Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Correlation of spermiogram profiles with DNA damage in sperm cells of infertile men: a comet assay study

We have investigated a relationship between DNA damage in sperm and spermiogram profiles in the infertile men. Twenty-one non-smoking infertile men <40 years of age with no systemic or genetic disease were randomly selected from the pool of infertile couples applied to our clinic. Sperm samples were collected and evaluated according to WHO guidelines. DNA damage of sperm cells was assessed using neutral comet assay. Fifty cells per slide and two slides per sample were scored to evaluate DNA damage. The cells were visually classified into four categories based on DNA migration such as undamaged (UD), little damage (LD), moderate damage (MD) and significant damage (SD). Total comet scores (TCS) were calculated as: 1×UD + 2×LD + 3×MD + 4×SD. There was a negative correlation between the percentage of slow- and in situ-motion sperm cells in spermiograms and TCS (p < 0.001 and p < 0.05, respectively). The relationship between the percentage of non-motile sperm cells and TCS was negative (p < 0.001). This study provides new evidence that DNA damage in spermatozoa and sperm motility parameters are negatively correlated. We suggest that evaluation of sperm DNA by the neutral comet assay may be valuable to use in fertility research.
18.7 A 2.4mm2 130mW MMSE-nonbinary-LDPC iterative detector-decoder for 4×4 256-QAM MIMO in 65nm CMOS

In this work, the authors demonstrate an MMSE-NBLDPC iterative detector-decoder for a 4×4 256-QAM MIMO system to achieve an excellent error rate that improves with iterations, as shown in Fig. 18.7. 1. To minimize latency over the iterative loop and improve throughput, the MMSE detector is divided into 4 task-based coarse pipeline stages so that all stages can operate in parallel. Both the number of stages and the stage latency of the detector are minimized, and the long critical paths are interleaved and placed in a slow clock domain to support a high data rate in a cost-effective way. The resulting MMSE detector achieves an 82% higher throughput compared, and almost 3.5× the throughput of the latest SD detector. The NBLDPC decoder is implemented using 78 processing nodes to enable fully parallel message passing. Serial Galois field (GF) processing is pipelined using a data forwarding technique to cut the decoding latency by 30% over the latest design. The detector and decoder exchange symbol log-likelihood ratios (LLR) that are efficiently computed based on the L1 distance to the nearest neighbors in the QAM constellation. To lower the power consumption, automatic clock gating is applied to stage boundary and buffer registers to save 53% of the detector power and 61% of the decoder power. The results are demonstrated in a 65nm MMSE-NBLDPC iterative detector-decoder test chip that achieves 1.38Gb/s detection and 1.02Gb/s decoding (5 iterations), consuming 26.5mW and 103mW, respectively.
Automatic video editing system using stereo-based head tracking for multiparty conversation

This paper presents an automatic video editing system based on head tracking for multiparty conversations. Systems that record meetings and those that support teleconferences are attracting considerable interest. Conventional systems use a fixed-viewpoint camera and simple camera selection based on participants' utterances. However, conventional systems fail to adequately convey who is talking to whom to the viewer. We focus on the participants' head orientation since this information is useful in detecting the speaker and who the speaker is talking to. In order to automatically estimate each participant's head orientation, our system combines several modules for stereo-based head tracking. The system selects the shot of the participant that most participants are looking at, based on majority decision. Experiments confirm the effectiveness of our system in several 3-participant conversations. The results show that our system can more successfully convey who is talking to whom which is an extremely crucial piece of information that allows the viewer to better under-stand conversation content.
CER-IOS: Internal Resource Utilization Optimized I/O Scheduling for Solid State Drives

Modern Solid State Drives (SSDs) integrate more internal resources to get higher performance and capacity. Improving internal resource utilization by exploiting internal parallelism is important to enhance the performance of SSDs. Unfortunately, the internal resource utilization of SSDs is limited at runtime in practice because of the practical access conflicts to internal resources. In this paper, we propose a Conflict Eliminated Requests Based I/O Scheduler (CER-IOS) to better utilize internal parallelism of flash chips by scheduling I/O requests in a more fine-grained way. We introduce Conflict Eliminated Requests (CERs) in which parallelizable memory requests are grouped during the process of address translation in Flash Translation Layer. To schedule conflicting requests, we propose a small CER size prioritized resource distribution scheme, that ensures internal resources can always be distributed to valuable conflicting requests to further improve the efficiency of resource utilization. Our extensive experimental evaluation results show that CER-IOS provides significant improvement of resource utilization at runtime and reduces average I/O latency largely compared to state-of-the-art I/O schedulers implemented in operating systems.
Variation in cerebral blood flow velocity with cerebral perfusion pressure >40 mm Hg in 42 children with severe traumatic brain injury

Objective:To determine the prevalence of low, normal, and high mean middle cerebral artery flow velocity when cerebral perfusion pressure is >40 mm Hg in children with severe traumatic brain injury. There is no information regarding the relationship between middle cerebral artery flow velocity and cerebral perfusion pressure in pediatric traumatic brain injury. Design:Prospective, observational study. Setting:Level I pediatric trauma center. Patients:A total of 42 children <17 yrs of age with an admission diagnosis of severe traumatic brain injury (admission Glasgow Coma Scale score of <9), traumatic brain injury on computed tomography scan, tracheal intubation/mechanical ventilation, and intracranial pressure monitoring. Interventions:None. Measurements and Main Results:Bilateral middle cerebral arteries were insonated using transcranial Doppler ultrasonography to calculate mean middle cerebral artery flow velocity after traumatic brain injury. Low mean middle cerebral artery flow velocity was defined as middle cerebral artery flow velocity <2 standard deviation and high was defined as mean middle cerebral artery flow velocity >2 standard deviation. Patients were grouped by age (0.8–2.9, 3–5.9, 6–9.9, and 10–16.9 yrs) and gender to examine the relationship between cerebral perfusion pressure and low, high, or normal mean middle cerebral artery flow velocity. Potential confounders of the relationship between cerebral perfusion pressure and mean middle cerebral artery flow velocity (intracranial pressure, PaCO2, hematocrit, sedation, fever,and impaired autoregulation were examined). Most children (n = 33; 79%) had normal mean middle cerebral artery flow velocity but four patients (9%) had low mean middle cerebral artery flow velocity and five children (12%) had high mean middle cerebral artery flow velocity despite cerebral perfusion pressure >40 mm Hg. There was no difference in potential confounders of the relationship between cerebral perfusion pressure and mean middle cerebral artery flow velocity except for hematocrit, which was lower (25 ± 4%; range = 21–30%) in children with high mean middle cerebral artery flow velocity. An inverse relationship between mean middle cerebral artery flow velocity and hematocrit was also found in boys aged 10 to 16.9 yrs. Conclusions:Both low and/or high mean middle cerebral artery flow velocity occur with cerebral perfusion pressure >40 mm Hg in severe pediatric traumatic brain injury. Of the potential confounders considered, only lower hematocrit was associated with high mean middle cerebral artery flow velocity.
Research on chromium and arsenic speciation in atmospheric particulate matter: short review

Atmospheric particulate matter (PM) plays an important role in the distribution of elements in the environment. The PM-bound elements penetrates into the other elements of the environment, in two basic forms - those dissolved in the atmospheric precipitation and those permanently bound to PM particles. Those forms differs greatly in their mobility, thus posing a potential threat to living organisms. They can also be an immediate threat, while being inhaled. Chromium (Cr) and arsenic (As) belong to the group of elements whose certain chemical states exhibit toxic properties, that is Cr(VI) and As(III). Thus, recognition of the actual threat posed by Cr and As in the environment, including those present in PM, is possible only through the in depth speciation analysis. Research on the Cr and As speciation in PM, more than the analogous studies of their presence in other compartments of the environment, have been undertaken quite rarely. Hence the knowledge on the speciation of PM-bound As and Cr is still limited. The state of knowledge in the field of PM-bound Cr and As is presented in the paper. The issues related to the characterization and occurrence of Cr and As species in PM, the share of Cr and As species mass in different PM size fractions, and in PM of different origin is also summarized. The analytical techniques used in the speciation analysis of PM-bound Cr and As are also discussed. In the existing literature there is no data on the physical characteristics of Cr and As (bound to a different PM size fractions), and thus it still lack of data needed for a comprehensive assessment of the actual environmental and health threat posed by airborne Cr and As.
Bitrate adaptation for mobile video streaming based on buffer and channel state

Mobile video streaming is a rising business but poses significant challenges for network and service operators. In mobile networks, time-variant wireless channels often violate the rate requirement of the content, which leads to a stalled video stream. Common HTTP Adaptive Streaming techniques cannot effectively react to channel variation by adapting the video bitrate only to the state of the playback buffer. In this paper, we present an optimal solution that adapts to the current and predicted channel state as well. Our optimal formulation is based on Markov Decision Processes and studied with real content and channel traces from vehicular users. The results clearly show the large benefit of complementing buffer-aware by channel-aware adaptation and prediction. Finally, we present a heuristic that closely achieves optimal service quality at practical computational complexity.
Psychosocial Factors of Different Health Behaviour Patterns in Adolescents: Association with Overweight and Weight Control Behaviours

Physical activity, nutrition, and sedentary behaviour combine to influence the risk of overweight among adolescents. This paper aims to identify psychosocial factors of different health behaviour patterns in adolescents and its association with overweight and weight control behaviours. The 3069 adolescents of both genders (average of 14.8 years old) from the 2010 Portuguese survey of Health Behaviour School-Aged Children (HBSC) answered the 2010 HBSC self-reported questionnaire. It used the cluster k-means (nonhierarchy method), qui-square, one-way ANOVA, and logistic regression. Three clusters with different behavioural patterns (physical activity, sedentary, and eating) composed the results obtained. The sedentary group (34%) had lower self-regulation, body satisfaction, health and wellness, family and classmates relationships, communication with the father than the other two groups. The active gamers (25%) had a smaller BMI but used more unhealthy weight control strategies than the other two groups. The healthy group (41%) was more motivated and more satisfied with school but was not different than the active gamers in most psychosocial variables. Differences were found between clusters for weight control behaviours and psychosocial variables. Different strategies for different patterns were necessary in order to promote obesity prevention and, simultaneously, target healthy lifestyle and wellbeing in adolescents.
Cross layer AODV with Position based forwarding routing for mobile adhoc network

Mobile adhoc network(MANET) is a “on the fly” network of mobile nodes. Packets are routed through mobile nodes instead of any fixed base station. (AODV) is most adopted routing protocol in MANET where a path is established when a node wants to communicate with another node. The period over which the communication proceeds through this path is known as a Session. When the mobility in the network is high, and the topology changes frequently the route maintenance overhead in AODV increases. The established routes are to be changes with new routes as the nodes moves away. It results in low performance as many packets are dropped when some active router node of a path moves away significantly. It also results in control overhead of route discovery that take place frequently. We improve the performance of the AODV by adopting a cross layer approach and Position based forwarding technique. In Position based forwarding, every node will maintain a set of neighbors nearest to the position of the destination. At the time of route establishment only these nodes will be selected. Hence the route lifetime improves. By a cross layer approach we design a MAC layer based approach to calculate the received power of the packets from other nodes. If the power of the packets is not sufficient (We determine a threshold value for received power based on observation) then MAC layer informs the network layer which interns removes those nodes from the routing table. Experiments are performed in OMNET++.
Phospholipase Cβ1 is linked to RNA interference of specific genes through translin‐associated factor X

Phospholipase Cβ1 (PLCβ1) is a G‐protein‐regulated enzyme whose activity results in proliferative and mitogenic changes in the cell. We have previously found that in solution PLCβ1 binds to the RNA processing protein translin‐associated factor X (TRAX) with nanomolar affinity and that this binding competes with G proteins. Here, we show that endogenous PLCβ1 and TRAX interact in SK‐N‐SH cells and also in HEK293 cells induced to overexpress PLCβ1. In HEK293 cells, TRAX overexpression ablates Ca2+ signals generated by G protein‐PLCβ1 activation. TRAX plays a key role in down‐regulation of proteins by small, interfering RNA, and PLCβ1 overexpression completely reverses the 2‐ to 4‐fold down‐regulation of GAPDH by siRNA in HEK293 and HeLa cells as seen by an ~4‐fold recovery in both the transcript and protein levels. Also, down‐regulation of endogenous PLCβ1 in HEK293 and HeLa cells allows for an ~20% increase in siRNA(GAPDH) silencing. While PLCβ1 overexpression results in a 50% reversal of cell death caused by siRNA(LDH), it does not affect cell survival or silencing of other genes (e.g., cyclophilin, Hsp90, translin). PLCβ1 overexpression in HEK293 and HeLa cells causes a 30% reduction in the total amount of small RNAs. LDH and GAPDH are part of a complex that promotes H2B synthesis that allows cells to progress through the S phase. We find that PLCβ1 reverses the cell death and completely rescues H2B levels caused by siRNA knockdown of LDH or GAPDH. Taken together, our study shows a novel role of PLCβ1 in gene regulation through TRAX association. —Philip, F. , Guo, Y. , Aisiku, O. , Scarlata, S. Phospholipase Cβ1 is linked to RNA interference of specific genes through translin‐associated factor X. FASEB J. 26, 4903–4913 (2012). www.fasebj. org
Instance Classification using Co-Occurrences on the Web

We present a novel unsupervised approach to mapping artrelated instances (such as music artists and painters) to subjective categories like genre and style. We base our approach on co-occurrences of the two on the web, found with Google. The co-occurrences are found using three methods: by identifying the search engine counts, by analyzing Google excerpts found by querying patterns and by scanning full documents. Per instance, we use the same co-occurrence-based approach to find its nearest neighbors, i.e. the most related instances. These results can be combined in order to create a more reliable classification. We tested and compared the three methods on two different domains: mapping music artists to genres, and painters to art-styles. The results show that the use of related instances indeed improves the precision of the classification. Moreover, the methods with the lowest Google Complexity perform best.
Planetary embryos and planetesimals residing in thin debris discs

We consider constraints on the planetesimal population residing in the discs of AU Microscopii (AU Mic), β Pictoris (β Pic) and Fomalhaut taking into account their observed thicknesses and normal disc opacities. We estimate that bodies of radius 5, 180 and 70 km are responsible for initiating the collisional cascade accounting for the dust production for AU Mic, β Pic and Fomalhaut’s discs, respectively, at break radii from the star where their surface brightness profiles change slope. Larger bodies, of radius 1000 km and with surface density of the order of 0.01 g cm −2 , are required to explain the thickness of these discs assuming that they are heated by gravitational stirring. A comparison between the densities of the two sizes suggests the size distribution in the largest bodies is flatter than that observed in the Kuiper belt. AU Mic’s disc requires the shallowest size distribution for bodies with radius greater than 10 km suggesting that the disc contains planetary embryos experiencing a stage of runaway growth.
Functional States of the Genome-Scale Escherichia Coli Transcriptional Regulatory System

A transcriptional regulatory network (TRN) constitutes the collection of regulatory rules that link environmental cues to the transcription state of a cell's genome. We recently proposed a matrix formalism that quantitatively represents a system of such rules (a transcriptional regulatory system [TRS]) and allows systemic characterization of TRS properties. The matrix formalism not only allows the computation of the transcription state of the genome but also the fundamental characterization of the input-output mapping that it represents. Furthermore, a key advantage of this “pseudo-stoichiometric” matrix formalism is its ability to easily integrate with existing stoichiometric matrix representations of signaling and metabolic networks. Here we demonstrate for the first time how this matrix formalism is extendable to large-scale systems by applying it to the genome-scale Escherichia coli TRS. We analyze the fundamental subspaces of the regulatory network matrix (R) to describe intrinsic properties of the TRS. We further use Monte Carlo sampling to evaluate the E. coli transcription state across a subset of all possible environments, comparing our results to published gene expression data as validation. Finally, we present novel in silico findings for the E. coli TRS, including (1) a gene expression correlation matrix delineating functional motifs; (2) sets of gene ontologies for which regulatory rules governing gene transcription are poorly understood and which may direct further experimental characterization; and (3) the appearance of a distributed TRN structure, which is in stark contrast to the more hierarchical organization of metabolic networks.
Independent Risk Factors and 2-Year Outcomes of Acute Kidney Injury after Surgery for Congenital Heart Disease

Background: Data are limited regarding risk factors for acute kidney injury (AKI) following cardiac surgery in children with congenital heart disease (CHD). This observational study was performed to examine temporal trends in AKI incidence according to the Pediatric Risk, Injury, Failure, Loss, End-Stage Renal Disease (pRIFLE) criteria, identify independent risk factors for AKI after cardiac surgery, and examine associations between AKI and long-term mortality. Methods: We retrospectively evaluated 418 patients (259 males, 159 females; median age, 5 months) who underwent cardiac surgery for CHD between April 2007 and August 2013. Patients were followed up for 2 years. AKI was defined according to the pRIFLE criteria as ≥25% decrease in estimated creatinine clearance. Results: AKI developed postoperatively in 104 cases (24.9%). Approximately 80% belonged to the “Risk” category according to the pRIFLE criteria, and only 21 cases (5%) required renal replacement therapy (peritoneal dialysis in all cases). Multivariate analysis revealed 3 independent risk factors for onset of AKI: young age (<1 year), surgery in Risk Adjustment in Congenital Heart Surgery (RACHS-1) category ≥4, and long cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB) time (≥90 min). Twenty-three patients (22%) with AKI died during the 2-year follow-up. In multivariate cox hazard regression analysis, the most significant contributor to risk of mortality was AKI. Conclusions: Postoperative AKI was strongly associated with young age, high RACHS-1 category, and prolonged CPB time. In addition, mortality rate was higher in patients who survived after recovery from AKI than in those without AKI, even among the lower pRIFLE categories.
BdH-Tree: A B+-Tree Based Indexing Method for Very Frequent Updates of Moving Objects

Several methods to index positions of moving objects have been proposed. Most of them are based on R-tree-like index structures. Some studies have made efforts to improve the update performance of R-trees, and they actually focus on query performance. Even though the update performance has been improved by virtue of those researchers' efforts, the overhead and immaturity of the concurrency control algorithms of R-trees make us hesitant to choose them for moving objects. In this paper, we propose an update-efficient indexing method. The proposed index is based on B+-tree and the Hilbert curve. We present an advanced Hilbert curve that automatically adjusts the order of the Hilbert curve in subregions, according to the data distribution. Through empirical study, we show that our strategy achieves a faster response time and higher throughput than those of other strategies.
Secure Profile Provisioning Architecture for Embedded UICC

Embedded UICC (eUICC) is a new form of UICC, soldered into a device during manufacturing. On the contrary to the traditional UICC, the eUICC is not fully controlled by one specific MNO (Mobile Network Operator) since not removable physically from the device and not issued by the MNO. Thus, the profiles necessary for its operations should be provisioned remotely into the eUICC by new entity. For this remote provisioning, SM (Subscription Manager) is newly introduced by the standardization organization. However, this new ecosystem around eUICCs can cause tremendous security issues unless thorough consideration of security is accompanied during the standardization because the profiles usually include the security-sensitive information. In this paper, a novel secure profile provisioning architecture for eUICCs is proposed. Our architecture mainly defines the overall architecture of the secure profile provisioning for eUICCs.