Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Review on Palm Print Verification System

Palm Print is one of the relatively new physiological biometrics, attracted the researchers due to its stable and unique characteristics. The rich feature information of palm print offers one of the powerful means in personal recognition. Palm print verification System has long been used and it was found that many research activities were carried out. This paper discusses about the number of research works introduced to overcome the difficulties faced in each stage of palm print verification. Our study on palm print recognition focuses on verifying the palm print in four different stages: Palm print acquisition, Preprocessing, Feature extraction and Palm print matching.
Examination of the follicular lymphoma international prognostic index (FLIPI) in the National LymphoCare study (NLCS): a prospective US patient cohort treated predominantly in community practices.

BACKGROUND Because follicular lymphoma (FL) patients have heterogeneous outcomes, the FL international prognostic index (FLIPI) was developed to risk-stratify patients and to predict survival. However, limited data exist regarding the role of FLIPI in the era of routine first-line rituximab (R) and R-chemotherapy regimens and in the setting of community oncology practices. PATIENTS AND METHODS We evaluated the outcome data from the National LymphoCare Study (NLCS), a prospective, observational cohort study, which collects data on patients with FL in the United States (US) community practices. RESULTS Among 1068 male and 1124 female patients with FLIPI data, most were treated in US community practices (79%); 35% were FLIPI good risk, 30% intermediate risk, and 35% poor risk. FLIPI risk groups were significant predictors of overall survival (OS) and progression-free survival (PFS) for patients who undergo watchful waiting (WW), and those who receive non-R-containing regimens, R-alone, and R-chemotherapy combinations. CONCLUSIONS In the setting of contemporary practice with routine R use, stratifying patients into good, intermediate, and poor FLIPI risk groups predicts distinct outcomes in terms of OS and PFS. FLIPI remains an important prognostic index in the R era and should be used in clinical practices to support discussions about prognosis.
Multisite causal mediation analysis in the presence of complex sample and survey designs and non‐random non‐response

This study provides a template for multisite causal mediation analysis using a comprehensive weighting‐based analytic procedure that enhances external and internal validity. The template incorporates a sample weight to adjust for complex sample and survey designs, adopts an inverse probability of treatment weight to adjust for differential treatment assignment probabilities, employs an estimated non‐response weight to account for non‐random non‐response and utilizes a propensity‐score‐based weighting strategy to decompose flexibly not only the population average but also the between‐site heterogeneity of the total programme impact. Because the identification assumptions are not always warranted, a weighting‐based balance checking procedure assesses the remaining overt bias, whereas a weighting‐based sensitivity analysis further evaluates the potential bias related to omitted confounding or to propensity score model misspecification. We derive the asymptotic variance of the estimators for the causal effects that account for the sampling uncertainty in the estimated weights. The method is applied to a reanalysis of the data from the National Job Corps Study.
Correlation of intraocular pressure with intracranial pressure in children with severe head injuries*

Objective: To determine whether there was a correlation between tonometric measurements of the intraocular pressure and transducer measurements of the intracranial pressure in the acute setting, and whether intraocular pressure can be used as a surrogate measure of intracranial pressure. Children with traumatic brain injuries commonly develop increased intracranial pressure requiring surgical placement of a pressure transducer to measure the intracranial pressure during the acute recovery period. The increased intracranial pressure may cause engorgement of the orbital compartments via dilation of the episcleral veins and manifest as increased intraocular pressure. Design: Prospective study. Setting: Tertiary academic pediatric intensive care unit. Patients: Children admitted with severe traumatic brain injury. Interventions: Tonometric intraocular pressure measurements. Measurements and Main Results: We performed an Institutional Review Board-approved, prospective study on 36 children (age range, 2.9–15.1 yrs) with traumatic brain injuries, requiring intracranial pressure monitoring. A total of 274 intraocular pressure measurements were made after placement of the pressure transducer, and concordance between the sites of injury and measurement was documented. The average age of the patients was 8.3 yrs. The mean intraocular pressure, intracranial pressure difference was −0.5 ± 0.68 cm H2O, and the variance was 29.88 (sd, 5.47). The 95% confidence interval was between −11.22 and 10.22. With concordance between the sites of measurement and injury, the mean IOP, intracranial pressure difference was −0.02 ± 0.61 cm H2O (variance, 23.28; sd, 4.82; 95% confidence interval, − 9.47 to 9.42). Concordance reduced the variance of the intraocular pressure, intracranial pressure discrepancy by 20.3%. The Pearson intraocular pressure-intracranial pressure regression coefficient and the Krippendorff's &agr; reliability estimate analyses indicated good agreement. The patient's age or Paco2 did not influence the intraocular pressure, intracranial pressure difference. Using 20 cm H2O as a normal intracranial pressure cutoff, the intraocular pressure had a specificity of 0.7 and sensitivity of 0.97; with concordance, the values improved to 0.78 and 0.96, respectively. Conclusions: Tonometry is a useful screening surrogate measure of intracranial pressure in children with traumatic brain injuries, but seems to lack the accuracy necessary for close management of intracranial pressure in the acute posttraumatic period.
Title Generation of NSE-MerCreMer transgenic mice with tamoxifeninducible Cre activity in neurons

To establish a genetic tool for conditional deletion or expression of gene in neurons in a temporally controlled manner, we generated a transgenic mouse (NSE-MerCreMer), which expressed a tamoxifen inducible type of Cre recombinase specifically in neurons. The tamoxifen inducible Cre recombinase (MerCreMer) is a fusion protein containing Cre recombinase with two modified estrogen receptor ligand binding domains at both ends, and is driven by the neural-specific rat neural specific enolase (NSE) promoter. A total of two transgenic lines were established, and expression of MerCreMer in neurons of the central and enteric nervous systems was confirmed. Transcript of MerCreMer was detected in several non-neural tissues such as heart, liver, and kidney in these lines. In the background of the Cre reporter mouse strain Rosa26R, Cre recombinase activity was inducible in neurons of adult NSE-MerCreMer mice treated with tamoxifen by intragastric gavage, but not in those fed with corn oil only. We conclude that NSE-MerCreMer lines will be useful for studying gene functions in neurons for the conditions that Cre-mediated recombination resulting in embryonic lethality, which precludes investigation of gene functions in neurons through later stages of development and in adult. Citation: Kam MKM, Lee KY, Tam PKH, Lui VCH (2012) Generation of NSE-MerCreMer Transgenic Mice with Tamoxifen Inducible Cre Activity in Neurons. PLoS ONE 7(5): e35799. doi:10.1371/journal.pone. 0035799 Editor: Cesario V. Borlongan, University of South Florida, United States of America Received April 6, 2011; Accepted March 27, 2012; Published May 7, 2012 Copyright: 2012 Kam et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: Funding support came from The Hong Kong SAR Government Research Council. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * E-mail: vchlui@hkucc.hku. hk ¤ Current address: Department of Pediatrics, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong SAR, China
Synthesis of impedance of axisymmetric body

Formulas for coefficients of reflection of a plane wave from a inhomogeneous impedance plane that refracts incident wave in a given direction were obtained. We have solved the problem of synthesis of inhomogeneous impedance rotation body of arbitrary shape of generatrix for a given scatterplot for co- and cross polarizations. Impedance distribution was obtained in explicit form. Formulated restrictions on the class of implementable scatterplots.
Simulation and experimental validation study on the drive performance of a new hydraulic power assist system

Hydraulic power assist system is a hydraulic regeneration system, which can improve fuel economy significantly coupled to a conventional bus operating in urban traffic. This paper presents a new hydraulic power assist system-HPAS. For the special configuration and control strategy, HPAS can be easily installed in an old bus as well as a new one. In this paper, more attention is paid to the drive performance of HPAS, and the effects of the component parameters on the system are simulated in AMESim. Experimental results show that HPAS satisfies the vehicle acceleration requirement and can reduce 25 percent of the fuel consumption.
Detection of small target in infrared image sequences using attention mechanism

The requirement of algorithm for detecting small target in infrared image sequences is not only a high rate to identify the true target and a low false alarm rate, but also the computation efficiency. By employing the selective attention mechanism, biological visual system can interpret a complex incoming image in real time with limited hardware resources. Much evidence has suggested that the biological visual system processes information in a serial strategy which rapidly selects a small relevant region in scene for further complex and time consuming analysis. In this paper, a two component computation scheme is proposed to detect dim targets in infrared image sequences. In the first process stage, an efficient method is applied to extract the potential targets which are further identified in second phase, the true targets are detected, and the spurious objects are rejected. The attention-based approach reduces the computation complexity, while the other performance aspects are not traded off. Experimental results indicate that the proposed extraction and recognition modules exhibit excellent performance of detecting small target in infrared image sequences, especially in process speed aspect
Definition For the definition of angina pectoris we refer to the definition in the guidelines ‘ Management of Stable Angina

Multidisciplinary Pain Center, Department of Medicine, SU/O} stra, Göteborg, Sweden; MRC Cyclotron Unit, Imperial College School of Medicine, Hammersmith Hospital, London, U.K.; National Refractory Angina Centre, Liverpool, U.K.; Taunton and Somerset Hospital, Taunton, Somerset, U.K.; Afdeling Cardiologie, Academisch Ziekenhuis Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands; Department für Innere Medizin, Universitätsspital, Zürich, Switzerland; Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Division of Cardiology, Sahlgrenska University Hospital, Göteborg, Sweden; Department für Innere Medizin, Kardiologie, Universitätsspital, Zürich, Switzerland; Deutsches Herzzentrum Berlin, Berlin, Germany; Institute of Heart and Lung Diseases, Göteborg University, Göteborg, Sweden
A 2D/1D Neutron Transport Method with Improved Angular Coupling

Developing efficient and accurate three-dimensional (3D) neutron transport methods for nuclear reactor applications has long been a major objective for nuclear scientists in the field of reactor physics and radiation transport. Even with the large computers available today, exact 3D neutron transport methods are often too costly to be used for practical core design or safety analysis. Several methods have been developed that use various approximations to the neutron transport equation so that the calculations can be performed on commonly available computing platforms. One such method is the “2D/1D” method, which decomposes 3D geometries into several 2D domains wherein 2D transport equations are solved. These 2D transport equations are coupled to one another through transverse, 1D, approximate transport solutions in the axial direction. The 2D/1D method is best suited for problems where the axial gradient of the solution is relatively weak, such as Light Water Reactor (LWR) problems. The 2D/1D method uses an accurate 2D transport solution to resolve the highly heterogeneous radial geometry, and treats the axial dimension with a lower-fidelity, more coarsely discretized solution, which is usually appropriate. Some of the typical assumptions made in many 2D/1D methods can negatively affect the accuracy of the solution in a non-negligible way. Two of the most significant are the isotropic approximations made to the transverse leakage (TL) and homogenized total cross section (XS) used to couple the 2D and 1D equations. In cases where the axial gradients are relatively strong, these assumptions are detrimental to the accuracy. The isotropic TL approximation was corrected in previous work. In this work, the XS is also allowed to be anisotropic. The results show that with both anisotropic TL and XS, the accuracy of 2D/1D is improved significantly. The 2D/1D methods with anisotropic TL and XS are significantly more expensive than the isotropic TL and XS method, which is the standard in the Michigan Parallel Characteristics Transport (MPACT) code. In this work, a 2D/1D method with polar angle parity is developed to significantly reduce the run time of the anisotropic TL and XS method while still significantly improving the accuracy compared to the isotropic TL and XS method. xiii The theoretical accuracy limit of the 2D/1D methods are analyzed and compared to the 3D Simplified P3 (SP3) method. We find that the 2D/1D method with anisotropic TL preserves the 3D SP3 limit with only a few anisotropic TL moments, while the 2D/1D method with isotropic TL does not. As a result, the isotropic TL method is less accurate in problems where there are strong spatial gradients in the radial and axial dimensions.
Next place prediction using mobility Markov chains

In this paper, we address the issue of predicting the next location of an individual based on the observations of his mobility behavior over some period of time and the recent locations that he has visited. This work has several potential applications such as the evaluation of geo-privacy mechanisms, the development of location-based services anticipating the next movement of a user and the design of location-aware proactive resource migration. In a nutshell, we extend a mobility model called Mobility Markov Chain (MMC) in order to incorporate the n previous visited locations and we develop a novel algorithm for next location prediction based on this mobility model that we coined as n-MMC. The evaluation of the efficiency of our algorithm on three different datasets demonstrates an accuracy for the prediction of the next location in the range of 70% to 95% as soon as n = 2.
Muscle-specific MicroRNA1 (miR1) Targets Heat Shock Protein 70 (HSP70) during Dexamethasone-mediated Atrophy*

Background: miR1 is a muscle-specific microRNA, however, its role in muscle atrophy is unclear. Results: Excess dexamethasone and myostatin induced miR1 via glucocorticoid receptor, resulting in reduced HSP70 and development of muscle atrophy. Conclusion: miR1 mediates muscle atrophy by regulating the levels of HSP70. Significance: Given that miR1 has a role in muscle atrophy, its antagonism may be beneficial during atrophy. High doses of dexamethasone (Dex) or myostatin (Mstn) induce severe atrophy of skeletal muscle. Here we show a novel microRNA1 (miR1)-mediated mechanism through which Dex promotes skeletal muscle atrophy. Using both C2C12 myotubes and mouse models of Dex-induced atrophy we show that Dex induces miR1 expression through glucocorticoid receptor (GR). We further show that Mstn treatment facilitates GR nuclear translocation and thereby induces miR1 expression. Inhibition of miR1 in C2C12 myotubes attenuated the Dex-induced increase in atrophy-related proteins confirming a role for miR1 in atrophy. Analysis of miR1 targets revealed that HSP70 is regulated by miR1 during atrophy. Our results demonstrate that increased miR1 during atrophy reduced HSP70 levels, which resulted in decreased phosphorylation of AKT, as HSP70 binds to and protects phosphorylation of AKT. We further show that loss of pAKT leads to decreased phosphorylation, and thus, enhanced activation of FOXO3, up-regulation of MuRF1 and Atrogin-1, and progression of skeletal muscle atrophy. Based on these results, we propose a model whereby Dex- and Mstn-mediated atrophic signals are integrated through miR1, which then either directly or indirectly, inhibits the proteins involved in providing protection against atrophy.
Experimental analysis of the relationship between neural and muscular recordings during hand control

In this study, the relationship between the electromyographic (EMG) and neural signals (ENG) recorded during hand control is investigated. EMG and ENG signals are both recorded from an amputee during the ENG control of a hand prosthesis. The EMG signal was processed with standard techniques to compute the envelope. For the neural signal, the processing involved the evaluation of the energy of the recordings with a moving average and the best combination of window width and multiplier for the standard deviation was searched for. Hence, a new curve for the neural signal was generated, gathering information about amplitude and occurrence of action potentials during the motion task. Its correlation with the EMG envelope was studied by means of a parameter purposely conceived, which accounts for the ratio between the areas under the two curves. The proposed approach has been applied to little finger flexion and open hand tasks. Ten movements for each task have been processed for the aim of this study and a comparative analysis with the Pearson coefficient has been carried out.
Canadian implementation of genomic evaluations

Effective August 2009, official genetic evaluations in Canada for the Holstein breed include genomic information in combination with traditional pedigree and progeny performance data. This follows the release by Canadian Dairy Network (CDN) of unofficial, research genomic evaluations on a monthly basis since April 2009. The main purpose of this paper is to summarize several elements of the official implementation of genomic evaluations in Canada.
Biological fabrication of cellulose fibers with tailored properties

Biological incorporation of functional molecules into cotton fibers adds magnetic or optical properties. More than just a cotton shirt Responsive or functional fabrics include coatings or secondary materials with properties such as changing color with temperature or generating electricity with movement. The challenge is that anything added to a fabric can get washed or worn away. Hence, Natalio et al. opted to build the functionality directly into cotton grown in vitro, through the addition of glucose modified at the C2 position to the culture medium. By this process, fibers can be made that naturally fluoresce or have magnetic properties, for instance. Science, this issue p. 1118 Cotton is a promising basis for wearable smart textiles. Current approaches that rely on fiber coatings suffer from function loss during wear. We present an approach that allows biological incorporation of exogenous molecules into cotton fibers to tailor the material’s functionality. In vitro model cultures of upland cotton (Gossypium hirsutum) are incubated with 6-carboxyfluorescein–glucose and dysprosium–1,4,7,10-tetraazacyclododecane-1,4,7,10-tetraacetic acid–glucose, where the glucose moiety acts as a carrier capable of traveling from the vascular connection to the outermost cell layer of the ovule epidermis, becoming incorporated into the cellulose fibers. This yields fibers with unnatural properties such as fluorescence or magnetism. Combining biological systems with the appropriate molecular design offers numerous possibilities to grow functional composite materials and implements a material-farming concept.
The TIME FOR COFFEE Gene Maintains the Amplitude and Timing of Arabidopsis Circadian Clocks Online version contains Web-only data. Article, publication date, and citation information can be found at www.plantcell.org/cgi/doi/10.1105/tpc.013730.

Plants synchronize developmental and metabolic processes with the earth's 24-h rotation through the integration of circadian rhythms and responses to light. We characterize the time for coffee (tic) mutant that disrupts circadian gating, photoperiodism, and multiple circadian rhythms, with differential effects among rhythms. TIC is distinct in physiological functions and genetic map position from other rhythm mutants and their homologous loci. Detailed rhythm analysis shows that the chlorophyll a/b-binding protein gene expression rhythm requires TIC function in the mid to late subjective night, when human activity may require coffee, in contrast to the function of EARLY-FLOWERING3 (ELF3) in the late day to early night. tic mutants misexpress genes that are thought to be critical for circadian timing, consistent with our functional analysis. Thus, we identify TIC as a regulator of the clock gene circuit. In contrast to tic and elf3 single mutants, tic elf3 double mutants are completely arrhythmic. Even the robust circadian clock of plants cannot function with defects at two different phases.
Testicular cancer risk associated with occupational radiation exposure: a systematic literature review

Testicular cancer is a rare disease, affecting mainly young men aged 15–49. There have been some recent reports that it might be associated with radiation exposure. We have systematically reviewed this topic. English-language articles published between 1990 and 2008 studying the relationship between occupational radiation exposure and testicular cancer were included. Risk of bias was assessed using a modified version of the EPHPP checklist. For ionising radiation we subdivided study populations into occupational groups. No pooled analysis was performed due to the heterogeneity of studies. Seven case–control and 30 cohort studies were included in the review. For radiation workers, one incidence study showed a significant increase and four showed no effect. Eight mortality studies did not indicate an effect while four showed a non-significant increase. Incidence among persons with military exposure was not increased in two studies and non-significantly increased in another two. Among aircrew studies, one showed no effect against five with slight increases. Medical exposure studies showed no increases. For EMF exposure, three studies showed no effect, two reported a significant and four a non-significant increase in incidence. Overall, there was very limited evidence for associations between occupational ionising radiation and testicular cancer, while there were some positive associations for EMF. Testicular cancer mortality is generally low and was not associated with radiation. New incidence studies are recommended to investigate the association between radiation exposure and testicular cancer where exposure is better specified and individually estimated.