Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
In silico evaluation of the mechanical stimulation effect on the regenerative rehabilitation for the articular cartilage local defects

Osteoarthritis is one of the most severe diseases of the human musculoskeletal system, and therefore, for many years, special attention has been paid to the search for effective methods of its treatment. However, even the most modern methods only in a limited number of cases in the early or intermediate stages of osteoarthritis lead to positive treatment results. In the later stages of development, osteoarthritis is practically incurable and most often ends with disability or the need for joint replacement for a large number of people. One of the main reasons hindering the development of osteoarthritis treatment methods is the peculiarities of articular cartilage, in which there is practically no vascular network and tissue homeostasis is carried out mainly due to the diffusion of nutrients present in the synovial fluid. In modern medicine, for the treatment of osteoarthritis, tissue engineering strategies have been developed based on the implantation of scaffolds populated with chondrogenic cells into the area of the defect. In vitro studies have established that these cells are highly mechanosensitive and, under the influence of mechanical stimuli of a certain type and intensity, their ability to proliferate and chondrogenesis increases. This property can be used to improve the efficiency of regenerative rehabilitation technologies based on the synergistic combination of cellular technologies, tissue engineering strategies, and mechanical tissue stimulation. In this work, using a regenerative rehabilitation mathematical model of local articular cartilage defects, numerical experiments were performed, the results of which indicate that the micro-and macro environment of the restored tissue, which changes during mechanical stimulation, has a significant effect on the formation of the extracellular matrix, and, consequently, cartilage tissue generally. The results obtained can be used to plan strategies for mechanical stimulation, based on the analysis of the results of cell proliferation experimental assessment after each stimulation procedure in vivo.
Generalized Fibonacci Sequence and its Properties

The Fibonacci Sequence can be generalized in several ways. Similar is the case with Lucas Sequence. In this paper, we study Generalized Fibonacci-Like sequence {M n} defined by the recurrence relation Mn = M n-1 + M n-2, for all n ≥ 2 with M0 = 2m and M 1 = 1+m, m being a fixed positive integer. The associated initial conditions are the sum of initial conditions of Fibonacci sequence and m times the initial conditions of Lucas sequence respectively. We shall define Binet's formula and generating function of Generalized Fibonacci-Like sequence. Mainly, Induction method and Binet's formula will be used to establish properties of Generalized Fibonacci-Like sequence.
Optimal LES formulations for isotropic turbulence

It is shown that there is an abstract subgrid model that is in all senses ideal. An LES using the ideal subgrid model will exactly reproduce all single-time, multi-point statistics, and at the same time will have minimum possible error in instantaneous dynamics. The ideal model is written as an average over the real turbulent fields whose large scales match the current LES field. But this conditional average cannot be computed directly. Rather, the ideal model is the target for approximation when developing practical models, though no new practical models are presented here. To construct such models, the conditional average can be formally approximated using stochastic estimation. These optimal formulations are presented, and it is shown that a relatively simple but general class of one-point estimates can be computed from two-point correlation data, and that the estimates retain some of the statistical properties of the ideal model. To investigate the nature of these models, optimal formulations were applied to forced isotropic turbulence. A variety of optimal models of increasing complexity were computed. In all cases, it was found that the errors between the real and estimated subgrid force were nearly as large as the subgrid force itself. It is suggested that this may also be characteristic of the ideal model in isotropic turbulence. If this is the case, then it explains why subgrid models produce reasonable results in actual LES while performing poorly in a priori tests. Despite the large errors in the optimal models, one feature of the subgrid interaction that is exactly represented is the energy transfer to the subgrid scales by each wavenumber.
Extraction of optical properties from hyperspectral images by Monte Carlo light propagation model

In this paper, diffuse reflectance hyperspectral images of a light beam propagating through a semi-infinite homogeneous layer were simulated by a modified version of the open source Monte Carlo (MC) for multi-layered tissues. Subsequently, the optical properties in terms of absorption and reduced scattering coefficients were extracted from the simulated hyperspectral images by an inverse MC model based on a criterion function that exploits the spatially resolved information of hyperspectral images. The method was validated on real hyperspectral images of turbid phantoms with exactly defined optical properties.
Oceanic gravity by analytical inversion of Hotine's formula

An analytical inversion of the Hotine formula is developed using fast Fourier transform techniques. Detailed mathematical derivations are used to explain the concepts behind the inverse transformation. Three modifications of the analytical inversion of the Hotine formula are compared and tested using both synthetic data from the OSU91A geopotential model and real GEOSAT altimetry data from the Exact Repeat Mission. The stability of this inverse Hotine approach is investigated using simulated data, and numerical tests are done to quantify the stability of this approach. The approach seems to be numerically stable without employing any stabilization technique. Estimated gravity information from GEOSTAT altimetry data is compared to marine gravity data from shipboard measurements in the Orphan Knoll area. The standard deviations and mean values of the differences between satellite and marine gravity disturbances are 8.2 and 2.9 mGal for the planar approximation, 9.2 and 3.7 mGal for the spherical approximati.
FeFET-Based In-Memory Hyperdimensional Encoding Design

The data explosion of Internet of Things (IoT) and machine learning tasks raises a great demand on highly efficient computing hardware and paradigms. Brain-inspired hyperdimensional computing (HDC) is becoming a promising computing paradigm, which encodes data as hypervectors with homogeneous elements instead of numbers, and can perform learning/classification tasks through simple logical or arithmetic operations on the encoded hypervectors. Therefore HDC has much lower computational complexity than conventional computational models such as neural networks. However, due to its high-dimensional data representation, processing, and encoding hypervectors in conventional Von–Neumann architectures (e.g., CPU and GPU) requires a large amount of energy- and time-consuming data transfer, thus weakening its efficiency benefiting from low complexity. In this article, we proposed an ultralow power and fast computing-in-memory (CiM) design based on nonvolatile (NV) ferroelectric FET (FeFET) for HDC encoding. The proposed design mainly support hyperdimensional bit-wise XOR and parallel majority vote (MAJ) operations for HDC encoding, which are implemented by FeFET-based memories together with CMOS peripheral circuits. The 1FeFET1T-based memory cell effectively mitigates the impact of transistor variations on the operation. A highly parallel and pipelined computing workflow of the proposed design further boosts the energy efficiency and performance with a negligible extra area overhead. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed design achieves $5.04\times $ energy efficiency improvement over other CiM designs for HDC encoding.
The reciprocal effects of physical activities and ride-sourcing on health

Abstract Previous studies revealed that not all physical activities contribute to positive health results. Due to time limitations and energy deficits, involvement in physical activity might limit participation in another physical activity. Moreover, physical activities with different intensities, either vigorous, moderate or light, might have different patterns in deactivating or activating subsequent physical activities. This study examines the reciprocal effects of physical activities with different intensities and their effects on various health indicators. The reciprocal effect and its effect on health were overlooked in previous studies as the main research gap. The emerging digital activities raise how ride-sourcing and online activities encourage or discourage physical activities, in turn, health. This is the additional research gap. The 2019 Malang Greater Area dataset and Structural Equation Modeling are used in the analysis. The result of the study confirms that the reciprocal effects of physical activities are relevant to unravel the deactivation of other physical activities due to the commitments to take a specific physical activity. However, vigorous physical activities at home are still performed when people have commitments to do moderate physical activities at work and home, vigorous sports and cycling. The results also confirm that ride-sourcing significantly provides greater opportunities to perform physical activities than online activities. Ride-sourcing is also found to reduce the negative health effects of vigorous physical activities at work. Not all physical activities, however, correlate with positive health performances. Active travel can be suggested to maintain older people’s health, whereas vigorous sports are good for young adults.
Malnutrition Patterns in Children with Chronic Kidney Disease

Malnutrition is frequent in children with chronic kidney disease (CKD). Apart from undernutrition and protein energy wasting (PEW), overnutrition prevalence is rising, resulting in fat mass accumulation. Sedentary behavior and unbalanced diet are the most important causal factors. Both underweight and obesity are linked to adverse outcomes regarding renal function, cardiometabolic risk and mortality rate. Muscle wasting is the cornerstone finding of PEW, preceding fat loss and may lead to fatigue, musculoskeletal decline and frailty. In addition, clinical data emphasize the growing occurrence of muscle mass and strength deficits in patients with fat mass accumulation, attributed to CKD-related wasting processes, reduced physical activity and possibly to obesity-induced inflammatory diseases, leading to sarcopenic obesity. Moreover, children with CKD are susceptible to abdominal obesity, resulting from high body fat distribution into the visceral abdomen compartment. Both sarcopenic and abdominal obesity are associated with increased cardiometabolic risk. This review analyzes the pathogenetic mechanisms, current trends and outcomes of malnutrition patterns in pediatric CKD. Moreover, it underlines the importance of body composition assessment for the nutritional evaluation and summarizes the advantages and limitations of the currently available techniques. Furthermore, it highlights the benefits of growth hormone therapy and physical activity on malnutrition management.
Plasma-only circulating tumor DNA analysis detects minimal residual disease and predicts early relapse in hepatocellular carcinoma patients undergoing curative resection

Background Minimal residual disease (MRD) is considered an essential factor leading to relapse within 2 years (early relapse) after radical surgery, which is challenging to be detected by conventional imaging. Circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) provides a novel approach for detecting MRD and predicting clinical outcomes. Here, we tried to construct a fixed panel for plasma-only ctDNA NGS to enable tumor-uninformed MRD detection in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Methods Here, we performed the followings: (i) profiling genomic alteration spectrum of ctDNA from the Chinese HCC cohort consisting of 493 individuals by NGS; (ii) screening of MRD monitoring genes; and (iii) performance evaluation of MRD monitoring genes in predicting early relapse in the ZJZS2020 cohort comprising 20 HCC patients who underwent curative resection. Results A total of 493 plasma samples from the Chinese HCC cohort were detected using a 381/733-gene NGS panel to characterize the mutational spectrum of ctDNA. Most patients (94.1%, 464/493) had at least one mutation in ctDNA. The variants fell most frequently in TP53 (45.1%), LRP1B (20.2%), TERT (20.2%), FAT1 (16.2%), and CTNNB1 (13.4%). By customized filtering strategy, 13 MRD monitoring genes were identified, and any plasma sample with one or more MRD monitoring gene mutations was considered MRD-positive. In the ZJZS2020 cohort, MRD positivity presented a sensitivity of 75% (6/8) and a specificity of 100% (6/6) in identifying early postoperative relapse. The Kaplan-Meier analysis revealed a significantly short relapse-free survival (RFS; median RFS, 4.2 months vs. NR, P=0.002) in the MRD-positive patients versus those with MRD negativity. Cox regression analyses revealed MRD positivity as an independent predictor of poor RFS (HR 13.00, 95% CI 2.60-69.00, P=0.002). Conclusions We successfully developed a 13-gene panel for plasma-only MRD detection, which was effective and convenient for predicting the risk of early postoperative relapse in HCC.
Connecting up embedded knowledge across Northern Powerhouse cities

One of the driving rationales behind plans for major transport investment between Northern UK cities is that of connecting labour pools. Integrated labour pools, the argument goes, will give rise to agglomeration economies and subsequent growth. Behind this logic lies the idea that access to complementary skills in neighbouring cities will yield benefits for firms. Yet, at what travel time radius is access to these skills beneficial? Can a better understanding of this inform our assessment of the likely economic impact of proposed transport investments and subsequent reductions in travel times? Here we develop a method to estimate this radius based on the relationship between industry employment growth in a city and the size of employment in ‘skill-related’ sectors. Assuming car or rail travel, we find that for Northern cities the radius is around 45 min while for the South it is around 110 min. Manufacturing peaks around 45 min for the whole UK, including both North and South. Services, however, peak around 110 min in the South but 70 min in the North. A comparison between the UK’s Integrated Rail Plan and earlier proposals to invest in High Speed 2 rail and Northern rail connections uncovers lost opportunities for employment growth in Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield. This study provides a road-map for the deployment of methods from Evolutionary Economic Geography, originally developed to predict regional and urban growth and diversification processes as a function of the local skill mix, to evaluate the potential gains from transport infrastructure schemes.
Access to vaccination services for priority ruminant livestock diseases in Ghana: Barriers and determinants of service utilization by farmers.

INTRODUCTION Livestock diseases are a major constraint to agricultural productivity, frequently causing significant livelihood losses for farmers, and negatively affecting public food safety and security. Vaccines provide an effective and profitable means for controlling most infectious livestock diseases, but remain underutilized. This study sought to assess the barriers and determinants of vaccination utilization for priority livestock diseases in Ghana. METHODS We conducted a mixed-method study involving a quantitative survey with ruminant livestock farmers (N = 350) and seven focus group discussions (FGD) involving 65 ruminant livestock farmers. The survey data were analyzed, and distribution of barriers to vaccination access described. We evaluated the determinants of vaccination utilization (any use of vaccination against contagious-bovine-pleuropneumonia (CBPP) and peste-des-petits-ruminants (PPR) in 2021) using logistic regression analyses at the 0.05 significance level. FGD transcripts were analyzed deductively. We used triangulation to achieve convergence across the different datasets and analyses. RESULTS The farmers kept an average (median) of 5 tropical livestock units (TLUs) of ruminant livestock (IQR=2.6-12.0) that were on average 8 kilometers (IQR=1.9-12.4) away from veterinary officers (VOs). Only 16% (56/350) of herds were vaccinated against the diseases. Most farmers (274/350) had limited knowledge on vaccines against CBPP and PPR infections, 63% (222/350) perceived low risk of these diseases to their herds. About half of farmers reported experiencing outbreaks of either disease in the study year (2021). Farmers scored on average 80.5 out of 98 (IQR=74-85) on the RS-14 resilience scale. After adjusting for farmers' livestock rearing experience, herd size, sex, wealth status, distance to VOs, previous disease outbreaks, and perceived risk of the diseases, vaccination utilization was negatively associated with limited knowledge (aOR=0.19, 95%CI=0.08-0.43), and positively associated with personal exposure to outbreaks in the study year (aOR=5.26, 95%CI=2.01-13.7) and increasing resilience (aOR=1.13, 95%CI=1.07-1.19). FGDs revealed farmer misconceptions about vaccines, costs of vaccines, and timely access to vaccines from VOs as additional barriers. CONCLUSIONS Acceptability, affordability, accessibility, and availability of vaccine services represent the main barriers to vaccines utilization by ruminant livestock farmers in Ghana. Given that limited knowledge regarding the value of vaccination and shortfalls in veterinary service supply are of central importance for both the demand and supply side, more collaboration between the different stakeholders in a transdisciplinary manner to effectively address the low vaccination utilization problem is needed.
Urban-driven decrease in arthropod richness and diversity associated with group-specific changes in arthropod abundance

Habitat loss and fragmentation caused by land-use changes in urbanised landscapes are main drivers of biodiversity loss and changes in species assemblages. While the effects of urbanisation on arthropods has received increasing attention in the last decade, most of the studies were taxon-specific, limited in time and/or covering only part of the habitats along the rural-urban gradient. To comprehensively assess the effects of urbanisation on arthropod communities, here, we sampled arthropods at 180 sites within an urban mosaic in the city of Innsbruck (Austria) using a systematic grid. At each site, arthropods were collected in three micro-habitats: the canopy, the bush layer and tree bark. They were identified to the family, infra-order or order level, depending on the taxonomic group. Urbanisation level was estimated by five different proxies extracted from land use/land cover data (e.g., impervious surface cover), all of them calculated in a 100, 500, and 1,000 m radius around the sampling points, and three indexes based on distance to settlements. We tested for the effects of different levels of urbanisation on (i) overall arthropod abundance, richness and diversity and (ii) community composition using redundancy analyses. In the canopy and the bush layer, arthropod richness and diversity decreased with increasing urbanisation level, suggesting that urbanisation acts as a filter on taxonomic groups. Our data on arthropod abundance further support this hypothesis and suggest that urbanisation disfavours wingless groups, particularly so on trees. Indeed, urbanisation was correlated to lower abundances of spiders and springtails, but higher abundances of aphids, barklice and flies. Arthropod community composition was better explained by a set of urbanisation proxies, especially impervious surface cover measured in a 100, 500, and 1,000 m radius. Arthropods are key elements of food webs and their availability in urban environments is expected to have bottom-up effects, thus shaping foraging behaviour, distribution, and/or success of species at higher trophic levels. Studying ecological networks in urban ecosystems is the next step that will allow to understand how urbanisation alters biodiversity.
Fake Airy functions and the asymptotics of reflectionlessness

Two classes of analytic refractive-index profile P2(z, in ), whose reflection coefficients r are zero for all values of a parameter in , are studied as in to 0. The aim is to understand why r=0 rather than r varies as exp(-1/ in ) as for generic profiles. The authors find that reflectionlessness is a consequence of the fact that transition points of P2 (zeros or poles in the complex z plane) form tight clusters (whose size vanishes with in ) which can be regarded neither as coalesced nor well separated. Expansion near a cluster yields the local wave not as the usual Airy function, whose Stokes phenomenon generates reflection, but as Bessel functions of half-integer order (fake Airy functions) which are exactly trigonometric functions with no Stokes phenomenon and so no reflection.
Endothelial, Vascular and Sympathetic Alterations as Therapeutic Targets in Chronic Heart Failure

Vascular and sympathetic abnormalities characterize chronic heart failure (CHF). Alterations include (1) a reduction in arterial distensibility, (2) endothelial dysfunction, (3) a decrease in arterial compliance and a parallel increase in arterial stiffness, and (4) sympathetic cardiovascular activation. Altogether, these alterations represent important targets in therapeutic interventions, because they display an independent negative impact on the disease prognosis, favouring disease progression and the development of cardiovascular complications with direct and indirect mechanisms. The present review will examine the effects of the different therapeutic interventions targeting the vascular/sympathetic alterations detected in CHF. Non-pharmacological, pharmacological and device-based treatments will be discussed in detail, highlighting the possible mechanisms responsible for the vascular/sympathetic effects of each intervention. Finally, the unmet goals in treatment in relation to endothelial and adrenergic targets will be also discussed.