Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Is CT-Based Perfusion and Collateral Imaging Sensitive to Time Since Stroke Onset?

Purpose CT-based perfusion and collateral imaging is increasingly used in the assessment of patients with acute stroke. Time of stroke onset is a critical factor in determining eligibility for and benefit from thrombolysis. Animal studies predict that the volume of ischemic penumbra decreases with time. Here, we evaluate if CT is able to detect a relationship between perfusion or collateral status, as assessed by CT, and time since stroke onset. Materials and methods We studied 53 consecutive patients with proximal vessel occlusions, mean (SD) age of 71.3 (14.9) years, at a mean (SD) of 125.2 (55.3) minutes from onset, using whole-brain CT perfusion (CTp) imaging. Penumbra was defined using voxel-based thresholds for cerebral blood flow (CBF) and mean transit time (MTT); core was defined by cerebral blood volume (CBV). Normalized penumbra fraction was calculated as Penumbra volume/(Penumbra volume + Core volume) for both CBF and MTT (PenCBF and PenMTT, respectively). Collaterals were assessed on CT angiography (CTA). CTp ASPECTS score was applied visually, lower scores indicating larger lesions. ASPECTS ratios were calculated corresponding to penumbra fractions. Results Both PenCBF and PenMTT showed decremental trends with increasing time since onset (Kendall’s tau-b = −0.196, p = 0.055, and −0.187, p = 0.068, respectively). The CBF/CBV ASPECTS ratio, which showed a relationship to PenCBF (Kendall’s tau-b = 0.190, p = 0.070), decreased with increasing time since onset (Kendall’s tau-b = −0.265, p = 0.006). Collateral response did not relate to time (Kendall’s tau-b = −0.039, p = 0.724). Conclusion Even within 4.5 h since stroke onset, a decremental relationship between penumbra and time, but not between collateral status and time, may be detected using perfusion CT imaging. The trends that we demonstrate merit evaluation in larger datasets to confirm our results, which may have potential wider applications, e.g., in the setting of strokes of unknown onset time.
Biomass burning and urban air pollution over the Central Mexican Plateau

Observations during the 2006 dry season of highly elevated concentrations of cyanides in the atmosphere above Mexico City (MC) and the surrounding plains demonstrate that biomass burning (BB) significantly impacted air quality in the region. We find that during the period of our measurements, fires contribute more than half of the organic aerosol mass and submicron aerosol scattering, and one third of the enhancement in benzene, reactive nitrogen, and carbon monoxide in the outflow from the plateau. The combination of biomass burning and anthropogenic emissions will affect ozone chemistry in the MC outflow.
Combined Procedures in Laparoscopic Surgery

With advancements in minimal access surgery, combined laparoscopic procedures are now being performed for treating coexisting abdominal pathologies at the same surgery. In our center, we performed 145 combined surgical procedures from January 1999 to December 2002. Of the 145 procedures, 130 were combined laparoscopic/endoscopic procedures and 15 were open procedures combined with endoscopic procedures. The combination included laparoscopic cholecystectomy, various hernia repairs, and gynecological procedures like hysterectomy, salpingectomy, ovarian cystectomy, tubal ligation, urological procedures, fundoplication, splenectomy, hemicolectomy, and cystogastrostomy. In the same period, 40 patients who had undergone laparoscopic cholecystectomy and 40 patients who had undergone ventral hernia repair were randomly selected for comparison of intraoperative outcomes with a combined procedure group. All the combined surgical procedures were performed successfully. The most common procedure was laparoscopic cholecystectomy with another endoscopic procedure in 129 patients. The mean operative time was 100 minutes (range 30–280 minutes.). The longest time was taken for the patient who had undergone laparoscopic splenectomy with renal transplant (280 minutes). The mean hospital stay was 3.2 days (range 1–21 days). The pain experienced in the postoperative period measured on the visual analogue scale ranged from 2 to 5 with a mean of 3.1. Of 145 patients who underwent combined surgical procedures, 5 patients developed fever in the immediate postoperative period, 7 patients had port site hematoma, 5 patients developed wound sepsis, and 10 patients had urinary retention. As long as the basic surgical principles and indications for combined procedures are adhered to, more patients with concomitant pathologies can enjoy the benefit of minimal access surgery. Minimal access surgery is feasible and appears to have several advantages in simultaneous management of two different coexisting pathologies without significant addition in postoperative morbidity and hospital stay.
Introduction to Feedback Control of Underactuated VTOL Vehicles

This article is an introduction to feedback control design for a family of robotic aerial vehicles with vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) capabilities such as quadrotors, ducted-fan tail-sitters, and helicopters. Potential applications for such devices, like surveillance, monitoring, or mapping, are varied and numerous. For these applications to emerge, motion control algorithms that guarantee a good amount of robustness against state measurement/ estimation errors and unmodeled dynamics like, for example, aerodynamic perturbations, are needed. The feedback control methods considered here range from basic linear control schemes to more elaborate nonlinear control solutions. The modeling of the dynamics of these systems is first recalled and discussed. Then several control algorithms are presented and commented upon in relation to implementation issues and various operating modes encountered in practice, from teleoperated to fully autonomous flight. Particular attention is paid to the incorporation of integral-like control actions, often overlooked in nonlinear control studies despite their practical importance to render the control performance more robust with respect to unmodeled or poorly estimated additive perturbations.
Aggressivity Detection on Social Network Comments

Verbal aggression and cyberbullying are widely concerned issues in netiquette. In this article, we introduce a text mining system that can detect whether a certain paragraph contains the aggressive sentiment, and demonstrate its performance with different classification models. In addition, it is observed that our system works well on both our manually curated dataset and the de facto dataset. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed system and highlight some possible factors that contribute to the robust results.
Multi-dimensional Admission Control and Capacity Planning for IaaS Clouds with Multiple Service Classes

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers typically offer multiple service classes to deal with the wide variety of users adopting this cloud computing model. In this scenario, IaaS providers need to perform efficient admission control and capacity planning in order to minimize infrastructure costs, while fulfilling the different Service Level Objectives (SLOs) defined for all service classes offered. However, most of the previous work on this field consider a single resource dimension – typically CPU – when making such management decisions. We show that this approach will either increase infrastructure costs due to over-provisioning, or violate SLOs due to lack of capacity for the resource dimensions being ignored. To fill this gap, we propose admission control and capacity planning methods that consider multiple service classes and multiple resource dimensions. Our results show that our admission control method can guarantee a high availability SLO fulfillment in scenarios where both CPU and memory can become the bottleneck resource. Moreover, we show that our capacity planning method can find the minimum capacity required for both CPU and memory to meet SLOs with good accuracy. We also analyze how the load variation on one resource dimension can affect another, highlighting the need to manage resources for multiple dimensions simultaneously.
Ranking under Tight Budgets

This paper introduces a budget-aware learning to rank approach that limits the cost for evaluating a ranking model, with a focus on very tight budgets that do not allow to fully evaluate at least for one time all documents for each term. In contrast to existing work on budget-aware learning to rank, our model allows to only partially evaluate parts of the ranking model for the most promising documents. In contrast to existing work on top-k retrieval, we generate an execution plan before the actual query processing starts, eliminating the need for expensive in-memory accumulator management. We consider a unified cost model that integrates loading and processing cost. An extensive evaluation with a standard benchmark collection shows that our method outperforms other budget-aware methods under tight budgets in terms of result quality.
Regional End‐Systolic Pressure‐Length Relationships Using a Volume‐Loading Technique in the Intact Pig Heart

The purpose of this study was to characterize left ventricular systolic elastances as derived from pressure-segment length and pressure-diameter relationships, and to compare the resulting regional and global elastances to known changes in inotropy. Left ventricular pressuresegment length and pressure-diameter were varied in a series of consecutive beats by means of a volume-loading technique, and both regional and global relationships at 20-msec intervals throughout systole were found to be nonlinear and to exhibit hysteresis. In eight animals, regional hysteresis was present after vagotomy, propranolol (1.0 mg/kg), and atropine (0.1 mg/kg), and was present no matter whether hearts were loaded by volume (45–60 ml/sec) or by pressure (partial aortic occlusion) over a similar range of left ventricular systolic pressures. Elastance was linearly approximated by the slope of the major axis of the hysteresis loops. In each instance, elastance increased to a maximum and then decreased, thus defining end-systole. In seven animals, maximum elastance-length and -diameter were compared before and after treatments with dobutamine (5–13 μg/kg per min) and propranolol (6–51 μg/kg per min), or after induction of global ischemia. Dobutamine increased maximum elastance-diameter by 37percent; (P < 0.01) and maximum elastance-length by 159percent; (P < 0.05). Propranolol decreased maximum elastancediameter by 27percent; (P < 0.05) and maximum elastance-length by 6percent; (P = NS). Global ischemia (50percent; reduction in coronary flow) did not significantly change either maximum elastance-diameter or -length. However, with ischemia, the diameter intercept of maximum elastance-diameter increased by 24percent; (P < 0.025), and the time to maximum elastance-length decreased by 33percent; (P < 0.01). Comparing all interventions, the percent changes in maximum elastance-length and -diameter related directly but with a low correlation coefficient (r = 0.49). These differences in regional and global elastance suggest a complex relationship between regional and global myocardial mechanics, and may not necessarily reflect specific changes in contractility.
Generating Spatial Referring Expressions in Interactive 3D Worlds

This paper discusses the computational problem of generating referring expressions (REG) in 3D virtual worlds. We propose a REG algorithm that attempts to make adequate choices of spatial relations for the purpose of disambiguation (as opposed to, e.g., determining the localisation of a previously identified object). The decisions made by the algorithm are based on existing computational models of spatial reference, and further refined by the use of domain knowledge obtained from a corpus of instructions in virtual environments. The proposed approach is shown to outperform a number of baseline systems, and provides evidence on how a standard REG approach may be applied to the generation of these descriptions in 3D virtual worlds.
Space-efficient Algorithms for Visibility Problems in Simple Polygon

Given a simple polygon $P$ consisting of $n$ vertices, we study the problem of designing space-efficient algorithms for computing (i) the visibility polygon of a point inside $P$, (ii) the weak visibility polygon of a line segment inside $P$ and (iii) the minimum link path between a pair of points inside $P$. For problem (i) two algorithms are proposed. The first one is an in-place algorithm where the input array may be lost. It uses only O(1) extra space apart from the input array. The second one assumes that the input is given in a read-only array, and it needs $O(\sqrt{n})$ extra space. The time complexity of both the algorithms are O(n). For problem (ii), we have assumed that the input polygon is given in a read-only array. Our proposed algorithm runs in $O(n^2)$ time using O(1) extra space. For problem (iii) the time and space complexities of our proposed algorithm are $O(kn)$ and O(1) respectively; $k$ is the length (number of links) in a minimum link path between the given pair of points.
Stigma towards people with mental illness in developing countries in Asia

Background: There is a wide range of literature on stigmatization and discrimination of people with mental illness. Most studies, however, derive from Western countries. This review aims at summarizing results from developing countries in Asia published between 1996–2006. Method: Medline search focusing on English-speaking literature. Results: Comparable to Western countries, there is a widespread tendency to stigmatize and discriminate people with mental illness in Asia. People with mental illness are considered as dangerous and aggressive which in turn increases the social distance. The role of supernatural, religious and magical approaches to mental illness is prevailing. The pathway to care is often shaped by scepticism towards mental health services and the treatments offered. Stigma experienced from family members is pervasive. Moreover, social disapproval and devaluation of families with mentally ill individuals are an important concern. This holds true particularly with regards to marriage, marital separation and divorce. Psychic symptoms, unlike somatic symptoms, are construed as socially disadvantageous. Thus, somatisation of psychiatric disorders is widespread in Asia. The most urgent problem of mental health care in Asia is the lack of personal and financial resources. Thus, mental health professionals are mostly located in urban areas. This increases the barriers to seek help and contributes to the stigmatization of the mentally ill. The attitude of mental health professionals towards people with mental illness is often stigmatizing. Conclusion: This review revealed that the stigmatization of people with mental illness is widespread in Asia. The features of stigmatization–beliefs about causes of and attitudes towards mental illness, consequences for help-seeking–have more commonalities than differences to Western countries.
Performance prediction of parallel systems with scalable specifications—methodology and case study

This paper describes the general methodology of specifying parallel systems within the PAPS (Performance Analysis of Parallel Systems) toolset and presents a case study that shows the applicability and accuracy of the Petri net based performance prediction tools contained in the toolset. Parallel systems are specified in the PAPS toolset by separately defining the program workload, the hardware resources, and the mapping of the program to the hardware. The resource parameterization is described in detail for a multiprocessor computer with a store a forward communication network. The Gaussian elimination algorithm is taken as a workload example to demonstrate how regularly structured parallel algorithms are modelled with acyclic task graphs. Three different program specifications with various levels of model accuracy are developed and their parameterization is described. The predicted execution time is compared with the measured execution times of the real program on the parallel hardware. It is shown that the Petri net based performance prediction tools provide accurate performance predicitons.
Autolytic Enzyme System of Streptococcus faecalis V. Nature of the Autolysin-Cell Wall Complex and Its Relationship to Properties of the Autolytic Enzyme of Streptococcus faecalis

Cell walls from exponential-phase cultures of Streptococcus faecalis ATCC 9790 contain an autolysin (a β-N-acetylmuramide glycanhydrolase, E.C. 3.2.1.17) which has been isolated from trypsin-speeded wall autolysates. The autolysin, which was excluded from Bio-Gel P-60, was further fractionated by diethylaminoethyl (DEAE)-cellulose chromatography or filtration on Bio-Gel P-200. After DEAE-cellulose chromatography, which removed most of the wall polysaccharide, autolysin activity was extremely labile and was rapidly lost at −20 C, even in the presence of albumin. The P-60-excluded enzyme was rapidly bound by walls at both 37 C (50% bound in about 1 min) and 0 C (50% bound in less than 4 min). Wall-bound autolysin could not be removed by 1.0 m ammonium acetate (pH 6.9). Autolysin was also bound by walls that had been extracted with 10% trichloroacetic acid or treated with 0.01 n periodate, suggesting that the nonpeptidoglycan wall polymers are not important for binding. Wall-bound autolysin was more stable than the soluble enzyme to proteinase digestion, acetone (40%), 8 m urea (at 0 C), or to inactivation at 56 C. Two bacterial neutral proteinases (which do not hydrolyze ester bonds) activated latent wall-bound autolysin, suggesting that activation results from the cleavage of one or more peptide bonds. The group A streptococcal proteinase activated latent autolysin but differed from the other proteinases in that it did not inactivate soluble autolysin. The results suggest that the autolysin is not covalently linked to the wall. The high affinity of the walls for the autolysin appears to be responsible for the firm, not easily reversed binding.
Influence of visuomotor action on visual-haptic simultaneous perception: A psychophysical study

Perceiving temporal simultaneity of cross-modal (e.g., visuo-haptic) events is very important for coherent perception and high performance in multi-modal interaction (e.g. telepresence) systems. The perception of simultaneity, however, depends on many factors, including stimulus intensity, redundant information and selective attention. In this study, we examined the effects of two factors on perceived simultaneity in a visuo-haptic task scenario: active (self- generated) motor control and additional visual motion feedback. We used a psychophysical method to measure the differences in points of subjective simultaneity (PSSs) and just noticeable differences (JNDs) in visuo-haptic events. The results showed that the PSS decreased significantly under conditions of active motor control with concurrent visual feedback, and the JNDs were narrowed with either active motor control or additional visual motion feedback.
Knowledge extraction from WebPages

This article presents a system to extract Knowledge from webpages by producing semantic annotations. taking into account semantic information from the domain to annotate an element in a webpage implies solving two problems : (1) identifying the syntactic structure of this element in the webpage and (2) identifying the most specific concept (in terms of subsumption) of the ontology that will be used to annotate this element. Our approach relies on a wrapper-based machine learning algorithm combined with reasoning making use of the formal structure of the ontology.
Responses of soil organic and inorganic carbon vary at different soil depths after long‐term agricultural cultivation in Northwest China

Whether the dryland to cropland conversation in arid regions could lead to a decrease in soil carbon (C) and land degradation remains unclear. In this study, we investigated the vertical patterns of soil C change with different lengths of land use history in the arid regions of China and explored the controls and mechanisms of these changes. One native desert grassland and six croplands with similar management but different cultivation times (i.e., 1, 3, 5, 15, 30, and 50 years) and were selected in Xinjiang, Northwest China. We measured both soil organic and inorganic C concentrations and soil properties (e.g., total nitrogen [N], NO3−‐N, NH4+‐N, pH, and electrical conductivity) with a 20‐cm depth interval down to 2 m in all croplands. The results showed that soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks increased with cultivation year for the topsoils (0–120 cm), which could be a result of higher plant C inputs and decreased soil pH in cropland than in the native desert. Soil pH explained the largest variation (45%) of SOC concentration. Soil inorganic C (SIC) stocks decreased with cultivation year in topsoils layers (0–40 cm) but increased in deep soil layers (120–200 cm), resulting in the net increment of SIC to the depth of 200 cm. This pattern might be caused by changes in soil pH in the cropland. Overall, this study demonstrated that, instead of reducing soil C, proper management of the desert ecosystem can enhance soil C sequestration in the arid regions.
Classic preconditioning decreases the harmful accumulation of nitric oxide during ischemia and reperfusion in rat hearts.

BACKGROUND The role of NO in the mechanism of preconditioning is not understood. Therefore, we studied the effect of preconditioning and subsequent ischemia/reperfusion on myocardial NO content in the presence of an NO synthase (NOS) inhibitor. METHODS AND RESULTS Isolated working rat hearts were subjected to preconditioning protocols of 3 intermittent periods of rapid pacing or no-flow ischemia of 5 minutes' duration each followed by a test 30 minutes of global no-flow ischemia and 15 minutes of reperfusion. Test ischemia/reperfusion resulted in a deterioration of myocardial function and a considerable increase in cardiac NO content as assessed by electron spin resonance. Preconditioning improved postischemic myocardial function and markedly decreased test ischemia/reperfusion-induced NO accumulation. In the presence of 4.6 micromol/L N(G)-nitro-L-arginine (LNA), basal cardiac NO content decreased significantly, although test ischemia/reperfusion-induced functional deterioration and NO accumulation were not affected in nonpreconditioned hearts. However, the protective effects of preconditioning on both test ischemia/reperfusion-induced functional depression and NO accumulation were abolished. When 4.6 micromol/L LNA was administered after preconditioning, it failed to block the effect of preconditioning. In the presence of 46 micromol/L LNA, ischemia/reperfusion-induced NO accumulation was significantly decreased and postischemic myocardial function was improved in nonpreconditioned hearts. CONCLUSIONS Our results show that (1) although NO synthesis by the heart is necessary to trigger classic preconditioning, preconditioning in turn attenuates the accumulation of NO during ischemia/reperfusion, and (2) blockade of ischemia/reperfusion-induced accumulation of cardiac NO by preconditioning or by an appropriate concentration of NOS inhibitor alleviates ischemia/reperfusion injury as demonstrated by enhanced postischemic function.