV-2 replication and disease in hamsters

Introduction Antibody therapeutic strategies have served an important role during the COVID-19 pandemic, even as their effectiveness has waned with the emergence of escape variants. Here we sought to determine the concentration of convalescent immunoglobulin required to protect against disease from SARS-CoV-2 in a Syrian golden hamster model. Methods Total IgG and IgM were isolated from plasma of SARS-CoV-2 convalescent donors. Dose titrations of IgG and IgM were infused into hamsters 1 day prior to challenge with SARS-CoV-2 Wuhan-1. Results The IgM preparation was found to have ~25-fold greater neutralization potency than IgG. IgG infusion protected hamsters from disease in a dose-dependent manner, with detectable serum neutralizing titers correlating with protection. Despite a higher in vitro neutralizing potency, IgM failed to protect against disease when transferred into hamsters. Discussion This study adds to the growing body of literature that demonstrates neutralizing IgG antibodies are important for protection from SARS-CoV-2 disease, and confirms that polyclonal IgG in sera can be an effective preventative strategy if the neutralizing titers are sufficiently high. In the context of new variants, against which existing vaccines or monoclonal antibodies have reduced efficacy, sera from individuals who have recovered from infection with the emerging variant may potentially remain an efficacious tool.
Fractional Gradient Methods via ψ-Hilfer Derivative

Motivated by the increase in practical applications of fractional calculus, we study the classical gradient method under the perspective of the ψ-Hilfer derivative. This allows us to cover several definitions of fractional derivatives that are found in the literature in our study. The convergence of the ψ-Hilfer continuous fractional gradient method was studied both for strongly and non-strongly convex cases. Using a series representation of the target function, we developed an algorithm for the ψ-Hilfer fractional order gradient method. The numerical method obtained by truncating higher-order terms was tested and analyzed using benchmark functions. Considering variable order differentiation and step size optimization, the ψ-Hilfer fractional gradient method showed better results in terms of speed and accuracy. Our results generalize previous works in the literature.
Testing for EGARCH Against Stochastic Volatility Models

Abstract. It is shown that the EGARCH model is the degenerate case of Danielsson's [Journal of Econometrics (1994) Vol. 61, pp. 375–400] stochastic volatility model where the disturbance of the transition equation of conditional volatility has zero variance. The Lagrange multiplier test statistic is obtained for the EGARCH model against the stochastic volatility model by expressing the degenerate density under the null hypothesis by the Dirac delta function. The finite sample performance of the test is studied in a small Monte Carlo experiment.