Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparative Assessment of Toxicities of Mainstream Smoke from Commercial Cigarettes

Three cigarette types were compared using an experimental approach for quantifying selected toxicological effects of diluted fresh whole cigarette mainstream smoke in vitro. The test procedure involved automatic smoking of cigarettes according to the FTC/ISO standard, online monitoring of generated smoke aerosols with respect to particulate and gas-phase components, and direct exposure of a human type II-like lung cell line (A549) using exposure conditions relevant to human smoking. Test specimens were the K1R4F standard research cigarettes (9.2 mg tar/cigarette) and two commercial European light filter cigarettes (brand 1, brand 2) having the same tar content (7.0 mg/cigarette). As a representative of the toxicological effect of smoke, intracellular reduced glutathione was analyzed directly after exposure of cells. Results revealed statistically significant different quantitative effects with regard to glutathione depletion when comparing whole smoke and filtered smoke from all three cigarettes. ED50 values revealed a depletion of reduced glutathione by brand 1 cigarettes that was more than twice the depletion caused by brand 2 cigarettes on a per cigarette basis. Also, quantitatively different effects were found on a per particle and on a per CO concentration basis using whole or filtered smoke from the cigarettes. We conclude that the methods we employed provide sensitive and reproducible ways of detecting differences in the toxicological action of smoke from various types of cigarettes.
Assessment of the ventricular-arterial coupling in obese patients with normal ejection fraction

Obesity is a major health problem worldwide, with important economic and social effects. Obesity affects cardiovascular and respiratory systems directly. In this paper, after presenting a noninvasive indicator of contractility, based on the clinical echocardiografic measurements, a computer model (implemented in Simulink) based on the simplified circuit of the cardiovascular model is used, taking into account the ventriculo-arterial coupling. The simulation results, and clinical tests expresses of a good correlation of the chosen noninvasive indicator of contractility with body mass index and the single-beat elastance in obese patients.
The emerging role of biomarkers and bio-impedance in evaluating hydration status in patients with acute heart failure

Abstract The quantitative and qualitative estimation of total body fluid content has proven to be crucial for both diagnosis and prognosis assessment in patients with heart failure. The aim of this review is to summarize the current techniques for assessing body hydration status as well as the principal biomarkers associated with acute heart failure (AHF). Although clinical history, physical examination and classical imaging techniques (e.g., standard radiography and echocardiography) still represent the cornerstones, novel and promising tools, such as biomarkers and bio-electrical impedance are achieving an emerging role in clinical practice for the assessment of total body fluid content. In the acute setting, the leading advantages of these innovative methods over device are represented by the much lower invasiveness and the reasonable costs, coupled with an easier and faster application. This article is mainly focused on AHF patients, not only because the overall prevalence of this disease is dramatically increasing worldwide, but also because it is well-known that their fluid overload has a remarkable diagnostic and prognostic significance. It is thereby conceivable that the bio-electrical vector analysis (BIVA) coupled with laboratory biomarkers might achieve much success in AHF patient management in the future, especially for assisting diagnosis, risk stratification, and therapeutic decision-making.
A Case of Acute Myeloid Leukemia (FAB M2) with Inversion 16 Who Presented with Pelvic Myeloid Sarcoma

Acute leukemias are the most common childhood cancer in all age groups. Acute myeloid leukemias (AML) constitute about 15–20% of acute leukemias. Fatigability, pallor, fever, and bleeding are the most common presenting symptoms of AML. Hepatosplenomegaly and lymphadenopathy are commonly encountered during physical examination. In rare instances eruptions due to skin involvement and localized tumor masses (myeloid sarcoma) may be found. Myeloid sarcoma is especially seen in AML-M2 subtype. By cytogenetic analysis, in AML-M2 subtype t(8;21) is often seen and it is more probable to find inversion 16 in AML-M4Eos subtype. Herein, we present a 15-year-old girl whose initial symptom was abdominal pain for three days and her pathological sign was a large abdominal mass which was verified by imaging studies and diagnosed as myeloid sarcoma by biopsy. On bone marrow examination, she had diagnosis of AML-M2 and by cytogenetic analysis inversion 16 was positive. She was treated with AML-BFM 2004 protocol and she is being followed up in remission on her ninth month of the maintenance therapy.
Identification of the Cadaverine Recognition Site on the Cadaverine-Lysine Antiporter CadB*

Amino acid residues involved in cadaverine uptake and cadaverine-lysine antiporter activity were identified by site-directed mutagenesis of the CadB protein. It was found that Tyr73, Tyr89, Tyr90, Glu204, Tyr235, Asp303, and Tyr423 were strongly involved in both uptake and excretion and that Tyr55, Glu76, Tyr246, Tyr310, Cys370, and Glu377 were moderately involved in both activities. Mutations of Trp43, Tyr57, Tyr107, Tyr366, and Tyr368 mainly affected uptake activity, and Trp41, Tyr174, Asp185, and Glu408 had weak effects on uptake. The decrease in the activities of the mutants was reflected by an increase in the Km value. Mutation of Arg299 mainly affected excretion, suggesting that Arg299 is involved in the recognition of the carboxyl group of lysine. These results indicate that amino acid residues involved in both uptake and excretion, or solely in excretion, are located in the cytoplasmic loops and the cytoplasmic side of transmembrane segments, whereas residues involved in uptake were located in the periplasmic loops and the transmembrane segments. The SH group of Cys370 seemed to be important for uptake and excretion, because both were inhibited by the existence of Cys125, Cys389, or Cys394 together with Cys370. The relative topology of 12 transmembrane segments was determined by inserting cysteine residues at various sites and measuring the degree of inhibition of transport through crosslinking with Cys370. The results suggest that a hydrophilic cavity is formed by the transmembrane segments II, III, IV, VI, VII, X, XI, and XII.
High-Resolution Optical Tweezers for Single-Molecule Manipulation

Forces hold everything together and determine its structure and dynamics. In particular, tiny forces of 1-100 piconewtons govern the structures and dynamics of biomacromolecules. These forces enable folding, assembly, conformational fluctuations, or directional movements of biomacromolecules over sub-nanometer to micron distances. Optical tweezers have become a revolutionary tool to probe the forces, structures, and dynamics associated with biomacromolecules at a single-molecule level with unprecedented resolution. In this review, we introduce the basic principles of optical tweezers and their latest applications in studies of protein folding and molecular motors. We describe the folding dynamics of two strong coiled coil proteins, the GCN4-derived protein pIL and the SNARE complex. Both complexes show multiple folding intermediates and pathways. ATP-dependent chromatin remodeling complexes translocate DNA to remodel chromatin structures. The detailed DNA translocation properties of such molecular motors have recently been characterized by optical tweezers, which are reviewed here. Finally, several future developments and applications of optical tweezers are discussed. These past and future applications demonstrate the unique advantages of high-resolution optical tweezers in quantitatively characterizing complex multi-scale dynamics of biomacromolecules.
Clip Art Rendering of Smooth Isosurfaces

Clip art is a simplified illustration form consisting of layered filled polygons or closed curves used to convey 3D shape information in a 2D vector graphics format. This paper focuses on the problem of direct conversion of smooth surfaces, ranging from the free-form shapes of art and design to the mathematical structures of geometry and topology, into a clip art form suitable for illustration use in books, papers, and presentations. We show how to represent silhouette, shadow, gleam, and other surface feature curves as the intersection of implicit surfaces and derive equations for their efficient interrogation via particle chains. We further describe how to sort, orient, identify, and fill the closed regions that overlay to form clip art. We demonstrate the results with numerous renderings used to illustrate the paper itself.
Formant Analysis of Punjabi Non-nasalized Vowel Phonemes

This paper presents the analysis of vowel phonemes of Punjabi. It shows formant analysis of vowels produced by speakers of Punjabi as a first language from Punjab. Comparison and analysis have been given with ten vowel phonemes of English. The vowel productions of a group of male speakers of Punjabi were recorded. Acoustic phonetic analyses of vowel formant frequencies and vowel duration were performed. It is amply clear in analysis that both language have different vowel phonemes. Mean of the respective formant frequencies are different.
Neurological Deterioration in Acute Lacunar Infarctions: The Role of Excitatory and Inhibitory Neurotransmitters

Background and Purpose The mechanisms involved in the neurological deterioration of acute lacunar strokes are unknown. Although accumulating evidence suggests that glutamate release plays a role in the progression of territorial infarctions, it remains to be established whether excitotoxicity also participates in lacunar stroke progression. We investigated whether excitatory and inhibitory amino acid concentrations in blood predict subsequent progressive motor deficits in lacunar infarctions. Methods We studied 113 consecutive patients with lacunar infarct, defined by clinical and computed tomography/magnetic resonance imaging criteria, within the first 24 hours after stroke onset. Neurological deterioration was defined as a decrease of ≥1 points in the motor items of the Canadian Stroke Scale in the first 48 hours after admission. Glutamate, glycine, and GABA were determined by high-performance liquid chromatography in plasma samples obtained on admission. Predictive values, sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of specific glutamate and GABA concentrations and glutamate×glycine/GABA index for progression of lacunar stroke were calculated. Results Twenty-seven patients (23.9%) had neurological worsening. Plasma concentrations of glutamate (253±70 versus 123±73 &mgr;mol/L, mean±SD) were higher and those of GABA (140±63 versus 411±97 nmol/L) were lower in the progressing group than in the nonprogressing group (both P <0.001). Glutamate concentrations >200 &mgr;mol/L and GABA levels <240 nmol/L had a positive predictive value for neurological deterioration of 67% and 84%, respectively. A excitotoxic index >106 had a positive predictive value of 85%. Conclusions These findings suggest that an imbalance between the glutamate and GABA concentrations may play a role in the pathophysiology of progressing lacunar infarctions.
Formulating Team-Sport Video Summarization as a Resource Allocation Problem

We propose a flexible framework to summarize team-sport videos that have been originally produced for broadcast purposes. The framework is able to integrate both the knowledge about displayed content (e.g., level of interest, type of view, and so on), and the individual (narrative) preferences of the user. It builds on the partition of the original video sequence into independent segments, and creates local stories by considering multiple ways to render each segment. We discuss how to segment videos automatically based on production principles, and design parametric functions to evaluate the benefit of various local stories from a segment. Summarization by selection of local stories is then regarded as a resource allocation problem, and Lagrangian relaxation is performed to find the optimum. We investigate the efficiency of our framework by summarizing soccer, basketball and volleyball videos in our experiments.
Sequence-Based Analysis of Thermal Adaptation and Protein Energy Landscapes in an Invasive Blue Mussel (Mytilus galloprovincialis)

Abstract Adaptive responses to thermal stress in poikilotherms plays an important role in determining competitive ability and species distributions. Amino acid substitutions that affect protein stability and modify the thermal optima of orthologous proteins may be particularly important in this context. Here, we examine a set of 2,770 protein-coding genes to determine if proteins in a highly invasive heat tolerant blue mussel (Mytilus galloprovincialis) contain signals of adaptive increases in protein stability relative to orthologs in a more cold tolerant M. trossulus. Such thermal adaptations might help to explain, mechanistically, the success with which the invasive marine mussel M. galloprovincialis has displaced native species in contact zones in the eastern (California) and western (Japan) Pacific. We tested for stabilizing amino acid substitutions in warm tolerant M. galloprovincialis relative to cold tolerant M. trossulus with a generalized linear model that compares in silico estimates of recent changes in protein stability among closely related congeners. Fixed substitutions in M. galloprovincialis were 3,180.0 calories per mol per substitution more stabilizing at genes with both elevated dN/dS ratios and transcriptional responses to heat stress, and 705.8 calories per mol per substitution more stabilizing across all 2,770 loci investigated. Amino acid substitutions concentrated in a small number of genes were more stabilizing in M. galloprovincialis compared with cold tolerant M. trossulus. We also tested for, but did not find, enrichment of a priori GO terms in genes with elevated dN/dS ratios in M. galloprovincialis. This might indicate that selection for thermodynamic stability is generic across all lineages, and suggests that the high change in estimated protein stability that we observed in M. galloprovincialis is driven by selection for extra stabilizing substitutions, rather than by higher incidence of selection in a greater number of genes in this lineage. Nonetheless, our finding of more stabilizing amino acid changes in the warm adapted lineage is important because it suggests that adaption for thermal stability has contributed to M. galloprovincialis’ superior tolerance to heat stress, and that pairing tests for positive selection and tests for transcriptional response to heat stress can identify candidates of protein stability adaptation.
Conflict-minimizing dynamic load balancing for P2P desktop Grid

Fully decentralized resource allocation for P2P desktop Grid allows each participating node to act as both resource provider and requester. The system performance indicators (including throughput, makespan, etc) are easily degraded by the unbalanced load distribution, which is probably caused by the fast-changing states of heterogeneous resources due to arbitrary task submissions. Although the cooperative load rebalancing methods can mitigate the problem, they are likely to introduce the contention on under-utilized resources with growing task arrival rates, leading to the sub-optimal load balancing efficacy. Our focus is on how to optimize load balancing status by taking into account minimizing the conflict of autonomic task migration decisions in P2P desktop Grid. Our load rebalancing process is modeled as a set of independent stochastic Bernoulli trials by letting each heavily loaded node push its surplus loads to its surrounding lightly loaded nodes. We proved that the surplus load amount should be shifted based on a proper ratio by considering decision conflicts and designed a novel load balancing algorithm with provably small decision conflict probability. We derived an upper-bound for this probability, which will be reduced down to about 2% under our algorithm. Finally, we validated via simulation that the system performance can be significantly improved accordingly.
A Fast and Compact Saliency Score Regression Network Based on Fully Convolutional Network

Visual saliency detection aims at identifying the most visually distinctive parts in an image, and serves as a pre-processing step for a variety of computer vision and image processing tasks. To this end, the saliency detection procedure must be as fast and compact as possible and optimally processes input images in a real time manner. However, contemporary detection methods always take hundreds of milliseconds to pursue feeble improvements on the detection precession. In this paper, we tackle this problem by proposing a fast and compact salient score regression network which employs deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) to estimate the saliency of objects in images. It operates (including training and testing) in an end-to-end manner (image-to-image prediction) and also directly produces whole saliency maps from original images without any pre-processings and post-processings. Comparing with contemporary CNN-based saliency detection methods, the proposed method extremely simplifies the detection procedure and further promotes the representation ability of CNN for the saliency detection. Our method is evaluated on six public datasets, and experimental results show that the precision can be comparable to the published state-of-the-art methods while the speed gets a significant improvement (35 FPS, processing in real time).
Use of neighborhood and stratification approaches to speed up instance selection algorithm

This paper investigates a method for instance selection in the context of supervised classification adapted to large databases. Based on the scale up concept, the method reduces the time required to perform the selection procedure by enabling the application of known condensation instance techniques to only small data sets instead of the whole set. The novelty of our approach relies in the way of hybridizing neighborhood and stratification approaches. The key idea is to consider instances found out for a given strata to generate sub populations for the other strata representing critical regions of the feature space. Experiments performed with various data sets revealed the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed approach.
A method of power loss calculation for RB-IGBT matrix converter

The calculation and distribution of power losses for RB-IGBT based matrix converter are discussed in this paper. The on-state performance and switching transients of RB-IGBTs are analyzed in detail. According to this analysis, the calculation models of switching losses and conduction loss are established and a power loss calculation method based on the mathematical fit of experimental test data is proposed. Calculation results are presented to validate the proposed method. In addition, this method can also be used for other power converters using RB-IGBT.
Estimating The Tonality Of Polyphonic Audio Files: Cognitive Versus Machine Learning Modelling Strategies

In this paper we evaluate two methods for key estimation from polyphonic audio recordings. Our goal is to compare between a strategy using a cognition-inspired model and several machine learning techniques to find a model for tonality (mode and key note) determination of polyphonic music from audio files. Both approaches have as an input a vector of values related to the intensity of each of the pitch classes of a chromatic scale. In this study, both methods are explained and evaluated in a large database of audio recordings of classical pieces.
Effect of a New Casino on Problem Gambling in Treatment-Seeking Substance Abusers

Problem gambling rates are frequently found to be higher in those who abuse substances than in the general population, and this group represents a well-established high-risk population for developing the disorder. In this study of 853 residential substance abusers, approximately 10% scored in the problem gambling range on the South Oaks Gambling Screen (SOGS). On most descriptive variables, these subjects appeared to be similar to substance abusers who do not have gambling problems. However, they tended to participate in more gambling behaviours and had more relationships with individuals who also gambled. There is some evidence that the introduction of a new casino in the community increased the SOGS scores for subjects who gambled most frequently on such casinorelated gaming as slot machines, cards, and casino games.
STRESS EVALUATION BY VOICE : FROM PREVENTION TO TREATMENT IN MENTAL HEALTH CARE

The implementation of large-scale mental health care requires low-cost, highaccuracy screening methods. Reporting bias cannot be eliminated from the self-administered screening methods that are currently in general use, and screening using biomarkers, which has seen remarkable developments in recent years, remains costly.Mental disorders resulting from stress alter the expression of emotion and cause changes in certain voice qualities. We have therefore attempted to assess stress intensity using vocal emotion recognition technology through a computer programme. In a prior verification comparing our programme with assessments through self-administered questionnaires (GHQ30) and interview assessments, the proposed technology obtained almost the same detection sensitivity as GHQ-30.The main advantages of the present technology are its ease of implementation and low cost. Its application in preventative medicine is therefore promising, and, if used in combination with the various biomarker-based diagnostic techniques currently in development, better induction to health care specialists will be possible.
Influence of gelling agents on the dosimetric performance of the Turnbull Blue gel dosimeter

Gelling agents such as agarose, phytagel, and several types of gelatin were used for preparation of Turnbull Blue radiochromic gel dosimeter. Their influence on gel dose response and background value was assessed. It was found that all gelatins cause significant increase of background in a short period of time after gel preparation therefore gelatin is not a suitable gelling agent for this dosimeter. Phytagel and agarose gels exhibit low and stable background and higher dose sensitivity than gelatin gels; however, the disadvantage is increased scattered light intensity in the gel in comparison to gelatin gels. A simple measurement was done demonstrating that the scattered light intensity significantly increases in phytagel and agarose gel in comparison to gelatin gels.
Controlled release behaviour of protein-loaded microparticles prepared via coaxial or emulsion electrospray

Biodegradable poly (lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA) microparticles are an effective way to achieve sustained drug release. In this study, we investigated a sustained release model of PLGA microparticles with incorporated protein via either emulsion or coaxial electrospray techniques. PLGA (75:25) was used as the carrier, and bovine serum albumin as a model protein. Coaxial electrospray resulted in a type of core–shell structure with mean diameters of 2.41 ± 0.60 µm and a centralised protein distribution within the core. Emulsion electrospray formed bigger microparticles with mean diameters of 22.75 ± 8.05 µm and a heterogeneous protein distribution throughout the microparticles. The coaxial electrospray microparticles presented a much slighter burst release than the emulsion electrospray microparticles. Loading efficiency was significantly higher (p < 0.05) in the coaxial group than emulsion group. This indicated that both emulsion and coaxial electrospray could produce protein-loaded microparticles with sustained release behaviour, but the former revealed a superior approach for drug delivery.