Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Removal of Silicone Oil From Intraocular Lens Using Novel Surgical Materials.

PURPOSE To design, fabricate, and evaluate novel materials to remove silicone oil (SiO) droplets from intraocular lenses (IOL) during vitreoretinal surgery. METHODS Three different designs were fabricated using soft lithography of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), three-dimensional (3D) inverse PDMS fabrication using water dissolvable particles, and atomic layer deposition (ALD) of alumina (Al2O3) on surgical cellulose fibers. Laboratory tests included static and dynamic contact angle (CA) measurements with water and SiO, nondestructive x-ray microcomputer tomography (micro-CT), and microscopy. SiO removal was performed in vitro and ex vivo using implantable IOLs and explanted porcine eyes. RESULTS All designs exhibited enhanced hydrophobicity and oleophilicity. Static CA measurements with water ranged from 131° to 160° and with SiO CA approximately 0° in 120 seconds following exposure. Nondestructive x-ray analysis of the 3D PDMS showed presence of interconnected polydispersed porosity of 100 to 300 μm in diameter. SiO removal from IOLs was achieved in vitro and ex vivo using standard 20-G vitrectomy instrumentation. CONCLUSION Removal of SiO from IOLs can be achieved using materials with lower surface energy than that of the IOLs. This can be achieved using appropriate surface chemistry and surface topography. Three designs, with enhanced hydrophobic properties, were fabricated and tested in vitro and ex vivo. All materials remove SiO within an aqueous environment. Preliminary ex vivo results were very promising, opening new possibilities for SiO removal in vitreoretinal surgeries. TRANSLATIONAL RELEVANCE This is the first report of an instrument that can lead to successful removal of SiO from the surface of IOL. In addition to the use of this instrument/material in medicine it can also be used in the industry, for example, retrieval of oil spills from bodies of water.
Complexity Measures for Secure Service-Oriented Software Architectures

As software attacks become widespread, the ability for a software system to resist malicious attacks has become a key concern in software quality engineering. Software attack ability is a concept proposed recently in the research literature to measure the extent to which a software system or service could be the target of successful attacks. Like most external attributes, attack ability is to some extent disconnected from the internal of software products. To mitigate software attack ability, we need to identify and manipulate related internal software attributes. Our goal in this paper is to study software complexity as one such internal attribute. We apply the User System Interaction Effect (USIE) model, a security measurement abstraction paradigm proposed in previous research, to define and validate a sample metric for service complexity. We thereby establish the usefulness of our sample metric through empirical investigation using open source software system as target application.
Knowledge Packets and Knowledge Packet Structures

One of the most challenging tasks in knowledge representation for text-understanding systems is the development of large-scale knowledge bases containing semantic background knowledge. Many current knowledge-based systems restrict their applicational scope to narrow world domains, that is, they are equipped to handle domain-specific tasks by using domain-specific facts and rules. However, for the domain of text understanding this restriction appears to be unacceptable since the understanding of naturallanguage texts draws on a large background of diverse world knowledge and belief. Even if a knowledgebased system could be provided with a large body of world knowledge sufficiently rich to cover a broader domain of discourse, the problem of using this knowledge to build and utilize representations for natural language inputs might prove a serious one with respect to computational resources.
A Performance Study of a Large-scale Data Collection Problem

We consider the problem of moving a large amount of data from several source hosts to a destination host over a wide-area network, i.e., a large-scale data collection problem. This problem is important since improvements in data collection times are crucial to performance of many applications, such as wide-area uploads, high-performance computing, and data mining. Existing approaches to the large-scale data collection problem are (a) transferring data directly from the source hosts to the destination host, using IPprescribed routes (which we refer to as direct methods) or or (b) using “best”-path type applicationlevel re-routing techniques, which we refer to as non-coordinated methods. However, we believe that in the case of large-scale data collection applications, it is important to coordinate data transfers from multiple sources. More specifically, our coordinated method takes into consideration the transfer demands of all source hosts and then schedules all This work was supported in part by the NSF ITR CCR0113192 and the NSF Digital Government EIA0091474 grants. yDept. of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University. This work was partly done while the author was with the Department of Computer Science and UMIACS at the University of Maryland. zDepartment of Computer Science and UMIACS, University of Maryland at College Park. xTeleGIF, Marina del Rey, California. This work was partly done while the author was with the Department of Computer Science and UMIACS at the University of Maryland. {Computer Science Department and IMSC and ISI, University of Southern California. This work was partly done while the author was with the Department of Computer Science and UMIACS at the University of Maryland. data transfers in parallel, using multiple paths existing between the source hosts and the destination host. All this is done at the application layer. In this paper, we present a performance and robustness study of the different data collection methods, namely the direct, the non-coordinated, and the coordinated methods. Our results show that coordinated methods can perform significantly better than non-coordinated and direct methods under various types of network congestion conditions. We also show that coordinated methods are more robust than non-coordinated methods under inaccuracies in network conditions information. Therefore, we believe that coordinated methods are a promising approach to large-scale data collection problems.
A comparison between long-term survivors of Hodgkin's disease and their siblings on fatigue level and factors predicting for increased fatigue.

PURPOSE To compare the level of fatigue in survivors of Hodgkin's disease and their siblings, and to explore factors associated with increased fatigue. METHODS Survivors of Hodgkin's disease 5 years or more from diagnosis and their siblings completed a questionnaire study. Fatigue level was measured using the Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy-Fatigue (FACIT-F) instrument, with lower scores reflecting increased fatigue. Multiple regression models were used to identify factors associated with fatigue level in the two populations. RESULTS Five hundred and eleven survivors (median age 44 years; range 16-82) and 224 siblings (median age 44 years; range 16-79) returned the completed questionnaire. The response rates were 61% and 58%, respectively. Compared with siblings, survivors were significantly more likely to report the presence of cardiac disease (26% versus 16%; P = 0.001) and hypothyroidism (65% versus 3%; P <0.001), and had a significantly lower mean FACIT-F score (40.7 and 42.2; P = 0.05). On multivariable analysis, factors significantly associated with increased fatigue in survivors were reports of cardiac disease (P <0.001), psychiatric condition (P <0.001), history of tobacco use (P = 0.004) and low exercise frequency (P = 0.03). For siblings, the only independent factor associated with increased fatigue was low exercise frequency (P = 0.03). CONCLUSIONS Survivors of Hodgkin's disease were more fatigued than their siblings. The difference was modest but statistically significant. The significant association between fatigue and cardiac disease suggests the importance of screening for underlying cardiac dysfunction in survivors with symptoms of fatigue. The association between fatigue and smoking history may be due to exacerbation of late medical complications of Hodgkin's disease by tobacco use.
Defective DNA repair and increased genomic instability in Cernunnos-XLF-deficient murine ES cells

Nonhomologous DNA end-joining (NHEJ) is a major pathway of DNA double-strand break (DSB) repair in mammalian cells, and it functions to join both specifically programmed DSBs that occur in the context of V(D)J recombination during early lymphocyte development as well as general DSBs that occur in all cells. Thus, defects in NHEJ impair V(D)J recombination and lead to general genomic instability. In human patients, mutations of Cernunnos-XLF (also called NHEJ1), a recently identified NHEJ factor, underlie certain severe combined immune deficiencies associated with defective V(D)J recombination and radiosensitivity. To characterize Cernunnos-XLF function in mouse cells, we used gene-targeted mutation to delete exons 4 and 5 from both copies of the Cernunnos-XLF gene in ES cell (referred to as CerΔ/Δ ES cells). Analyses of CerΔ/Δ ES cells showed that they produce no readily detectable Cernunnos-XLF protein. Based on transient V(D)J recombination assays, we find that CerΔ/Δ ES cells have dramatic impairments in ability to form both V(D)J coding joins and joins of their flanking recombination signal sequences (RS joins). CerΔ/Δ ES cells are highly sensitive to ionizing radiation and have intrinsic DNA DSB repair defects as measured by pulse field gel electrophoresis. Finally, the Cernunnos-XLF mutations led to increased spontaneous genomic instability, including translocations. We conclude that, in mice, Cernunnos-XLF is essential for normal NHEJ-mediated repair of DNA DSBs and that Cernunnos-XLF acts as a genomic caretaker to prevent genomic instability.
Distributional semantics for ontology verification

As they grow in size, OWL ontologies tend to comprise intuitively incompatible statements,even when they remain logically consistent. This is true in particular of lightweight ontologies, especially the ones which aggregate knowledge from different sources. The article investigates how distributional semantics can help detect and repair violation of common sense in consistent ontologies, based on the identification of consequences which are unlikely to hold if the rest of the ontology does. A score evaluating the plausibility for a consequence to hold with regard to distributional evidence is defined, as well as several methods in order to decide which statements should be preferably amended or discarded. A conclusive evaluation is also provided, which consists in extending an input ontology with randomly generated statements, before trying to discard them automatically.
Transcriptional Activation of the Staphylococcus aureus putP Gene by Low-Proline-High Osmotic Conditions and during Infection of Murine and Human Tissues

ABSTRACT Staphylococcus aureus can grow virtually anywhere in the human body but needs to import proline through low- and high-affinity proline transporters to survive. This study examined the regulation of the S. aureus putP gene, which encodes a high-affinity proline permease. putP::lacZ and putP::lux transcriptional fusions were constructed and integrated into the genomes of several S. aureus strains. Enzyme activity was measured after growth in media with various osmolyte concentrations. As osmolarity rose, putP expression increased, with a plateau at 2 M for NaCl in strain LL3-1. Proline concentrations as low as 17.4 μM activated expression of the putP gene. The putP::lux fusion was also integrated into the genomes of S. aureus strains that were either SigB inactive (LL3-1, 8325-4, and SH1003) or SigB active (Newman and SH1000). SigB inactive strains showed increased putP gene expression as NaCl concentrations rose, whereas SigB active strains displayed a dramatic decrease in putP expression, suggesting that the alternative sigma factor B plays a negative role in putP regulation. Mice inoculated with S. aureus strains containing the putP::lux fusion exhibited up to a 715-fold increase in putP expression, although levels in the various murine organs differed. Moreover, urine from human patients infected with S. aureus showed elevated putP levels by use of a PCR procedure, whereas blood and some abscess material had no significant increase. Thus, putP is transcriptionally activated by a low-proline and high osmotic environment both in growth media and in murine or human clinical specimens.
Evolution of the Nadr Regulon in Enterobacteriaceae

The NAD biosynthetic pathway and NAD transformations in E. coli and S. typhi are well characterized. Using comparative genomics methods we describe the NadR regulon in other Enterobacteriaceae, identity new candidate regulon members and demonstrate that even a very simple regulon covering an essential methabolic pathway could be different in closely related genomes.
Prospective Evaluation of the Risk of Bacteremia Associated With Transesophageal Echocardiography

BackgroundTransient bacteremia may lead to endocarditis in patients with significant valvular lesions. Methods and ResultsBecause transesophageal echocardiography selects a patient population with a high prevalence of valvular lesions, we prospectively evaluated the risk of transient bacteremia associated with transesophageal echocardiography in 49 patients. Blood cultures were obtained immediately before transesophageal echocardiography and at 5, 10, and 20 minutes after the start of the procedure. For each culture, 30 ml venous blood was obtained and 10 ml was inoculated into each of an Isolator tube, Septi-chek bottle, and a nonvented Trypticase soy broth bottle. Broth cultures were incubated for 14 days. Blood from the Isolator tube was plated onto appropriate media for recovery of bacteria and fungi. Two patients were excluded from analysis because the final two sets of blood cultures could not be obtained. Among the remaining 47 study patients, two preprocedure control blood cultures were positive, and two of 141 subsequent cultures were positive. All isolates were considered contaminants. Thus, we found no significant bacteremia due to pathogenic oral flora during transesophageal echocardiography (0%; 95% CI, 0.0-7.5%). ConclusionsAlthough recommendations for antimicrobial prophylaxis for transesophageal echocardiography should be individualized for each patient, many patients may not require antimicrobial prophylaxis. (Circulation 1991;84:177–180)
Dynamic voltage frequency scaling for multi-tasking systems using online learning

This paper presents an extremely lightweight dynamic voltage and frequency scaling technique targeted towards modern multi-tasking systems. The technique utilizes processors runtime statistics and an online learning algorithm to estimate the best suited voltage and frequency setting at any given point in time. We implemented the proposed technique in Linux 2.6. 9 running on an Intel PXA27x platform and performed experiments in both single and multi-task environments. Our measurements show that we can achieve the maximum energy savings of 49% and reduce the implementation overhead by a factor of 2 when compared to state of the art techniques.
Cytomegalovirus IgG Level and Avidity in Breastfeeding Infants of HIV-Infected Mothers in Malawi

ABSTRACT Cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection is common among infants of HIV-infected mothers in resource-limited settings. We examined the prevalence and timing of infant CMV infection during the first year of life using IgG antibody and avidity among HIV-exposed infants in Malawi and correlated the results with the presence of detectable CMV DNA in the blood. The Breastfeeding, Antiretrovirals and Nutrition (BAN) study randomized 2,369 mothers and their infants to maternal antiretrovirals, infant nevirapine, or neither for 28 weeks of breastfeeding, followed by weaning. Stored plasma specimens were tested for CMV IgG and antibody avidity from a random subset of infants who had been previously tested with blood CMV PCR and had available specimens at birth and at 24 and 48 weeks of age. Ninety-four of 127 infants (74.0%) tested at 24 weeks of age had CMV IgG of low or intermediate avidity, signifying primary CMV infections. An additional 22 infants (17.3%) had IgG of high avidity; 19 of them had CMV DNA detected in their blood, indicating infant infections. Taken together, these results show that the estimated prevalence of CMV infection at 24 weeks was 88.9%. By 48 weeks of age, 81.3% of infants had anti-CMV IgG; most of them (70.9%) had IgG of high avidity. The CMV serology and avidity testing, combined with the PCR results, confirmed a high rate of primary CMV infection by 6 months of life among breastfeeding infants of HIV-infected mothers. The CMV PCR in blood detected most, but not all, infant CMV infections.
A Methodology for Quality Assessment in Collaborative Score Libraries

We examine quality issues raised by the development of XML-based Digital Score Libraries. Based on the authors' practical experience, the paper exposes the quality shortcomings inherent to the complexity of music encoding, and the lack of support from state-of-the-art formats. We also identify the various facets of the ``quality'' concept with respect to usages and motivations. We finally propose a general methodology to introduce quality management as a first-level concern in the management of score collections, and an initial taxonomy of quality problems based on real use cases.
MMSE Beam Forming on Fast-Scanning Phased Array Weather Radar

A fast-scanning phased array weather radar (PAWR) with a digital beam forming receiver is under development. It is important in beam forming for weather radar observation with temporally high resolution to form a stable and robust main lobe and adaptively suppress sidelobes with a small number of pulses in order to accurately estimate precipitation profiles (reflectivity, mean Doppler velocity, and spectral width). A minimum mean square error (MMSE) formulation with a power constraint, proposed in this paper, gives us adaptively formed beams that satisfy these demands. The MMSE beam-forming method is compared in various precipitation radar signal simulations with traditional beam-forming methods, Fourier and Capon methods, which have been applied in atmospheric research to observe distributed targets such as precipitation, and it is shown that the MMSE method is appropriate to this fast-scanning PAWR concept.
Non‐homogeneous Markov process models with informative observations with an application to Alzheimer's disease

Identifying risk factors for transition rates among normal cognition, mildly cognitive impairment, dementia and death in an Alzheimer's disease study is very important. It is known that transition rates among these states are strongly time dependent. While Markov process models are often used to describe these disease progressions, the literature mainly focuses on time homogeneous processes, and limited tools are available for dealing with non‐homogeneity. Further, patients may choose when they want to visit the clinics, which creates informative observations. In this paper, we develop methods to deal with non‐homogeneous Markov processes through time scale transformation when observation times are pre‐planned with some observations missing. Maximum likelihood estimation via the EM algorithm is derived for parameter estimation. Simulation studies demonstrate that the proposed method works well under a variety of situations. An application to the Alzheimer's disease study identifies that there is a significant increase in transition rates as a function of time. Furthermore, our models reveal that the non‐ignorable missing mechanism is perhaps reasonable.
Multiplicity dependence of the transverse-momentum spectrum for centrally produced hadrons in antiproton-proton collisions at sqrt s =1.8 TeV.

The transverse momentum of charged particles produced within the pseudorapidity range eta = -0.36 to +1.0 has been measured in p-barp collisions at . sqrt.s = 1.8 TeV. The charged-particle multiplicity of each event was measured with a 240-element cylindrical hodoscope system covering the range -3.25
Diversity and Community Composition of Vertebrates in Desert River Habitats

Animal species are seldom distributed evenly at either local or larger spatial scales, and instead tend to aggregate in sites that meet their resource requirements and maximise fitness. This tendency is likely to be especially marked in arid regions where species could be expected to concentrate at resource-rich oases. In this study, we first test the hypothesis that productive riparian sites in arid Australia support higher vertebrate diversity than other desert habitats, and then elucidate the habitats selected by different species. We addressed the first aim by examining the diversity and composition of vertebrate assemblages inhabiting the Field River and adjacent sand dunes in the Simpson Desert, western Queensland, over a period of two and a half years. The second aim was addressed by examining species composition in riparian and sand dune habitats in dry and wet years. Vertebrate species richness was estimated to be highest (54 species) in the riverine habitats and lowest on the surrounding dune habitats (45 species). The riverine habitats had different species pools compared to the dune habitats. Several species, including the agamid Gowidon longirostris and tree frog Litoria rubella, inhabited the riverine habitats exclusively, while others such as the skinks Ctenotus ariadnae and C. dux were captured only in the dune habitats. The results suggest that, on a local scale, diversity is higher along riparian corridors and that riparian woodland is important for tree-dependent species. Further, the distribution of some species, such as Mus musculus, may be governed by environmental variables (e.g. soil moisture) associated with riparian corridors that are not available in the surrounding desert environment. We conclude that inland river systems may be often of high conservation value, and that management should be initiated where possible to alleviate threats to their continued functioning.
A denotational semantics for a process-based simulation language

In this article, we present semantic translations for the actions of μDemos, a proocess-based, discrete event simulation language. Our formal translation schema permits the automatic construction of a process algebraic representatioon of the underlying simulation model which can then be checked for freedom from deadlock and livelock, as well as system-specific safety and liveness properties. As simulation methodologies are increasingly being used to design and implement complex systems of interaction objects, the ability to perform such verifications in of increasing methodological importance. We also present a normal form for the syntactic construction of μDemos programs that allows for the direct comparison of such programs (two programs with the same normal form must execute in identical fashion), reduces model proof obligations by minimizing the number of language constructs, and permits an implementer to concentrate on the basic features of the language (since any program implementation that efficiently evaluates normal forms will be an efficient evaluator for the complete language).
A Note on Additional Materials for “Fund Flows and Income Risk of Fund Managers”

This note provides additional materials for the paper titled “Fund Flows and Income Risk of Fund Managers” (Cen et al., 2023). In this note, we compare our findings with some of the results in Bai et al. (2023), a recent working paper that also studies the compensation of fund managers