Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
How do risks and benefits affect user’ privacy decisions? An event-related potential study on privacy calculus process

Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine how risks and benefits affect users’ privacy-related decision-making processes. Design/methods/approach This study collected and analyzed the neural activity processes of users’ privacy-related decisions when faced with personalized services with different risks and benefits through an ERP experiment that included 40 participants. Findings/results The findings show that users subconsciously categorize personalized services based on benefit; Privacy calculus affects privacy decision by influencing the allocation of cognitive resources for personalized service, and the scarcity of cognitive resources increases the degree of privacy disclosure; Emotional change in privacy decision is the result of many factors, not the result of privacy risk alone. Originality/Discussion This study provides a new perspective to explain the process of privacy decision-making, and a new approach to investigate the privacy paradox.
Existence and Stability of Almost Periodic Solutions for Quasilinear Delay Systems and the Halanay Inequality

Abstract We present some easily verifiable conditions for the existence and global asymptotical stability of almost periodic solutions to systems of delay differential equations in the form u′(t) = −Au(t) + Wg(t, ut) + f(t), where A, W ∈ L ( R n) and f(t), g(t, ϕ) are almost periodic in t uniformly on ϕ from bounded subsets of C([−h, 0], R n). With this purpose, we use the exponential dichotomy theory together with usual positivity arguments. In particular, the semigroup version of the so-called Perron–Frobenius theorem is applied to study the generalized Halanay inequality. Finally, systems with maxima are studied in detail.
Energetic proton and electron dispersion signatures in the nightside magnetosheath supporting their leakage out of the magnetopause

Energetic proton and electron dispersion structures are detected at both the dawn and dusk nightside magnetosheath near the equatorial plane using the Geotail Energetic Particles and Ion Composition instrument data. A common feature of all the exhibited examples is that the vector magnetic field progressively scans from northward to southward through all the latitude angles while remaining almost within a plane intersecting the nightside magnetopause. For such geometries, at the duskside magnetosheath, peaks in the energetic electron flux precede those in the proton, whereas the opposite occurs at the dawnside magnetosheath. The peak fluxes of energetic protons (electrons) are measured at the duskside (dawnside) magnetosheath whenever the vector magnetic field points toward the central dusk (dawn) low-latitude boundary layer (LLBL) region of the magnetosphere. Therefore we infer that the energetic electron (proton) source is essentially spatially limited to the central dawn (dusk) LLBL. We interpret the observed dispersion structures as spatial phenomena: Energetic electrons (protons) leak out from the equatorial dawn (dusk) LLBL and then are channeled along the draped magnetic field lines over the magnetopause toward spacecraft on the duskside (dawnside). The energetic electrons (protons) are detected in the duskside (dawnside) magnetosheath for a larger range of magnetic field latitude angles. In conclusion, the leakage of energetic particles through the magnetopause seems to be a process of great importance, in parallel with the merging one.
An Overview of Hepatocellular Carcinoma Surveillance Focusing on Non-Cirrhotic NAFLD Patients: A Challenge for Physicians

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is the most common cause of liver disease worldwide and it ranges from simple steatosis to hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). HCC represents the first liver tumor and the third source of cancer death. In the next few years, the prevalence of NAFLD and consequently of HCC is estimated to increase, becoming a major public health problem. The NAFLD-HCC shows several differences compared to other causes of chronic liver disease (CLD), including the higher percentage of patients that develop HCC in the absence of liver cirrhosis. In HCC surveillance, the international guidelines suggest a six months abdominal ultrasound (US), with or without alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) evaluation, in patients with cirrhosis and in a subgroup of patients with chronic hepatitis B infection. However, this screening program reveals several limitations, especially in NAFLD patients. Thus, new biomarkers and scores have been proposed to overcome the limits of HCC surveillance. In this narrative review we aimed to explore the differences in the HCC features between NAFLD and non-NAFLD patients, and those between NAFLD-HCC developed in the cirrhotic and non-cirrhotic liver. Finally, we focused on the limits of tumor surveillance in NAFLD patients, and we explored the new biomarkers for the early diagnosis of HCC.
The association between vitamin D deficiency and risk of renal event: Results from the Korean cohort study for outcomes in patients with chronic kidney disease (KNOW-CKD)

Backgrounds Some observational studies have suggested a possible association between vitamin D deficiency and CKD. However, in most studies, the causality between low levels of vitamin D and risk of renal events could not be explained. We investigated the relationship between vitamin D deficiency and risk of severe CKD stage and renal event in a large-scale prospective cohort study. Methods We used data from a prospective cohort of 2,144 patients with available information on serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D) levels at baseline from KNOW-CKD, 2011-2015 were included. Vitamin D deficiency was defined as serum 25(OH)D levels < 15 ng/mL. We performed a cross-sectional analysis to elucidate the relationship between 25(OH)D and CKD stage using baseline CKD patient data. We further examined a cohort analysis to clarify the association between 25(OH)D and risk of renal event. Renal event was a composite of the first occurrence of a 50% decline in eGFR from the baseline value or the onset of CKD stage 5 (initiation of dialysis or kidney transplantation) across the follow-up period. We also investigated the associations of vitamin D deficiency with risk of renal event according to diabetes and overweight status. Results Vitamin D deficiency were significantly associated with an increased risk of severe CKD stage – 1.30-fold (95% CI: 1.10-1.69) for 25(OH)D. Deficiency of 25(OH)D with 1.64-fold (95% CI: 1.32-2.65) was related to renal event compared with the reference. Furthermore, vitamin D deficiency patients with presence of DM and overweight status also displayed higher risk than non-deficient patients for risk of renal event. Conclusion Vitamin D deficiency is associated with significantly increased risk of severe CKD stage and renal event.
CNS demyelinating events in primary Sjögren's syndrome: A single-center case series on the clinical phenotype

Objective The study aimed to assess the prevalence, clinical characteristics, and therapeutic outcomes of the central nervous system (CNS) demyelinating disease in a large cohort of primary Sjögren's syndrome (pSS). Methods This is an explorative cross-sectional study of patients with pSS seen in the departments of rheumatology, otorhinolaryngology, or neurology of a tertiary university center between January 2015 and September 2021. Results In a cohort of 194 pSS patients, 22 patients had a CNS manifestation. In this CNS group, 19 patients had a lesion pattern suggestive of demyelination. While there were no obvious differences in the patients' epidemiological disposition or rate of other extraglandular manifestations, the CNS group differed from the remaining patients with pSS by having less glandular manifestations but a higher seroprevalence for anti-SSA/Ro antibodies. Notably, patients with CNS manifestations were often diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) and treated as such, although age and disease course were atypical of MS. Many first-line MS agents were ineffective in these “MS look-alikes”; however, the disease course was benign with B-cell-depleting agents. Conclusion Neurological symptoms of pSS are common and clinically manifest mainly as myelitis or optic neuritis. Notably, in the CNS, the pSS phenotype can overlap with MS. The prevailing disease is crucial since it has a major impact on the long-term clinical outcome and the choice of disease-modifying agents. Although our observations neither confirm pSS as a more appropriate diagnosis nor rule out simple comorbidity, physicians should consider pSS in the extended diagnostic workup of CNS autoimmune diseases.
Exact Controllability of an Impulsive Semilinear System with Deviated Argument in a Banach Space

A functional differential equation with deviated argument coupled with impulsive conditions is studied for the existence and uniqueness of the mild solution and exact controllability of the system. The results are obtained by using Banach contraction principle and <path id="x1D436" d="M682 629q-1 -16 -1.5 -72t-2.5 -86l-31 -4q-5 92 -51 129t-139 37q-100 0 -177 -49t-116 -125t-39 -162q0 -122 66 -201t182 -79q83 0 137 42.5t112 128.5l26 -15q-12 -31 -42.5 -88t-45.5 -75q-139 -27 -199 -27q-148 0 -243 81.5t-95 226.5q0 173 129.5 274.5 t325.5 101.5q114 0 204 -38z"> <path id="x30" d="M241 635q53 0 94 -28.5t63.5 -76t33.5 -102.5t11 -116q0 -58 -11 -112.5t-34 -103.5t-63.5 -78.5t-94.5 -29.5t-95 28t-64.5 75t-34.5 102.5t-11 118.5q0 58 11.5 112.5t34.5 103t64.5 78t95.5 29.5zM238 602q-32 0 -55.5 -25t-35.5 -68t-17.5 -91t-5.5 -105 q0 -76 10 -138.5t37 -107.5t69 -45q32 0 55.5 25t35.5 68.5t17.5 91.5t5.5 105t-5.5 105.5t-18 92t-36 68t-56.5 24.5z"> semigroup theory without imposing additional assumptions such as analyticity and compactness conditions on the generated semigroup and the nonlinear term. An example is provided to illustrate the presented theory.
remote sensing

: As marine observation technology develops rapidly, underwater optical image object detection is beginning to occupy an important role in many tasks, such as naval coastal defense tasks, aquaculture, etc. However, in the complex marine environment, the images captured by an optical imaging system are usually severely degraded. Therefore, how to detect objects accurately and quickly under such conditions is a critical problem that needs to be solved. In this manuscript, a novel framework for underwater object detection based on a hybrid transformer network is proposed. First, a lightweight hybrid transformer-based network is presented that can extract global contextual information. Second, a ﬁne-grained feature pyramid network is used to overcome the issues of feeble signal disappearance. Third, the test-time-augmentation method is applied for inference without introducing additional parameters. Extensive experiments have shown that the approach we have proposed is able to detect feeble and small objects in an efﬁcient and effective way. Furthermore, our model signiﬁcantly outperforms the latest advanced detectors with respect to both the number of parameters and the mAP by a considerable margin. Speciﬁcally, our detector outperforms the baseline model by 6.3 points, and the model parameters are reduced by 28.5 M.
Fine-Grained Visual Classification via Internal Ensemble Learning Transformer

Recently, vision transformers (ViTs) have been investigated in fine-grained visual recognition (FGVC) and are now considered state of the art. However, most ViT-based works ignore the different learning performances of the heads in the multi-head self-attention (MHSA) mechanism and its layers. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel internal ensemble learning transformer (IELT) for FGVC. The proposed IELT involves three main modules: multi-head voting (MHV) module, cross-layer refinement (CLR) module, and dynamic selection (DS) module. To solve the problem of the inconsistent performances of multiple heads, we propose the MHV module, which considers all of the heads in each layer as weak learners and votes for tokens of discriminative regions as cross-layer feature based on the attention maps and spatial relationships. To effectively mine the cross-layer feature and suppress the noise, the CLR module is proposed, where the refined feature is extracted and the assist logits operation is developed for the final prediction. In addition, a newly designed DS module adjusts the token selection number at each layer by weighting their contributions of the refined feature. In this way, the idea of ensemble learning is combined with the ViT to improve fine-grained feature representation. The experiments demonstrate that our method achieves competitive results compared with the state of the art on five popular FGVC datasets.
Prevalence of growing pains in a general paediatric OPD: A descriptive, observational and cross-sectional study

Context: Growing pain (GP) is a common presentation in primary care settings. Aims: To find out the prevalence of GP and to observe its characteristics and associations. Settings and Design: General paediatric outpatient department (OPD). Methods and Material: Children coming to the general paediatric OPD of a tertiary centre in India between April 2019 and March 2020 for 'chronic leg pains' were screened with Peterson's criteria. Patients with systemic illness were excluded. All received vitamin D and calcium supplementation. Patients with haemoglobin less than 11 gm% received additional 3 mg/kg iron supplementation. Then, patients were asked for follow-up. Statistical Analysis Used: Chi-square test. Results: A total of 333 children were diagnosed as GP out of the total OPD attendance of 26750. The prevalence was 1.24% and 72.7% among the children with chronic leg pain. Highest prevalence was in winter (1.74%). The mean age of the patients was 7.88 years. The mean duration of symptoms was 10.92 months. After 3 months, 267 patients could be followed up. Seventy-two out of 107 (67.3%) children, who received iron became symptom-free. Only 43 (28.8%) patients became symptom-free out of 160, who received only calcium and vitamin D3 and did not receive iron. The difference was highly significant statistically (P < 0.0001). Conclusions: The prevalence of GP in the OPD was 1.24% and 72.7% among the children with chronic leg pain. Iron supplementation along with vitamin D3 and calcium was associated with faster resolution of the symptoms.
Is the extent of functional liver remnant increase truly “functional”? A single-institution case series of patients with Associating Liver Partition and Portal vein ligation for Staged hepatectomy (ALPPS)

Aim of the study Associating Liver Partition and Portal vein ligation for Staged hepatectomy (ALPPS) aims to induce rapid hypertrophy of the future liver remnant (FLR) to reduce the risk of post-hepatectomy liver failure (PHLF). However, volumetric increase does not correspond to functional increase. This is a novel study which aims to compare the increase in standardized FLR (sFLR) vs. indocyanine green retention at 15 minutes (ICG-R15). Material and methods This is a retrospective case series of patients who underwent ALPPS between May 2015 and January 2022. Primary outcomes were sFLR and ICG-R15. Secondary outcomes were incidence of PHLF, morbidity, recurrence, overall survival (OS) and disease-free survival (DFS). Results There were 10 patients with median age of 60.5 years (range 29-69). Most patients had adenocarcinoma secondary to colorectal origin (80%). There were 7 patients who received neoadjuvant chemotherapy [median 6 cycles (range 5-9)]. Median size of the primary tumour was 5.0 cm (range 2.0-7.0 cm). There was a significant increase in median ICG-R15 after stage 1 ALPPS (8.8% vs. 10.2%, p = 0.024) and increase in median sFLR after stage 1 ALPPS (34.4% vs. 53.0%, p = 0.012). Linear regression showed no significant correlation between sFLR increase and ICG-R15 (B = 0.26, 95% CI: –0.82, 1.34, p = 0.565). One patient had PHLF. Median time to local recurrence and metastatic recurrence was 14.4 months (range 6.9-21.9) and 7.5 months (range 6.9-17.3) respectively. OS and DFS were 50% and 40% respectively. Conclusions No significant relationship was observed between ICG-R15 and sFLR. Volume increase may overestimate the functional increase following ALPPS. Larger studies are needed to validate our findings.
Comparison of the angle deviation of the nose line to the mentum and Mallampati test in predicting the difficult airway before anesthesia

Introduction: A high percentage of dangerous events in anesthesia occur due to airway problems, and proper airway management is always one of the key points during anesthesia. Airway management in critically ill patients is one of the most stressful situations for primary care physicians and even for anesthesiologists. The aim of this study was to evaluate the anatomical features of patients' airways, including the angle of deviation of the nasal line from the nasal to the mentum (NMLD), and perform a Mallampati test. Method: This cross-sectional study was performed on all patients admitted to Shohada Hospital in Tabriz, Iran, who were candidates for elective surgery for 1 year and 6 months, and underwent endotracheal intubation. Based on laryngeal observation, patients were classified into four groups. Then, all data related to individuals including type of surgery, age, sex, weight, height, body mass index (BMI), and nasal mentum line deviation (NMLD) were recorded. Then, all the collected data were analyzed using SPSS software version 19. Results: A total of 85 patients from 17 to 67 years with a mean age of 37.64 ± 12.89 were studied. There was a statistically significant relationship between laryngoscopy difficulty and Mallampati score (P = 0.001). The findings showed a statistically significant relationship between laryngoscopy difficulty and the mean NMLD (P = 0.01). A Mallampati of 85% indicates laryngoscopy difficulty. Also, NMLD can predict laryngoscopy difficulty by up to 66%. Conclusion: The present study demonstrated that both the Mallampati score variable and NMLD are related to the difficult airway problem. Furthermore, the Mallampati score has a higher predictive value for difficult intubation than the NMLD.
Stretched exponential relaxation in molecular and electronic glasses

Stretched exponential relaxation, , fits many relaxation processes in disordered and quenched electronic and molecular systems, but it is widely believed that this function has no microscopic basis, especially in the case of molecular relaxation. For electronic relaxation the appearance of the stretched exponential is often described in the context of dispersive transport, where is treated as an adjustable parameter, but in almost all cases it is generally assumed that no microscopic meaning can be assigned to even at , a glass transition temperature. We show that for molecular relaxation can be understood, providing that one separates extrinsic and intrinsic effects, and that the intrinsic effects are dominated by two magic numbers, for short-range forces, and for long-range Coulomb forces, as originally observed by Kohlrausch for the decay of residual charge on a Leyden jar. Our mathematical model treats relaxation kinetics using the Lifshitz - Kac - Luttinger diffusion to traps depletion model in a configuration space of effective dimensionality, the latter being determined using axiomatic set theory and Phillips - Thorpe constraint theory. The experiments discussed include ns neutron scattering experiments, particularly those based on neutron spin echoes which measure S( Q,t) directly, and the traditional linear response measurements which span the range from to s, as collected and analysed phenomenologically by Angell, Ngai, Bohmer and others. The electronic materials discussed include a-Si:H, granular , semiconductor nanocrystallites, charge density waves in , spin glasses, and vortex glasses in high-temperature semiconductors. The molecular materials discussed include polymers, network glasses, electrolytes and alcohols, Van der Waals supercooled liquids and glasses, orientational glasses, water, fused salts, and heme proteins. In the intrinsic cases the theory of is often accurate to 2%, which is often better than the quoted experimental accuracies . The extrinsic cases are identified by explicit structural signatures which are discussed at length. The discussion also includes recent molecular dynamical simulations for metallic glasses, spin glasses, quasicrystals and polymers which have achieved the intermediate relaxed Kohlrausch state and which have obtained values of in excellent agreement with the prediction of the microscopic theory.
Palatine Tonsil Measurements and Echogenicity during Tonsillitis Using Ultrasonography: A Case–Control Study

This case–control study aimed to assess the size and echogenicity of inflamed tonsils using ultrasonography. It was carried out at different hospitals, nurseries, and primary schools in Khartoum state. About 131 Sudanese volunteers between 1 and 24 years old were recruited. The sample included 79 volunteers with normal tonsils and 52 with tonsillitis according to hematological investigations. The sample was divided into groups according to age—1–5 years old, 6–10 years old, and more than ten years. Measurements in centimeters of height (AP) and width (transverse) of both tonsils (right and left) were taken. Echogenicity was assessed according to normal and abnormal appearances. A data collection sheet containing all the study variables was used. The independent samples test (t-test) showed an insignificant height difference between normal controls and cases with tonsillitis. The transverse diameter increased significantly with inflammation (p-value < 0.05) for both tonsils in all groups. Echogenicity can differentiate between normal and abnormal tonsils (p-value < 0.05 using the chi-square test) for samples from 1–5 years and 6–10 years. The study concluded that measurements and appearance are reliable indicators of tonsillitis, which can be confirmed with the use of ultrasonography, helping physicians to make the correct diagnosis and decisions.
Temperature effect on drug diffusion in the stomach and bloodstream compartments

In this paper, we explain the effect of temperature on the distribution of drugs between the stomach and the bloodstream compartments of the human body. The study demonstrates that the behavior of drug distribution is linked with high or low surrounding temperatures in the compartments (the stomach and bloodstream) under study. In the study, we converted real-world problems into mathematical equations and then solved the resulting remodeled system and the mathematical models found in previous research by introducing a temperature component in an attempt to understand the behavior of a drug administered in the human body over time. The analytical solutions for the drug concentration in the stomach and bloodstream were obtained using separation of variables and variation of parameters techniques of solving ODEs, while the numerical solutions and the graphical results were obtained using Wolfram Mathematica. The results show that as the temperature rises, the drug administered into the system diffuses faster between the compartments and diffuses slower as the temperature falls, which shows the novelty of this research project.