Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improved Guided Image Fusion for Magnetic Resonance and Computed Tomography Imaging

Improved guided image fusion for magnetic resonance and computed tomography imaging is proposed. Existing guided filtering scheme uses Gaussian filter and two-level weight maps due to which the scheme has limited performance for images having noise. Different modifications in filter (based on linear minimum mean square error estimator) and weight maps (with different levels) are proposed to overcome these limitations. Simulation results based on visual and quantitative analysis show the significance of proposed scheme.
Finger patterns and age of onset for the determination of the parent-of-origin in the transmission of schizophrenia

Summary: Dermatoglyphic traits which are reported to be largely determined by genes could be considered as phenotypic characterestics and if the same are expressed through generations in schizophrenic families it can be speculated to serve as genetic markers for schizophrenia. Another factor that might be influenced by genes is the age of onset of the illness in the offspring and the parent of origin. Objective: This study was aimed to elucidate the occurrence of identical finger patterns in the schizophrenic patients and their affected parents. The other objective was to assess the age of onset of the illness in them. Methods: Forty six schizophrenic patients in whom one of the parents was also affected with schizophrenia or related disorders were recruited. Of these pairs 29 were taken up for finger patterns analysis, with an equal number of control group pairs. 35 proband and parent pairs were investigated for the age of onset of the illness. Results: The frequency of occurrence of identical patterns in the right thumbs of proband and their affected mother pairs was significantly more than between the proband and their affected father pairs. Additionally, the number of identical patterns was also more in the right thumbs of proband and their affected mother pairs compared with the control group. The difference between the mean age of onset of the illness in the probands and their affected fathers was more than between the probands and their affected mothers. Conclusion: The genetic association of schizophrenic patients with the affected maternal side appear to be more stronger than with the paternal side.
Toward a Multi-Analyst, Collaborative Framework for Visual Analytics

We describe a framework for the display of complex, multidimensional data, designed to facilitate exploration, analysis, and collaboration among multiple analysts. This framework aims to support human collaboration by making it easier to share representations, to translate from one point of view to another, to explain arguments, to update conclusions when underlying assumptions change, and to justify or account for decisions or actions. Multidimensional visualization techniques are used with interactive, context-sensitive, and tunable graphs. Visual representations are flexibly generated using a knowledge representation scheme based on annotated logic; this enables not only tracking and fusing different viewpoints, but also unpacking them. Fusing representations supports the creation of multidimensional meta-displays as well as the translation or mapping from one point of view to another. At the same time, analysts also need to be able to unpack one another's complex chains of reasoning, especially if they have reached different conclusions, and to determine the implications, if any, when underlying assumptions or evidence turn out to be false. The framework enables us to support a variety of scenarios as well as to systematically generate and test experimental hypotheses about the impact of different kinds of visual representations upon interactive collaboration by teams of distributed analysts
Multipoint K‐space point mapping (KPM) technique for NMR microscopy

An extended version of point mapping in k‐space for microscopic imaging applications is analyzed and described. Because the method can offer a number of advantages over the other conventional techniques due to the short echo time (TE), the technique is ideally suited for microscopic imaging where field in homogeneity dependent signal degradation is one of the main causes of image resolution degradation (1–3). Another application area is the case of imaging in a highly inhomogeneous situation such as the fringe field imaging (Z.H. Cho, E. Wong, US. Patent) #5023554 (1990). The first original point mapping technique described by Nauert et al. (1) and Emid and Creyghton (2) is analyzed as a k‐space point mapping technique, and the original technique is extended to a multipoint k‐space point mapping (MKPM) technique. With the extended MKPM technique, much faster microscopic imaging that is free of susceptibility and diffusion effects can be performed (4–6). To examine this idea, computer simulations are performed and their results are given.
Summary of the discussion: trauma registry data and TRISS evidence.

I appreciate the opportunity to participate in this symposium and the invitation to serve on a panel presentation with Jerry Jurkovich, Charlie Mock, and Howard Champion. My comments will focus on several issues that we have begun to address today and several topics that need to be incorporated into our deliberations. First, the difficult methodologic issues already raised in our symposium on preventable trauma death studies and trauma registries are not unique to studies of trauma care effectiveness. An overriding concern throughout health care is how to better establish an evidence base for health services provided and how to establish this evidence within existing budgets. Enormous gaps persist in our capacity to study health care processes and outcomes. Mark Pauly, a health economist at the Wharton School, has summarized the general problem: "Current techniques for measuring appropriateness and effectiveness of care are deficient in the sense of not accurately measuring initial severity, not capturing the full spectrum . of outcomes, and not being based on good statistical methodologies. "1 That we lack definitive measures of trauma system effectiveness is not surprising. What would be surprising is if such measures were readily available.
Acknowledging Rural Disadvantage in Mental Health: Views of Peer Workers

PURPOSE The aim of this article was to present views and opinions of people employed to work from their personal experience of significant mental health challenges (peer workers). The specific focus was on their capacity to contribute meaningfully to mental health service provision and in rural areas and associated barriers. DESIGN AND METHODS Grounded Theory was the methodology utilized. In-depth interviews were conducted with peer workers throughout Australia. FINDINGS Participants described significant barriers to the provision of quality mental health services in rural and regional locations. The two main areas identified were the following: transport and distance, and lack of mental health staff and services. CONCLUSIONS The identified barriers place limitations on the capacity of peer workers to maximize effectiveness in rural settings. Peer workers could potentially play an important role in overcoming shortages of staff and services and improving mental health service delivery.
Association Between Unemployment Duration and Depression in the SouthWest Region of Turkey: A Cross-Sectional Study

ABSTRACT Unemployment has risen as an effect of globalization in the country of Turkey. To date, no studies have examined the association between the duration of unemployment and perceived mental health. Therefore, the aim of this study is to evaluate the association between the duration of unemployment and the incidenence of depression among citizens in the southwest region of Turkey. A questionnaire was developed and distributed to 908 unemployed individuals. The questionnaire gathered sociodemographic characteristics and employment-related circumstances. To measure mental health, a depression inventory was administered and group-wise t-tests and logistic regressions were conducted. The findings show that long-term unemployed persons had more episodes of depressive moods in the past 12 months when compared with the group of the short-term unemployed. In addition, depression levels were higher among the long-term unemployed compared with the short-term unemployed. It was estimated that the duration of unemployment and the measurement of depression had a positive correlation. Risk factors that increased depression in the short-term unemployed were gender (female), older age, and greater periods of unemployment. However, higher education, income, and having social insurance significantly decreased the risk of developing depression for both the short-term and the long-term unemployed. Future recommendations include supportive counseling to increase motivation levels and developing strategies to handle periods of unemployment.
A Fixed Low Complexity Message Pass Algorithm Detector for Up-Link SCMA System

Sparse code multiple access (SCMA) is a new modulation and non-orthogonal multiple access scheme for 5G systems, in which the coded bits are mapped to multi-dimensional sparse codewords, and the message passing algorithm (MPA) is employed to detect multi-user signals. However, the relative high computational complexity of MPA detection is still a big concern for practical implementation, even the sparse structure has already been employed. In this letter, a novel fixed low complexity detector for uplink SCMA system is proposed, based on partial marginalization (PM). Our analysis and simulation results show that, compared with the existing MPA detector, the implementation complexity of the new PM-based detector is reduced substantially, while the bit error ratio (BER) performance degrades unnoticeably (less than 0.3 dB).
Beyond Natural Numbers: Negative Number Representation in Parietal Cortex

Unlike natural numbers, negative numbers do not have natural physical referents. How does the brain represent such abstract mathematical concepts? Two competing hypotheses regarding representational systems for negative numbers are a rule-based model, in which symbolic rules are applied to negative numbers to translate them into positive numbers when assessing magnitudes, and an expanded magnitude model, in which negative numbers have a distinct magnitude representation. Using an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging design, we examined brain responses in 22 adults while they performed magnitude comparisons of negative and positive numbers that were quantitatively near (difference <4) or far apart (difference >6). Reaction times (RTs) for negative numbers were slower than positive numbers, and both showed a distance effect whereby near pairs took longer to compare. A network of parietal, frontal, and occipital regions were differentially engaged by negative numbers. Specifically, compared to positive numbers, negative number processing resulted in greater activation bilaterally in intraparietal sulcus (IPS), middle frontal gyrus, and inferior lateral occipital cortex. Representational similarity analysis revealed that neural responses in the IPS were more differentiated among positive numbers than among negative numbers, and greater differentiation among negative numbers was associated with faster RTs. Our findings indicate that despite negative numbers engaging the IPS more strongly, the underlying neural representation are less distinct than that of positive numbers. We discuss our findings in the context of the two theoretical models of negative number processing and demonstrate how multivariate approaches can provide novel insights into abstract number representation.
The presentation of police in everyday life: Police–press relations, impression management and the Leveson Inquiry

In 2012 the Leveson Inquiry investigated relations between the police and the press, examining the routine systems and processes of police–press relations in the UK and, more specifically, the conduct of senior Metropolitan Police Service officers during an investigation into phone-hacking (Operation Caryatid). The Inquiry is notable in that it shone a light on a normally hidden policing function; it brought the backstage processes of police–media relations, part of police ‘image work’, to the frontstage area. This article considers the Leveson Inquiry and the data it collected as a case study of police impression management; it examines how the police sought to manage impressions about how they manage impressions. It takes a dramaturgical approach drawing on the work of Erving Goffman and Peter K Manning, combined with impression management concepts drawn from management and organisational studies. The article concludes that the identified impression management tactics used by different police ‘teams’ combined to protect the collective police image and to reinforce, for the present, the dominant position of the police in their relationship with the press.
Initial Validation of the Spanish Childhood Trauma Questionnaire-Short Form

The present study examines the internal consistency and factor structure of the Spanish version of the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire-Short Form (CTQ-SF) and the association between the CTQ-SF subscales and parenting style. Cronbach’s α and confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) were performed in a female clinical sample (n = 185). Kendall’s ι correlations were calculated between the maltreatment and parenting scales in a subsample of 109 patients. The Spanish CTQ-SF showed adequate psychometric properties and a good fit of the 5-factor structure. The neglect and abuse scales were negatively associated with parental care and positively associated with overprotection scales. The results of this study provide initial support for the reliability and validity of the Spanish CTQ-SF.
Gonadotropin releasing hormone stimulation of cultured pituitary cells requires calcium.

The requirement for Ca2+ during luteinizing hormone (LH) release stimulated by gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) was studied in dispersed cultured rat pituicytes. With maximal GnRH stimulation, LH release required 1 mM Ca2+ for optimal stimulation, although basal production was not calcium dependent. Stimulated release was inhibited when cells were incubated in media lacking Ca2+, and by LaCl3 (a potent inhibitor of Ca2+ action) which inhibited GnRH-induced LH release in the presence of Ca2+. The requirement for Ca2+ is specific, since Mg2+ is not as effective, even at elevated concentrations. Two agents that block Ca2+ movement into and within cells, Ruthenium Red and D-600 (methoxy-verapamil), also blocked the release of LH from stimulated pituicytes. The present results demonstrate a specific dependence on calcium for GnRH stimulation of LH release from cultured gonadotrophs. Our observations satisfy some of the criteria require for a postulated role of Ca2+ in stimulus-secretion coupling in this system.
Google-based Information Extraction Finding

We discuss a method to extract information from text fragments found with a search engine. We populate an ontology using handcrafted domain-specific relation patterns and a class-dependent rules to recognize instances of the classes. The algorithm uses the instances for one class found in the Google excerpts to find instances of other classes. The work is illustrated by two case studies. The first involves the population of an ontology in the movie domain. The second is a search for famous people and the collection of their biographical entries such as nationality and profession.
Excitation Current Forecasting for Reactive Power Compensation in Synchronous Motors: A Data Mining Approach

Excitation current of a synchronous motor has a key role in reactive power compensation. For this purpose, the k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) classifier designed in this paper predicts the excitation current parameter using n-tupled inputs. Load current, power factor, power factor error and the change of excitation current parameters were utilized in n-tupled inputs. Moreover, Euclidean, Manhattan and Minkowski distance metrics were employed for measuring the closeness among the observations and the nearest neighbor number k was assigned as 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, respectively. The forecasting results have shown that the k-NN classifier which uses power factor and the change of excitation current parameters achieved the best forecasting accuracy for k=1 in Minkowski distance metric. However, the k-NN classifier which uses load current, power factor and power factor error parameters gave the worst forecasting accuracy for k=5 in Minkowski distance metric.
Runtime Enforcement of Security Policies on Black Box Reactive Programs

Security enforcement mechanisms like execution monitors are used to make sure that some untrusted program complies with a policy. Different enforcement mechanisms have different strengths and weaknesses and hence it is important to understand the qualities of various enforcement mechanisms. This paper studies runtime enforcement mechanisms for reactive programs. We study the impact of two important constraints that many practical enforcement mechanisms satisfy: (1) the enforcement mechanism must handle each input/output event in finite time and on occurrence of the event (as opposed to for instance Ligatti's edit automata that have the power to buffer events for an arbitrary amount of time), and (2) the enforcement mechanism treats the untrusted program as a black box: it can monitor and/or edit the input/output events that the program exhibits on execution and it can explore alternative executions of the program by running additional copies of the program and providing these different inputs. It can not inspect the source or machine code of the untrusted program. Such enforcement mechanisms are important in practice: they include for instance many execution monitors, virtual machine monitors, and secure multi-execution or shadow executions. We establish upper and lower bounds for the class of policies that are enforceable by such black box mechanisms, and we propose a generic enforcement mechanism that works for a wide range of policies. We also show how our generic enforcement mechanism can be instantiated to enforce specific classes of policies, at the same time showing that many existing enforcement mechanisms are optimized instances of our construction.
α-Synuclein inclusions in the skin of Parkinson's disease and parkinsonism

The presence in the brain of α‐synuclein containing Lewy neurites, or bodies, is the histological hallmark of Parkinson's disease (PD). The discovery of α‐synuclein aggregates in nerve endings of the heart, digestive tract, and skin has lent support to the concept of PD as a systemic disease. Our goals were, first, to demonstrate the presence of α‐synuclein inclusions in the skin and, second, to detect quantitative differences between patients with PD and atypical parkinsonism (AP).
Adoptive Immunotherapy With CMV-specific Cytotoxic T Lymphocytes for Stem Cell Transplant Patients With Refractory CMV Infections

Adoptive immunotherapy with cytomegalovirus (CMV)-specific cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL) is an effective strategy for preventing and treating viral reactivation after allogeneic stem cell transplantation (SCT). We have shown previously that CMV CTL can be generated in 1 to 2 weeks by stimulating donor lymphocytes with peptide mixes derived from full-length pp65 and IE1. We conducted a multi-institutional study of CMV-specific CTL for patients with persistent or anti–viral-resistant CMV infections after allogeneic SCT, to determine the safety, feasibility, and immunologic effects of this approach. We were successful in stimulating CTL from 10/10 donors with pooled CMV overlapping peptide mixes. Five of the 7 subjects who met infusion criteria had new onset CMV-specific CTL activity detected within 4 to 6 weeks after infusion. Of the 2 subjects who did not have immunologic responses after infusion, 1 received CTL with a low viability after thawing, and the other patient received cyclosporine A and systemic corticosteroids at the time of the infusion, achieving only a low, transient increase (10%) in pp65-specific activity. There was no graft-versus-host disease attributable to these infusions. These findings indicate that the infusion of CTL stimulated over 1 to 2 weeks with overlapping CMV peptides can result in virus-specific immune reconstitution in SCT recipients, without exacerbations of graft-versus-host disease.
Automated Detection of Mentors and Players in an Educational Game

Automatically identifying the various roles (e.g., mentor, player) in multi-party collaborative chat is a challenging task. To better understand the conversational demands of mentors and players, this paper investigates the dynamics and linguistic features of multi-party chat in the context of an online educational game. In this paper we introduce a novel computational linguistics method using a machine learning algorithm to automatically classify utterances of players and mentors in a serious game, where players act as interns in an urban planning firm and discuss their ideas about urban planning and environmental science in written natural language. Our results are promising and our model can be extended to any multi-party environment that leaders (Mentors) are needed to be distinguished based on their conversation.
Managing collective trauma on social media: the role of Twitter after the 2011 Norway attacks

This study analyses the meaning-making discourse on Twitter in the 6 days following the 2011 Norway attacks. The attacks in Oslo and on the island of Utøya resulted in 77 deaths, of which 69 were youths on Utøya, where a summer camp arranged by the Norwegian Social Democratic youth organisation Arbeidernes Ungdomsfylking (AUF) was being held. The main discursive themes in the material were found to be focused on the Norwegian nation, expressions of solidarity, the meaning and outcomes of the attacks, as well as details of the attacks themselves. These themes were of changing importance over the 6 days following the attacks, as discussions concerning the Norwegian nation and the attacks themselves dropped rapidly in favour of negotiating the explanations behind the attacks. Twitter was shown to be useful for providing backchannel discourse negotiations that were separate from the mass media discourse concerning the attacks.
Zero-Voltage Switching Two-Transformer Full-Bridge PWM Converter With Lossless Diode-Clamp Rectifier for PDP Sustain Power Module

This paper presents a zero-voltage switching (ZVS) two-transformer full-bridge (TTFB) pulsewidth modulation (PWM) converter with lossless diode-clamp rectifier for a plasma display panel sustaining power module (PSPM). The TTFB converter has series-connected two transformers which act as an output inductor as well as a main transformer. Although the naturally doubled leakage inductor due to the series-connected two transformers contributes to achieve the ZVS of the lagging leg, it creates a serious voltage ringing across the output rectifier diodes. This results in the heavy voltage stresses across the rectifier diodes. Thus the dissipative snubber circuits are required in spite of the severe power dissipation. To overcome these problems, a new lossless diode-clamp rectifier (LDCR) is employed as the output rectifier, which helps the voltage across rectifier diodes to be clamped at one half the output voltage (Vo/2) or a full output voltage (Vo). Therefore, no dissipative snubber circuits for the rectifier diodes are needed and a high efficiency as well as a low noise output voltage can be realized. In addition, the clamping capacitors of the LDCR can help considerably to reduce the primary circulating current. The operations, analysis, and design consideration of proposed converter are presented. Also, a 425-W, 385-Vdc input, 170-Vdc output prototype is constructed and experimental results show the validity of the proposed converter