Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Experimental Adaptation of Rotaviruses to Tumor Cell Lines

A number of viruses show a naturally extended tropism for tumor cells whereas other viruses have been genetically modified or adapted to infect tumor cells. Oncolytic viruses have become a promising tool for treating some cancers by inducing cell lysis or immune response to tumor cells. In the present work, rotavirus strains TRF-41 (G5) (porcine), RRV (G3) (simian), UK (G6-P5) (bovine), Ym (G11-P9) (porcine), ECwt (murine), Wa (G1-P8), Wi61 (G9) and M69 (G8) (human), and five wild-type human rotavirus isolates were passaged multiple times in different human tumor cell lines and then combined in five different ways before additional multiple passages in tumor cell lines. Cell death caused by the tumor cell-adapted isolates was characterized using Hoechst, propidium iodide, 7-AAD, Annexin V, TUNEL, and anti-poly-(ADP ribose) polymerase (PARP) and -phospho-histone H2A.X antibodies. Multiple passages of the combined rotaviruses in tumor cell lines led to a successful infection of these cells, suggesting a gain-of-function by the acquisition of greater infectious capacity as compared with that of the parental rotaviruses. The electropherotype profiles suggest that unique tumor cell-adapted isolates were derived from reassortment of parental rotaviruses. Infection produced by such rotavirus isolates induced chromatin modifications compatible with apoptotic cell death.
Mandibular Reconstruction: Are Two Flaps Better Than One?

This study compared the combined iliac and ulnar forearm flaps with the osteomusculocutaneous fibular free flap for mandibular reconstruction. A retrospective study of 40 patients who had oromandibular reconstruction was performed, of whom 23 patients had a combined iliac crest without skin and ulnar forearm free flap. Seventeen patients had an osteomusculocutaneous free fibular flap. Ten women and 30 men with a mean age of 57.5 years comprised this study population. Ninety percent of the cases were squamous cell carcinoma (55%, T4), of which 11% were recurrent tumors. Anterolateral mandibular defects constituted 52.9% of the fibular reconstructions and 60.9% accounted for the iliac/ulnar reconstructions. The mean bone gaps were 8.79 cm and 8.95 cm respectively. Functional evaluation was based on the University of Washington Questionnaire through phone calls and personal communication. The mean hospital stay was 15.43 days and 10.09 days for the fibular and iliac/ulnar flaps respectively. The facial artery (64.7%) and facial vein (60%) were the main recipient vessels for the fibular reconstructions whereas the external carotid artery (95.6%) and the internal jugular vein (66.7%) were the main recipient vessels for the iliac/ulnar reconstruction. Overall flap survival was 96.8% (100% of fibular flaps and 95.65% of iliac/ulnar flaps). Two flaps were lost in the iliac/ulnar series because of unsalvageable venous thrombosis. Local complications for the iliac/ulnar flaps were 30.4% but were 5.9% for the fibular reconstructions. Function such as speech, swallowing, and chewing were notably better in the fibular than the iliac/ulnar group in 23 of the patients tested. The cosmetic acceptance of 77.8% of the fibular flaps was judged to be excellent and good, whereas 71.4% of the iliac/ulnar flaps were rated good. It appears that within this study population the free osteomusculocutaneous fibular flap had fewer local complications and a higher flap survival rate than the combined iliac/ulnar forearm flaps. Overall functional outcome was also improved. The use of the double flap may be appropriate in massive oromandibular defects, but may be less appropriate in more modest functional reconstructions of mandibular defects.
Annotation of Temporal and Event Expressions

Humans live in a dynamic world, where actions bring about consequences, and the facts and properties associated with entities change over time. Without a robust ability to identify events in NL data and temporally situate them, the real 91aboutness92 of the information can be missed. In appreciation of this need, there has recently been a renewed interest in temporal and event-based reasoning for NLP, aimed at addressing challenges in areas such as information extraction, question-answering, and summarization.This tutorial will begin with an overview of theoretical work on tense, aspect, and event structure in natural language, as well as the fundamentals of temporal reasoning. It will then go on to discuss the annotation of temporal and event expressions in corpora, including the TimeML specification language and other results from the ARDA/NRRC Workshop on Temporal and Event Recognition for Question Answering Systems (TERQAS). The tutorial will examine how to formally distinguish events and their temporal anchoring in documents, and will discuss algorithms for ordering events mentioned in a document relative to each other and for computing closure over an entire discourse of events.Tutorial attendees can expect to learn about current methodologies and computational resources, the outstanding problems in the area, as well as obtain follow-up pointers to the research literature. Attendees should be familiar with information extraction and the notion of corpus annotation. The course should appeal to those with an interest in leveraging robust semantic analysis for tasks like question-answering, information extraction, and summarization.
Retinal development anomalies and cone photoreceptors degeneration upon Bmi 1 deficiency

Retinal development occurs through the sequential but overlapping generation of six neuronal and one glial cell types. Of these, rod and cone photoreceptors represent the functional unit of light detection and phototransduction and are frequently affected in retinal degenerative diseases. During mouse development, the Polycomb group protein Bmi1 is expressed in immature retinal progenitors and differentiated retinal neurons, including cones. We show here that Bmi1 is required to prevent post-natal degeneration of cone photoreceptors and bipolar neurons, and that inactivation of Chk2 or p53 could improve but not overcome cone degeneration in Bmi1 mice. The retinal phenotype of Bmi1 mice was also characterized by loss of heterochromatin, activation of tandem-repeats, oxidative stress, and Rip3-associated necroptosis. In the human retina, BMI1 was preferentially expressed in cones at heterochromatic foci. BMI1 inactivation in human embryonic stem cells was compatible with retinal induction but impaired cone terminal differentiation. Despite this developmental arrest, BMI1-deficient cones recapitulated several anomalies observed in Bmi1 photoreceptors such as loss of heterochromatin, activation of tandem-repeats and p53 induction, revealing partly conserved biological functions between mouse and man. D ev el o pm en t • A dv an ce a rt ic le
A Cross Layer Broadcast Protocol for Multihop Emergency Message Dissemination in Inter-Vehicle Communication

In order to achieve cooperative driving in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET), broadcast transmission is usually used for disseminating safety-related information among vehicles. Nevertheless, broadcast over multihop wireless networks poses many challenges due to link unreliability, hidden terminal, message redundancy, and broadcast storm, etc., which greatly degrade the network performance. In this paper, we propose a cross layer broadcast protocol (CLBP) for multihop emergency message dissemination in inter-vehicle communication systems. We first design a novel composite relaying metric for relaying node selection, by jointly considering the geographical locations, physical layer channel conditions, moving velocities of vehicles. Based on the designed metric, we then propose a distributed relay selection scheme to guarantee that a unique relay is selected to reliably forward the emergency message in the desired propagation direction.We further apply IEEE802.11e EDCA to guarantee QoS performance of safety related services. Finally, simulation results are given to demonstrate that CLBP can not only minimize the broadcast message redundancy, but also quickly and reliably disseminate emergency messages in a VANET.
GRASP With Path Relinking For The Three-Index Assignment Problem

Abstract. This paper describes variants of GRASP (greedy randomized adaptive search procedure) with path relinking for the three index assignment problem (AP3). GRASP is a multi-start metaheuristic for combinatorial optimization. It usually consists of a construction procedure based on a greedy randomized algorithm and of a local search. Path relinking is an intensification strategy that explores trajectories that connect high quality solutions. Several variants of the heuristic are proposed and tested. Computational results show clearly that this GRASP for AP3 benefits from path relinking and that the variants considered in this paper compare well with previously proposed heuristics for this problem. GRASP with path relinking was able to improve the solution quality of heuristics proposed by Balas and Saltzman (1991), Burkard, Rudolf, and Woeginger (1996), and Crama and Spieksma (1992) on all instances proposed in those papers. We show that the random variable “time to target solution,” for all proposed GRASP with path relinking variants, fits a two-parameter exponential distribution. To illustrate the consequence of this, one of the variants of GRASP with path relinking is shown to benefit from parallelization.
Electrically assisted cycling: a new mode for meeting physical activity guidelines?

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to assess the potential of the electrically assisted bicycle (EAB) as a novel tool for meeting the physical activity guidelines in terms of intensity. METHODS Twelve habitually active adult subjects were requested to cycle a track of 4.3 km at an intensity they would normally choose for commuter cycling, using three different support settings: no support (NO), eco support (ECO), and power support (POW). For estimating the intensity, the oxygen consumption was measured by using a portable gas-analyzing system, and HR was simultaneously measured. The bicycle was equipped with the SRM Training System to measure subjects' power output, pedaling rate, and the cycle velocity. RESULTS Mean intensity was 6.1 MET for NO, 5.7 MET for ECO, and 5.2 MET for POW. Intensity was significantly lower in POW compared with that in NO. No differences were found between NO and ECO and between ECO and POW. Mean HR was significantly higher in NO compared with that in ECO and POW. The cycling speed with electrical support settings was significantly higher than cycling in the NO condition. Mean power output during cycling was significantly different among all three conditions. Most power outputs were supplied in the NO condition, and the lowest power output was supplied in the POW condition. CONCLUSIONS Intensity during cycling on an EAB, in all three measured conditions, is sufficiently high to contribute to the physical activity guidelines for moderate-intensity health-enhancing physical activity for adults (cutoff, 3 MET). Further study is needed to conclude whether these results still hold when using the EAB in regular daily life and in subjects with other fitness level.
A palmprint ROI extraction method for mobile devices in complex environment

Palmprint ROI (Region of Interest) extraction is an important procedure in palmprint recognition or authentication which mainly aims to obtain standardized images for feature extraction and matching. ∗Locating contactless palmprint ROI in complex environment is a challenging work because of unstable external factors and relaxed operation environment. As to mobile palmprint recognition, the inherent problems mainly focus on hand postures, complex background, illumination variation and restricted processing capability. In this paper, a new palmprint ROI extraction (PRE) method is proposed which uses the modified convexity theory. PRE method abandons typical edge detection, centroid and coordinate procedure. Verification experiments on contactless palmprint databases demonstrate that PRE method is feasible and effective for mobile palmprint ROI extraction.
Optimizing human-machine interaction in manual assembly

This contribution introduces a concept for human-machine interaction in a working environment. A foot pedal based interface was applied for the investigation of capabilities and bottlenecks in human information processing as well as for the user-controlled timing of relevant information presentation. The use of the interaction concept was tested within an experimental study, where complexity of a manual assembly task was varied in order to manipulate respective processing resources. Results were interpreted regarding the development of an assistive system in production environments and regarding the optimization of human-machine interaction in general.
Online multicast routing with bandwidth guarantees: a new approach using multicast network flow

This paper presents a new algorithm for on-line routing of bandwidth-guaranteed multicasts where routing requests arrive one-by-one without there being any a priori knowledge of future requests. A multicast routing request consists of a source s, a set of receivers R, and a bandwidth requirement b. This multicast routing problem arises in many contexts. Two applications of interest are routing of point-to-multipoint label-switched paths in Multi-Protocol Label Switched (MPLS) networks, and the provision of bandwidth guaranteed Virtual Private Network (VPN) services under the “hose” service model [17]. Offline multicast routing algorithms cannot be used since they require a priori knowledge of all multicast requests that are to be routed. Instead, on-line algorithms that handle requests arriving one-by-one and that satisfy as many potential future demands as possible are needed. The newly developed algorithm is an on-line algorithm and is based on the idea that a newly routed multicast must follow a route that does not “interfere too much” with network paths that may be critical to satisfy future demands. We develop a multicast tree selection heuristic that is based on the idea of deferred loading of certain “critical” links. These critical links are identified by the algorithm as links that, if heavily loaded, would make it impossible to satisfy future demands between certain ingress-egress pairs. The presented algorithm uses link-state information and some auxilliary capacity information for multicast tree selection and is amenable to distributed implementation. Unlike previous algorithms, the proposed algorithm exploits any available knowledge of the network ingress-egress points of potential future demands even though the demands themselves are unknown and performs very well.
A Novel Isolator-Based System Promotes Viability of Human Embryos during Laboratory Processing

In vitro fertilisation (IVF) and related technologies are arguably the most challenging of all cell culture applications. The starting material is a single cell from which one aims to produce an embryo capable of establishing a pregnancy eventually leading to a live birth. Laboratory processing during IVF treatment requires open manipulations of gametes and embryos, which typically involves exposure to ambient conditions. To reduce the risk of cellular stress, we have developed a totally enclosed system of interlinked isolator-based workstations designed to maintain oocytes and embryos in a physiological environment throughout the IVF process. Comparison of clinical and laboratory data before and after the introduction of the new system revealed that significantly more embryos developed to the blastocyst stage in the enclosed isolator-based system compared with conventional open-fronted laminar flow hoods. Moreover, blastocysts produced in the isolator-based system contained significantly more cells and their development was accelerated. Consistent with this, the introduction of the enclosed system was accompanied by a significant increase in the clinical pregnancy rate and in the proportion of embryos implanting following transfer to the uterus. The data indicate that protection from ambient conditions promotes improved development of human embryos. Importantly, we found that it was entirely feasible to conduct all IVF-related procedures in the isolator-based workstations.
Estimating observation unit profitability with options modeling.

BACKGROUND Over the past two decades, the use of observation units to treat such common conditions as chest pain, asthma, and others has greatly increased. These units allow patients to be directed out of emergency department (ED) acute care beds while potentially avoiding inpatient admission. Many studies have demonstrated the clinical effectiveness of care delivered in such a setting compared to the ED or inpatient ward. However, there are limited data published about observation unit finance. METHODS Using the economic principles of stock options, opportunity costs, and net present value (NPV), a model that captures the value generated by admitting a patient to an observation unit was derived. In addition, an appendix is included showing how this model can be used to calculate the dollar value of an observation unit admission. RESULTS A model is presented that captures more complexity of observation finance than the simple difference between payments and costs. The calculated estimate in the Appendix suggests that the average value of a single observation unit admission was about $2,908, which is about 40% higher than expected. CONCLUSION Subtraction of costs from payments may significantly underestimate the financial value of an observation unit admission. However, the positive value generated by an observation unit bed must be considered in the context of other projects available to hospital administrators.
Similarity based context for nonparametric scene parsing

Scene parsing is an important research area in computer vision which aims to provide semantic label for each pixel in an image. In this paper, we propose a new approach in non-parametric scene parsing. Typical non-parametric scene parsing approaches have two main steps: retrieving similar images to test image and label transferring from retrieved images to the test image. In our approach, in the label transferring step, we use an objective function in which object level and context level information are incorporated. The main contribution of this paper is to propose a new contextual term which it is adapted to the employed similarity distance measure in the retrieval stage. Also, we propose a new adaptive weighting procedure which balances the effectiveness of object-level and context level terms in the objective function. To evaluate the proposed approach, it is applied on the MSRC-21 datasets. The obtained results show that our approach outperforms comparable state-of-the-art nonparametric approaches.
On Optimal Device-to-Device Resource Allocation for Minimizing End-to-End Delay in VANETs

In vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), the IEEE 802.11p is a popular and standardized protocol for communications among vehicles and infrastructure (e.g., roadside units). However, because of a limited communication range and the randomly access nature of the carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) mechanism, the end-to-end delay could be high due to both store-and-catch-up (SAC) delay when the network is temporally disconnected and the channel access contention delay. In this paper, we propose a new method based on fifth-generation device-to-device (D2D) technology to improve the delay performance of VANETs. The basic idea is that direct D2D-based communications among vehicles remove the contention delay and can support longer distance. Specifically, we design a hybrid system with both D2D- and IEEE 802.11p-based communications, where the D2D links are controlled by the cellular base stations (BSs) in the overlay scheme. Each vehicle periodically checks its packet lifetime and requests the BSs to establish D2D links, if needed. The optimal resource allocation problem at the BSs is to select optimal receiver vehicles to establish D2D links and assign proper channels for them so that the total delay is minimized. The problem is equivalent to a maximum weighted independent set problem with dependent weights (MWIS-DW), which is NP-hard. To calculate the weights, an analytical approach is developed to model the expected end-to-end delay. Furthermore, we propose a greedy-based algorithm to solve this problem and develop a theoretical performance lower bound for the algorithm. The effectiveness of the algorithm under various scenarios is evaluated through simulations.
A Wide-Locking-Range Dual Injection-Locked Frequency Divider With an Automatic Frequency Calibration Loop in 65-nm CMOS

This brief presents a wide-locking-range injection-locked frequency divider (ILFD) that uses an automatic frequency calibration loop. The proposed ILFD uses the ring oscillator to provide the high division ratio with small chip area. A dual-injection scheme is proposed in order to achieve the wide locking range of the ILFD. The free-running frequency of the ILFD is automatically digitally calibrated to reflect the frequency of the injected signal from the voltage-controlled oscillator. To control the frequency of the ILFD, the load current is digitally tuned with 3-bit control signal. The ILFD is fabricated using 65-nm CMOS process, and by tuning the load current, it achieves the wide operation frequency range of 14.1-45.8 GHz. When the input signal of 30 GHz is injected, the locking range of the ILFD is 7.2 GHz, while the power consumption is 2.5 mW from a 1-V supply voltage.
Cyclic variations in the permeability of the cell wall of Saccharomyces cerevisiae

To study cell‐cycle‐related variations in wall permeability of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, two approaches were used. First, an asynchronous culture was fractionated by centrifugal elutriation into subpopulations containing cell of increasing size. The subpopulations represented different stages of the cell cycle as judged by light microscopy. Cell wall porosity increased when these subpopulations became enriched with budded cells. Secondly, synchronous cultures were obtained by releasing MATa cells from alpha‐factor induced G1‐arrest. These cultures grew synchronously for at least two generations. The cell wall porosity incresed sharply in these cultures, shortly before buds became visible and was maximal during the initial stages of bud growth. It decreased in cells which had completed nuclear migration and before abscission of the bud had occurred. The porosity reached its lowest value during abscission and in unbudded cells.
Capture effect on R-ALOHA protocol for inter-vehicle communications

As a component of the intelligent transportation system (ITS) and one of the concrete applications of mobile ad-hoc networks, inter-vehicle communication (IVC) has attracted research attention from both the academia and industry. A key issue in the wireless network is the design of medium access control (MAC) layer protocols for distributed channel assignment. A promising class of protocols for IVC networks is R-ALOHA-based protocols. In this paper, we document our investigation of near-far effects and capture effects on R-ALOHA for a real-time distributed packet wireless network or IVC in the presence of multipath, and shadowing. The research recorded in this paper also studied the stability of R-ALOHA protocol for IVC analytically and by simulation. In order to analyze how fast R-ALOHA makes the network stable once communication among terminals is initiated, we construct a discrete Markov chain and derive new recursive formulas based on solutions to Markov chain to evaluate distribution and mean value of system stabilization time in the fading environment.