Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparability of cause of death between ICD-9 and ICD-10: preliminary estimates.

OBJECTIVES This report presents preliminary results describing the effects of implementing the Tenth Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) on mortality statistics for selected causes of death effective with deaths occurring in the United States in 1999. The report also describes major features of the Tenth Revision (ICD-10), including changes from the Ninth Revision (ICD-9) in classification and rules for selecting underlying causes of death. Application of comparability ratios is also discussed. METHODS The report is based on cause-of-death information from a large sample of 1996 death certificates filed in the 50 States and the District of Columbia. Cause-of-death information in the sample includes underlying cause of death classified by both ICD-9 and ICD-10. Because the data file on which comparability information is derived is incomplete, results are preliminary. RESULTS Preliminary comparability ratios by cause of death presented in this report indicate the extent of discontinuities in cause-of-death trends from 1998 through 1999 resulting from implementing ICD-10. For some leading causes (e.g., Septicemia, Influenza and pneumonia, Alzheimer's disease, and Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome and nephrosis), the discontinuity in trend is substantial. The ranking of leading causes of death is also substantially affected for some causes of death. CONCLUSIONS Results of this study, although preliminary, are essential to analyzing trends in mortality between ICD-9 and ICD-10. In particular, the results provide a means for interpreting changes between 1998, which is the last year in which ICD-9 was used, and 1999, the year in which ICD-10 was implemented for mortality in the United States.
Cessation of Dreaming and Ventromesial Frontal-region Infarcts

Freud attributed the primary instigator of dreaming to the “libidinal drive” in his theory. Research support for this classical psychoanalytic theory was provided in Solms’s clinico-anatomical studies. He found that damage to the ventromesial frontal pathway caused both global cessation of dreaming and a reduction in motivated behaviour. However, most of the patients in Solms’s clinical series were cases of tumor and diffuse injury. These conditions rendered the localization work difficult and imprecise. In view of this, the present study investigated the association between dream cessation and lesions to the ventromesial frontal region in patients who were diagnosed with infarctions. Solms’s findings were largely replicated. In addition, results from the present study indicated that compared to the other neural components in the ventromesial frontal pathway, the role of the caudate nucleus appeared to be particularly salient in the functional architecture of dreaming.
The Use of Points as a Display Primitive

As the visual complexity of computer generated scenes continues to increase, the use of classical modeling primitives as display primitives becomes less appealing. Customization of display algorithms, the conflict between object order and image order rendering and the reduced usefulness of object coherence in the presence of extreme complexity are all contributing factors. This paper proposes to decouple the modeling geometry from the rendering process by introducing the notion of points as a universal meta-primitive. We first demonstrate that a discrete array of points arbitrarily displaced in space using a tabular array of perturbations can be rendered as a continuous three-dimensional surface. This solves the longstanding problem of producing correct silhouette edges for bump mapped textures. We then demonstrate that a wide class of geometrically defined objects, including both flat and curved surfaces, can be converted into points. The conversion can proceed in object order, facilitating the display of procedurally defined objects. The rendering algorithm is simple and requires no coherence in order to be efficient. It will also be shown that the points may be rendered in random order, leading to several interesting and unexpected applications of the technique.
Privacy preserving social graphs for high precision community detection

Discovering communities from a social network requires publishing the social network's data. However, community detection from raw data of a social network may reveal many sensitive information of the involved parties, e.g., how much a user is involved in which communities. An individual may not want to reveal such sensitive information. To resolve this issue, we address the problem of privacy preserving community detection in social networks. More specifically, we want to ensure that community detection is possible from the published social graph/data but the identity of users involved in a community should not be disclosed.
Requirements for integrating software architecture and reengineering models: CORUM II

This paper discusses the requirements and a generic framework for the integration of architectural and code-based reengineering tools. This framework is needed because there is a large number of stand-alone reengineering tools that operate at different levels of abstraction ranging from "code-level" to software architecture. For the purposes of reengineering a complete system however, these tools need to be able to share information so that not only can the code be updated or corrected, but also the system's software architecture can be simultaneously rationalized or modernized. To this end, we have built upon the CORUM model of reengineering tool interoperation to include software architecture concepts and tools. This extended framework-called CORUM II-is organized around the metaphor of a "horseshoe", where the left-hand side of the horseshoe consists of fact extraction from an existing system, the right hand side consists of development activities, and the bridge between the sides consists of a set of transformations from the old to the new.
Cyclic AMP‐mediated induction of the glial fibrillary acidic protein is independent of protein kinase A activation in rat C6 glioma

N6‐O′2‐dibutyryl cAMP (dbcAMP), N6‐monobutyryl cAMP (N6‐mbcAMP), 8‐Chloro cAMP (ClcAMP), and O′2‐monobutyryl cAMP (O′2‐mbcAMP) were used to study glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) induction in rat C6 glioma. With the exception of O′2‐mbcAMP, these cAMP analogs induced GFAP after stimulation of cells with a concentration of 0.5‐1 mM. Only dbcAMP and N6‐mbcAMP increased the intracellular concentration of cAMP. Protein kinase A (PKA) activation is often proposed to be involved in GFAP expression in astrocytes. Ion‐exchange chromatography indicated that protein kinase activity is associated with PKA type II in C6. dbcAMP, N6‐mbcAMP, and ClcAMP upregulated the amount of cAMP‐binding proteins approximately twofold. RI was upregulated in the cytosol and particulate fraction, whereas RII was not affected after stimulation with dbcAMP. Concomitant, the PKA activity decreased approximately 60% and 40% in the cytosol and particulate fraction, respectively. CREB is constitutively expressed in C6 and is downregulated after stimulation with dbcAMP.
Consistency as a Service: Auditing Cloud Consistency

Cloud storage services have become commercially popular due to their overwhelming advantages. To provide ubiquitous always-on access, a cloud service provider (CSP) maintains multiple replicas for each piece of data on geographically distributed servers. A key problem of using the replication technique in clouds is that it is very expensive to achieve strong consistency on a worldwide scale. In this paper, we first present a novel consistency as a service (CaaS) model, which consists of a large data cloud and multiple small audit clouds. In the CaaS model, a data cloud is maintained by a CSP, and a group of users that constitute an audit cloud can verify whether the data cloud provides the promised level of consistency or not. We propose a two-level auditing architecture, which only requires a loosely synchronized clock in the audit cloud. Then, we design algorithms to quantify the severity of violations with two metrics: the commonality of violations, and the staleness of the value of a read. Finally, we devise a heuristic auditing strategy (HAS) to reveal as many violations as possible. Extensive experiments were performed using a combination of simulations and real cloud deployments to validate HAS.
Effects of ischemia-like conditions on cultured neurons: protection by low Na+, low Ca2+ solutions

An in vitro system was used to mimic several aspects of ischemia, including low oxygen pressure, low nutrient levels, and the accumulation of cellular products thought to contribute to damage during ischemia. We replaced normal culture medium from 3-week-old basal ganglia cultures with oxygen-depleted, nutrient-deficient medium. After incubation in an atmosphere of 94% N2, 6% CO2 for 5 hr at 37 degrees C, the cultures were returned to normal medium. After a 24 hr recovery period, cell viability was assessed in terms of cell number, electrophysiological properties, and immunohistochemical markers. When the medium used during the ischemic period was a normal balanced salt solution, more than 70% of the cells were damaged by the low-oxygen, low-glucose stress. Loss of cell processes and cell swelling were the most evident signs of damage. The majority of the cells remaining viable were astrocytes. Neuronal damage was observed only when both glucose and oxygen were deficient. Some damage was evident even at oxygen tensions of 60 mm Hg when glucose was absent from the medium; much more extensive damage was observed at tensions below 1.0 mm Hg. Lowering both extracellular sodium and calcium resulted in more than a 2-fold increase in survival (70 vs 28%). These results indicate that damage to neurons during conditions of extreme energy deprivation such as ischemia may be mediated by the influx of calcium and/or sodium.
The Shafarevich-Tate group in cyclotomic Z_p-extensions at supersingular primes

We study the asymptotic growth of the p-primary component of the Shafarevich-Tate group in the cyclotomic direction at any odd prime of good supersingular reduction, generalizing work of Kobayashi. This explains formulas obtained by Kurihara, Perrin-Riou, and Nasybullin in terms of Iwasawa invariants of modified Selmer groups.
Effect of weight, sleep duration, and comorbid sleep disorders on behavioral outcomes in children with sleep-disordered breathing.

OBJECTIVE To assess the relative contribution of potential risk factors for adverse neurobehavioral outcomes in children referred for evaluation of sleep-disordered breathing (SDB), including weight, mean sleep duration, and comorbid sleep disorders. DESIGN Medical record review. SETTING Academic pediatric medical center. PARTICIPANTS Clinical sample of 235 children aged 3 to 18 years undergoing overnight polysomnography for symptoms of SDB. OUTCOME MEASURES History of behavioral, emotional, and academic problems and Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) scores. RESULTS More than half (56%) of the sample was overweight or at risk for overweight, more than one-third (36%) was classified as being short sleepers, and almost half (49%) had at least 1 additional sleep diagnosis. Forty-seven percent had a history of behavioral problems and 23% had a reported diagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. There were no significant differences in CBCL scores based on any measure of SDB disease severity. Increased weight was associated with increased internalizing CBCL scores in a dose-dependent fashion (P = .003), while short sleepers were more likely to have elevated externalizing scores (P < .001). Overall, the strongest predictor of adverse behavioral outcomes was the presence of at least 1 additional sleep diagnosis (P < .001). CONCLUSIONS The relationship between SDB and parent-reported behavioral outcomes in children is complex. In addition to SDB-related impairments, clinicians should consider the relative contributions of being overweight, insufficient sleep, and comorbid sleep disorders when assessing behavior in these children.
Deriving Actionable Insights from Research Funding Portfolios through Interactive Data Visualizations

Characterizing the existing funding portfolio of any federal agency becomes difficult due to the number, complexity, and diversity of funded projects and associated metadata. Deep Insights Anywhere, Anytime (DIA2) is a new platform that makes it easy to access and understand funding portfolios. Providing insights to determine the impact of any funded project can be challenging, especially in terms of qualifying the return on investment of the research activity. This paper presents results of assessing DIA2’s usability and explains how DIA2 can provide meaningful representations that contribute to determining the impact of a research portfolio. The results show that DIA2 has good usability. Further, participants identified several indicators of impact as a result of the visualizations that can be realized through DIA2.
Fast disparity estimation for Multi-view plus depth video coding

Disparity estimation is used in Multi-view Video Coding (MVC) to remove the inter-view redundancies present in both color and depth multi-view video sequences. The standard H.264/MVC achieves high compression efficiency by deriving the optimal disparity vector through the exhaustive calculation of the Rate-Distortion cost function for all the possible search points. This makes disparity estimation highly computational expensive. This paper proposes an efficient technique that exploits both the multi-view and the epipolar geometries to determine the optimal search area, resulting in a reduction of search points and thus computations. Simulation results show that this technique can save up to 95% of the computational cost for disparity estimation, with negligible loss in coding efficiency for both the color and the depth multi-view video coding.
Initialization-Insensitive Visual Tracking through Voting with Salient Local Features

In this paper we propose an object tracking method in case of inaccurate initializations. To track objects accurately in such situation, the proposed method uses "motion saliency" and "descriptor saliency" of local features and performs tracking based on generalized Hough transform (GHT). The proposed motion saliency of a local feature emphasizes features having distinctive motions, compared to the motions which are not from the target object. The descriptor saliency emphasizes features which are likely to be of the object in terms of its feature descriptors. Through these saliencies, the proposed method tries to "learn and find" the target object rather than looking for what was given at initialization, giving robust results even with inaccurate initializations. Also, our tracking result is obtained by combining the results of each local feature of the target and the surroundings with GHT voting, thus is robust against severe occlusions as well. The proposed method is compared against nine other methods, with nine image sequences, and hundred random initializations. The experimental results show that our method outperforms all other compared methods.
Scheduling algorithm considering response time for mixed tasks on multiprocessor systems

The purpose of this paper is to study the scheduling problem of mixed task sets on multiprocessor systems. We propose a scheduling framework to improve the average response time of aperiodic jobs in mixed tasks. Our proposed scheduling framework consists of two phases: In the first phase, we considers how to assign each periodic task to a proper processor by different task allocation heuristics. Then, on a processor the unused capacity left by periodic tasks is set as the size of the Total Bandwidth (TB) Server. In the second phase, at run time when an aperiodic job arrives in the system, it will be assigned to a proper TB Server with the minimal virtual deadline and scheduled with periodic jobs on the same processor under Earliest Deadline First (EDF). A series of experiments were conducted to evaluate the proposed framework.
Relationship between the serum alanine aminotransferase level at the end of interferon treatment and histologic changes in wild‐type and precore mutant hepatitis B virus infections

Summary Unravelling the role of interferon (IFN) in the treatment of chronic hepatitis B is complicated by many factors. Several mutant forms of hepatitis B virus (HBV) have recently been discovered; the most common of these is the precore mutant, characterized by hepatitis Be antigen (HBeAg) negativity and hepatitis Be antibody (HBeAb) positivity in an individual with an active HBV infection. The aim of this study was to compare the response rate to IFN therapy in patients with wild‐type HBV infection and in individuals infected with the precore mutant. A second aim was to evaluate the role of an increased serum ferritin in terms of the IFN response rate in these two different types of HBV infection.
A fully abstract game semantics for general references

A games model of a programming language with higher-order store in the style of ML-references is introduced. The category used for the model is obtained by relaxing certain behavioural conditions on a category of games previously used to provide fully abstract models of pure functional languages. The model is shown to be fully abstract by means of factorization arguments which reduce the question of definability for the language with higher-order store to that for its purely functional fragment.
The Dynamics of Service: Reflections on the Changing Nature of Customer/Provider Interactions.

1. The Service Revolution: From Relationships to Encounters 2. Service Through Relationships: Creating Bonds of Trust 3. Service Through Encounters: Ensuring Speed, Efficiency, and Uniformity 4. Key Distinctions Between Relationships and Encounters 5. The Provider's Perspective 6. The Customer's Perspective 7. The Organization's Role: Creating the Context for Customer/Provider Interaction 8. The Pseudorelationship: Making Encounters Feel More Personal 9. Information Technology as Partner and Provider: Buying Services with the Help of Machines 10. Relationships, Encounters, and the Quality of Life 11. Implications for the Future
The spiritual experience index : Revision and reformulation

An expanded analysis of the original Spiritual Experience Index yielded two distinct dimensions. The item groupings with the highest factor loadings were identified as the Spiritual Support and the Spiritual Openness subscales. The analysis provided preliminary evidence for the internal consistency and construct validity of SS and SO. The possibilities of using scale scores on both dimensions to categorize individuals into four spiritual types were also explored.
Minimum mean brightness error bi-histogram equalization in contrast enhancement

Histogram equalization (HE) is widely used for contrast enhancement. However, it tends to change the brightness of an image and hence, not suitable for consumer electronic products, where preserving the original brightness is essential to avoid annoying artifacts. Bi-histogram equalization (BBHE) has been proposed and analyzed mathematically that it can preserve the original brightness to a certain extends. However, there are still cases that are not handled well by BBHE, as they require higher degree of preservation. This paper proposes a novel extension of BBHE referred to as minimum mean brightness error bi-histogram equalization (MMBEBHE) to provide maximum brightness preservation. BBHE separates the input image's histogram into two based on input mean before equalizing them independently. This paper proposes to perform the separation based on the threshold level, which would yield minimum absolute mean brightness error (AMBE - the absolute difference between input and output mean). An efficient recursive integer-based computation for AMBE has been formulated to facilitate real time implementation. Simulation results using sample image which represent images with very low, very high and medium mean brightness show that the cases which are not handled well by HE, BBHE and dualistic sub image histogram equalization (DSIHE), can be properly enhanced by MMBEBHE. Besides, MMBEBHE also demonstrate comparable performance with BBHE and DSIHE when come to use the sample images show in [Yeong-Taeg Kim, February 1997] and [Yu Wan et al., October 5 1999].
Alkaline agarose gel electrophoresis.

INTRODUCTION Alkaline agarose gels are run at a pH that is sufficiently high to denature double-stranded DNA. The denatured DNA is maintained in a single-stranded state and migrates through the alkaline gel as a function of its size. Alkaline agarose gels are used chiefly to measure the size of first and second strands of cDNA (Construction of cDNA Libraries Stage 1: Synthesis of First-strand cDNA Catalyzed by Reverse Transcriptase) and to analyze the size of the DNA strand after digestion of DNA-RNA hybrids with nucleases such as S1.
Towards an Understanding of Australia’s Co-movement with Foreign Business Cycles

This paper identifies two transmission mechanisms which might contribute to explaining the well-documented correlation between Australian and foreign business cycles. The first is through exports. We find that the US and Japan have a high output elasticity of demand for Australia’s exports. Consequently, their business cycles have a larger impact on Australia’s exports than that suggested by their market shares. The second mechanism is through the share market. Both the US and Australian share markets appear to have a significant impact on Australian activity. Evidence is also found that the responses of investment to the share market in the two countries are remarkably similar. Given that the share markets are highly correlated, the similarity in response lags may help to explain the correlation in business cycles.
A new approach to grading and treating COPD based on clinical phenotypes: summary of the Spanish COPD guidelines (GesEPOC)

After the development of the COPD Strategy of the National Health Service in Spain, all scientific societies, patient organisations, and central and regional governments formed a partnership to enhance care and research in COPD. At the same time, the Spanish Society of Pneumology and Thoracic Surgery (SEPAR) took the initiative to convene the various scientific societies involved in the National COPD Strategy and invited them to participate in the development of the new Spanish guidelines for COPD (Guía Española de la EPOC; GesEPOC). Probably the more innovative approach of GesEPOC is to base treatment of stable COPD on clinical phenotypes, a term which has become increasingly used in recent years to refer to the different clinical forms of COPD with different prognostic implications. The proposed phenotypes are: (A) infrequent exacerbators with either chronic bronchitis or emphysema; (B) overlap COPD-asthma; (C) frequent exacerbators with emphysema predominant; and (D) frequent exacerbators with chronic bronchitis predominant. The assessment of severity has also been updated with the incorporation of multidimensional indices. The severity of the obstruction, as measured by forced expiratory volume in 1 second, is essential but not sufficient. Multidimensional indices such as the BODE index have shown excellent prognostic value. If the 6-minute walking test is not performed routinely, its substitution by the frequency of exacerbations (BODEx index) provides similar prognostic properties. This proposal aims to achieve a more personalised management of COPD according to the clinical characteristics and multidimensional assessment of severity.