Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of Appropriate Prolonged Sacral Neuromodulation Testing in Improving Implantation Rate of a Permanent Implantable Pulse Generator in Patients with Refractory Lower Urinary Tract Dysfunctions in Mainland China

Background: Sacral neuromodulation (SNM) has become an effective method for treating lower urinary tract voiding dysfunction during the past 20 years. Because of the expensive cost, the number of implantable pulse generator (IPG) implantations per year in China is far lower than that in Western developed countries since 2012. This study was to summarize the effects of the appropriate prolonged SNM testing time in improving the implantation rate of a permanent IPG in patients with refractory lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) in mainland China. Methods: From January 2013 to June 2016, 51 patients with refractory LUTS received SNM therapy. In this study, we compared the conversion rate 2 weeks after the Stage I test and final actual conversion rate. We also observed the complications (such as pain, infection, and electrode displacement) and effectiveness. We tried to improve an appropriate prolonged test time which was favorable for improving the SNM conversion rate while ensuring safety and effectiveness. Results: Among 51 patients receiving SNM therapy, 19 patients (mean age 45.0 ± 16.9 years) had poor Stage I test results, and on an average, the electrode was removed 27.4 ± 9.6 days after the surgery. In one patient, the electrode was removed within 2 weeks; when the remaining 18 patients were questioned 2 weeks after testing, none of the patients wanted to terminate the test, and all the 18 patients desired to prolong the testing time to further observe the treatment effect. The remaining 32 patients (mean age 46.7 ± 15.3 years) received Stage II permanent implantation at 19.6 ± 10.4 days after the surgery. The overall Stage I–II conversion was 62.7% (32/51) in this study. Within 2 weeks after the surgery, only eight patients received Stage II permanent implantation, and the conversion rate was only 15.7% (8/51), which was much lower than the overall conversion rate of 62.7%. Nearly 84.4% (27/32) of the patients received Stage II implantation within 4 weeks. None of the patients had incision infections. In one patient, the entire system was removed 1 month after Stage II implantation due to pain in the implantation site. Conclusions: Appropriate extension of the Stage I testing time of an SNM-barbed electrode could significantly improve the Stage II permanent implantation rate in Chinese refractory LUTS patients; there were no wound infections, and the postoperative complication rate was low. This study recommended that Stage I period of SNM therapy should be 4 weeks according to safety and successful conversion rate.
Web Based Pattern Mining and Matching Approach to Question Answering

We describe herein a Web based pattern mining and matching approach to question answering. For each type of questions, a lot of textual patterns can be learned from the Web automatically, using the TREC QA track data as training examples. These textual patterns are assessed by the concepts of support and confidence, which are borrowed from the data mining community. Given a new unseen question, these textual patterns can be utilized to extract and rank the plausible answers on the Web. The performance of this approach has been evaluated also by the TREC QA track data.
The innovation concept applied to the processing of measurements and parameters errors in power systems state estimation

The state estimation plays a crucial role in modern Energy Management Systems, since it determines the complex voltages in all buses of the power system. Although many methodologies have been proposed to detect, identify and correct gross errors in measurements and parameters errors, they often fail when those errors occur simultaneously. Thus, this paper proposes an approach to process both errors using a geometrical view. In the paper's methodology, firstly it is tested if the set of measurements has an error, using the proposed Composed Measurement Error. Then, it is determined what kind of error has occurred. The correction to be made is based on another proposed index, the Composed Normalized Error. To test the efficiency of the approach, the IEEE 14-bus system has been used. The results of the simulations have demonstrated the reliability of the proposed approach to deal with parameters and measurements errors, even when occurring simultaneously.
Stochastic subgradient methods with approximate Lagrange multipliers

We study the use of approximate Lagrange multipliers in the stochastic subgradient method for the dual problem in constrained convex optimisation. The use of approximate Lagrange multipliers in the optimisation (instead of the true multipliers) is motivated by the fact that it is possible to accurately approximate some non-convex control problems as convex optimisations. For example, it is possible to solve certain stochastic discrete decision problems by solving a sequence of convex optimisations. We show how the analysis can be used in networking problems with queues, and present a wireless example that has constraints on how control actions can be selected which illustrates the power of the approach.
A scalable architecture for supporting interactive games on the internet

This paper presents a scalable architecture for supporting large-scale interactive Internet games. In order to support a large number of participants and to divide the workload, the virtual world is divided into partitions. Each partition is then assigned to a server. A client (i.e., a player or a participant) will join a server according to the position of the avatar it controls. Compared to a centralized architecture, this distributed client-server architecture is more scalable. In addition, compared to a fully distributed, peer-to-peer architecture, it also provides a means for detecting cheating in distributed games. Since interactions and accounting information must be forwarded directly to one of the servers for qualification and verification, cheating amongst distributed players of the game will be minimized. To support secured communication for interactions and accounting information as well as to speedup periodic update messages (e.g., position updates), a hybrid communication scheme using both TCP and IP multicast is used between clients and the associated server. The communication among servers is enabled by the Run-Time Infrastructure (RTI) services. The High Level Architecture (HLA) Data Distribution Management (DDM) is employed to limit the amount of communication between the servers. In addition, the Ownership Management (OM) is also employed to implement the need for transferring the avatars between servers. In this paper, the design detail of the architecture will be presented. An experimental interactive Internet game realized using the architecture will be also described in the paper.
Intracellular Nucleic Acid Delivery by the Supercharged Dengue Virus Capsid Protein

Supercharged proteins are a recently identified class of proteins that have the ability to efficiently deliver functional macromolecules into mammalian cells. They were first developed as bioengineering products, but were later found in the human proteome. In this work, we show that this class of proteins with unusually high net positive charge is frequently found among viral structural proteins, more specifically among capsid proteins. In particular, the capsid proteins of viruses from the Flaviviridae family have all a very high net charge to molecular weight ratio (> +1.07/kDa), thus qualifying as supercharged proteins. This ubiquity raises the hypothesis that supercharged viral capsid proteins may have biological roles that arise from an intrinsic ability to penetrate cells. Dengue virus capsid protein was selected for a detailed experimental analysis. We showed that this protein is able to deliver functional nucleic acids into mammalian cells. The same result was obtained with two isolated domains of this protein, one of them being able to translocate lipid bilayers independently of endocytic routes. Nucleic acids such as siRNA and plasmids were delivered fully functional into cells. The results raise the possibility that the ability to penetrate cells is part of the native biological functions of some viral capsid proteins.
The Comprehensive Antibiotic Resistance Database

ABSTRACT The field of antibiotic drug discovery and the monitoring of new antibiotic resistance elements have yet to fully exploit the power of the genome revolution. Despite the fact that the first genomes sequenced of free living organisms were those of bacteria, there have been few specialized bioinformatic tools developed to mine the growing amount of genomic data associated with pathogens. In particular, there are few tools to study the genetics and genomics of antibiotic resistance and how it impacts bacterial populations, ecology, and the clinic. We have initiated development of such tools in the form of the Comprehensive Antibiotic Research Database (CARD; http://arpcard.mcmaster.ca). The CARD integrates disparate molecular and sequence data, provides a unique organizing principle in the form of the Antibiotic Resistance Ontology (ARO), and can quickly identify putative antibiotic resistance genes in new unannotated genome sequences. This unique platform provides an informatic tool that bridges antibiotic resistance concerns in health care, agriculture, and the environment.
Improving lightly supervised training for broadcast transcription

This paper investigates improving lightly supervised acoustic model training for an archive of broadcast data. Standard lightly supervised training uses automatically derived decoding hypotheses using a biased language model. However, as the actual speech can deviate significantly from the original programme scripts that are supplied, the quality of standard lightly supervised hypotheses can be poor. To address this issue, word and segment level combination approaches are used between the lightly supervised transcripts and the original programme scripts which yield improved transcriptions. Experimental results show that systems trained using these improved transcriptions consistently outperform those trained using only the original lightly supervised decoding hypotheses. This is shown to be the case for both the maximum likelihood and minimum phone error trained systems. Index Terms: lightly supervised training, speech recognition, confidence scores
Highly asymmetric fine‐scale genetic structure between sexes of African striped mice and indication for condition dependent alternative male dispersal tactics

Sex‐biased dispersal is observed in many taxa, but few studies have compared sex‐biased dispersal among and within populations. We addressed the magnitude and habitat dependency of sex‐biased dispersal in social African striped mice by separating group‐related from population‐related genetic variance to understand the contribution of each sex to deme structure. As dispersal over unoccupied habitat is likely to be more costly than dispersal within a population, we predicted that individuals leaving the natal population have a lower body condition, being inferior to heavier territorial individuals. Fine‐scale genetic structure was detected in both sexes. Female relatedness decreased continuously from R = 0.21 at 25 m to zero at 500 m. Maximum male relatedness R = 0.05 was constant at distances between 25 and 75 m, becoming zero at 100 m. Genetic variance (FST) among seven locations was significantly higher in females than in males, while inbreeding estimates (FIS) were significantly higher in males than in females. Assignment tests estimated significantly more migrants among males, while Bayesian clustering estimated only a single genetic unit cluster for males among the seven locations. The mean body mass of migrant males (44 g) was significantly lower than for males that remained resident and thus dispersed within their sub‐population (48 g). Combined, the results showed habitat‐independent male‐biased dispersal and high female philopatry, and suggested that body condition was more important than kinship in male dispersal decisions. We suggest that locally inferior males are important for gene flow between sub‐populations. Thus, males might follow alternative dispersal tactics.
Design Optimization of Multipole Galatea Trap Coils by Multiple Population Genetic Algorithm

In order to improve the performance of multipole Galatea traps, this paper proposes an optimized method for the design of coil parameters. Based on an accurate magnetic field model, key parameters describing the multipole Galatea magnetic trap configuration were analyzed to establish an optimization model using the axial electromagnetic force, weak magnetic field area, and average magnetic mirror ratio as the optimization goals with the coil current as the design variable. Applying the improved multiple population genetic algorithm (MPGA), which has a strong searching ability and a fast convergence speed, enables production of optimization results following selection of the appropriate weight coefficients. Results confirm that optimization design results from MPGA are consistent with the design goals for different weight coefficients. In addition, the performance of multipole Galatea magnetic traps with optimization coil parameters was improved. Finally, the results from finite-element simulation software proved the validity and feasibility of the proposed method.
A proposal on a decomposition-based evolutionary multiobjective optimization for large scale vehicle routing problems

A proposed approach is specialized for large scale vehicle routing problems(VRPs) and based on area segmentation and gradual area integration mechanisms so as to avoid combinatorial explosion. The purpose of the proposed approach is to deconstruct large scale problem into small size sub-problems and gradually restore these to original state. Firstly, an original large scale problem is divided into some small sub-areas and optimal solutions in each sub-area are derived. When a best incumbent solution remains unchanged for a certain period, subareas are gradually integrated and new optimal solutions in a new integrated sub-area are newly searched through use of the obtained solutions in previous sub area. This gradual integration and optimization are iterated until every sub-area are integrated into the one (the original problem), and the optimal solution of original problem can be obtained at this time. The proposed approach aims to deconstruct large scale problem into small size sub-problems and perform more efficient search. Through some typical test problems, it was demonstrated that our approach could derive better results more effectively than conventional approach.
Spontaneously Diabetic BB Rats Have Age-Dependent Islet β-Cell—Specific Surface Antibodies at Clinical Onset

Diabetes-prone BB rats were examined before, during, and after clinical onset of diabetes for the occurrence of circulating islet cell surface antibodies (ICSAs) with a specific binding to islet β-cells. The presence of ICSA was assessed by incubating serum immunoglobulin fractions with normal Wistar rat islet cells and identifying cell-bound immunoglobulins by indirect immunofluorescence and by a complementinduced cell toxicity reaction. Under the selected experimental conditions, none of the diabetes-resistant rats were ICSA positive over the entire study period (45–120 days of age). In two diabetes-prone BB rat strains, 19 animals developed diabetes with onset between 50 and 120 days. At day 45, none of these animals was positive for ICSA. In rats developing diabetes between 50 and 85 days of age, 7 of 9 animals presented ICSA at clinical onset, determined by either the immunofluorescence or cytotoxicity test. The antibodies bound to insulin-containing β-cells but not to other islet cell types, and binding was not eliminated by absorption with liver powder. In animals developing diabetes between 85 and 120 days, only 1 of 10 was positive for β-cell-specific surface antibodies at onset of the disease. After 30 days of insulin treatment, β-cell-specific antibodies were detectable in 3 of 4 animals of age 50-85 days, whereas only 3 of 12 older rats presented ICSAs that were, in addition, of low titer or affinity. Our data confirm that ICSAs develop in diabetic BB rats and indicate that these antibodies can bind specifically to islet 7bgr;-cells compared with other islet cell types. Our study also suggests that the occurrence of circulating β-cell-specific surface antibodies in diabetes-prone BB rats is not only related to the time of clinical onset of the disease but also to the age of the animals. Our study illustrates the advantage of using purified normal islet cells in the analysis of the autoimmune phenomena in insulin-dependent diabetes.
Facilitated Communication and Children with Disabilities: An Enigma in Search of a Perspective.

As defined by Crossley (1988, 1992a) and Bilden (1990, 1992), facilitated communication is an augmentative communication method that permits individuals with severe disabilities such as autism to demonstrate unanticipated, and in some instances extraordinary, communication skills. Sustained by hand-over-hand support or other types of physical assistance from an individual without disabilities, people with disabilities who are thought to have limited communication ability purportedly are able to type thoughts and ideas, using facilitated communication, that are nothing short of remarkable. After only minimal experience with facilitated communication, individuals with severe disabilities allegedly have communicated that they have normal intelligence and adept social skills and knowledge. Other individuals reportedly have revealed that through facilitated communication, they are for the first time in their lives able to communicate. Still, others with severe disabilities purportedly have communicated that they are trapped within a body that prohibits them from moving or communicating with others competently because of a condition known as global apraxia (Biklen & Schubert, 1991; Calculator, 1992). Biklen (1992) proposed that individuals with global apraxia might seem to have severe language deficits and mental retardation in spite of having intact language processing abilities and normal intelligence. Thus, when afforded facilitated communication, these individuals demonstrate normal intelligence and advanced social skills, literacy, and communication abilities. MAY 1995
Novel Composite Phase-Shifting Transmission-Line and Its Application in the Design of Antenna Array

A novel composite phase-shifting transmission line (TL) with designable characteristics is presented, which can be used to achieve arbitrary phase of the transmission coefficient at any required frequency with a certain length of the TL. An empirical formula is given of the relationship between the phase and physical length of the composite TL at a required frequency. A sample of 0° phase-shifting TL is designed in detail, and is verified by the full-wave simulation. At the required frequency of 5 GHz, the amplitude of S21 is equal to -0.23 dB with a phase of -0.467°. The electric length is only 0.212¿0, which has been decreased by 68.5% compared to the conventional microstrip line. Using the proposed composite TL, an antenna array is designed with two radiation patches excited by the novel series feed-line. The detailed procedure of such design is presented. The lowest reflection coefficient is exactly achieved at the required frequency of 5 GHz. The maximum radiation is obtained at ¿0=0°, which indicates that the 0° phase-shifting TL works very well. The sample is also fabricated and good agreements between simulation and measurement results are obtained.
Benzodiazepines identified by capillary gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, with specific ion screening used to detect benzophenone derivatives.

We developed algorithms for confirmation and identification of benzodiazepines and their metabolites, initially detected in urine samples by enzyme-multiplied immunoassay (EMIT). These algorithms are based on the pattern of benzophenone derivatives of benzodiazepines obtained by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) with use of a modified specific ion selection mode. Benzophenone derivatives were produced by acid hydrolysis of urine samples containing benzodiazepines and (or) their metabolites. We present mass spectra of the newer benzodiazepines--alprazolam, midazolam, and triazolam--and we determined the detection limit (0.2 mg/L) for these drugs as measured with the EMIT d.a. u. benzodiazepine assay and the ETS instrument (both from Syva Co.). We conclude that these algorithms are useful mostly in forensic toxicology in which unequivocal identification of benzodiazepines is the desired goal.
Immersive teleoperation of a robot arm using electro-tactile feedback

Teleoperation can allow an operator to control a robot remotely in inaccessible and hostile places. To achieve more dexterous control of a tele-operated robot some researchers are developing user interfaces equipped with vision and tactile feedback. 3D visual perception and tactile feedback can also assist the operator to feel immersed in the robot's environment and embodied within the robot to some extent. Most existing tactile feedback systems use electro-mechanical actuators and linkages. However, these systems are complex, cumbersome and consequently make it difficult for the operator feel embodied within the robot. To improve on these drawbacks, this paper introduces an immersive teleoperation system comprised of a 3D stereo vision head set combined with an electro-tactile feedback system. Our electro-tactile feedback system is compact, nonmechanical and versatile. Experimental results are provided which show how this form of immersive 3D perception and tactile feedback system can enable the user to achieve more dexterous control of a robot arm by enabling the operator to effectively see what robot sees and experience what the robot feels while performing work with the robot.
Learning to Extract Keyphrases from Text

Many academic journals ask their authors to provide a list of about five to fifteen key words, to appear on the first page of each article. Since these key words are often phrases of two or more words, we prefer to call them keyphrases. There is a surprisingly wide variety of tasks for which keyphrases are useful, as we discuss in this paper. Recent commercial software, such as Microsoft? s Word 97 and Verity? s Search 97, includes algorithms that automatically extract keyphrases from documents. In this paper, we approach the problem of automatically extracting keyphrases from text as a supervised learning task. We treat a document as a set of phrases, which the learning algorithm must learn to classify as positive or negative examples of keyphrases. Our first set of experiments applies the C4.5 decision tree induction algorithm to this learning task. The second set of experiments applies the GenEx algorithm to the task. We developed the GenEx algorithm specifically for this task. The third set of experiments examines the performance of GenEx on the task of metadata generation, relative to the performance of Microsoft? s Word 97. The fourth and final set of experiments investigates the performance of GenEx on the task of highlighting, relative to Verity? s Search 97. The experimental results support the claim that a specialized learning algorithm (GenEx) can generate better keyphrases than a general-purpose learning algorithm (C4.5) and the non-learning algorithms that are used in commercial software (Word 97 and Search 97).