Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparison of Motor Control Deficits During Treadmill and Overground Walking Poststroke

Background. Force-sensing split-belt treadmills (TMs) provide an alternative to the conventional overground (OG) setting and allow new avenues for analyzing the biomechanics and motor control of walking. However, walking control may differ on a TM compared with walking OG. Objective. To compare spatiotemporal, kinematic, and EMG-based measures of motor control between TM and OG walking at self-selected and fastest comfortable speeds in persons with poststroke hemiparesis. Methods. Individuals with chronic hemiparesis (56) and similarly aged healthy individuals (17) walked over an instrumented walkway and on an instrumented split-belt TM; 16 channels of EMG recorded bilateral muscle activity, and a 12-camera motion capture system collected bilateral 3D kinematics. The authors applied a nonnegative matrix factorization (NNMF) algorithm to examine the underlying patterns of motor control. Results. Self-selected walking patterns differed on the TM versus OG in controls: speed decreased, stride length decreased, stance percentage increased, and double-support percentage increased. Poststroke, responses were similar, but cadence also decreased, and step length asymmetry increased. Kinematic patterns were similar except those associated with slower walking speeds. NNMF demonstrated similar EMG variance in the 2 environments. Conclusion. Persons, both healthy and poststroke, walk with different gait parameters on the TM. Although measures of motor control were mostly similar between the 2 environments, the TM induced step length asymmetry in 30% of participants (60% of whom took longer paretic steps). TM walking, therefore, is a valid method for detecting motor control deficits.
Quantitative Prediction of CYP3A4 Induction: Impact of Measured, Free, and Intracellular Perpetrator Concentrations from Human Hepatocyte Induction Studies on Drug-Drug Interaction Predictions

Typically, concentration-response curves are based upon nominal inducer concentrations for in-vitro-to-in-vivo extrapolation of CYP3A4 induction. The limitation of this practice is that it assumes the hepatocyte culture model is a static system. We assessed whether correcting for: 1) changes in perpetrator concentration in the induction medium during the incubation period, 2) perpetrator binding to proteins in the induction medium, and 3) nonspecific binding of perpetrator can improve the accuracy of CYP3A4 induction predictions. Of the seven compounds used in this evaluation, significant parent loss and nonspecific binding were observed for rifampicin (29.3–38.3%), pioglitazone (64.3–78.6%), and rosiglitazone (57.1–75.5%). As a result, the free measured EC50 values (EC50u) of pioglitazone, rosiglitazone, and rifampicin were significantly lower than the nominal EC50 values. In general, the accuracy of the induction predictions, using multiple static models, improved when corrections were made for measured medium concentrations, medium protein binding, and nonspecific binding of the perpetrator, as evidenced by 18–29% reductions in the root mean square error. The relative induction score model performed better than the basic static and mechanistic static models, resulting in lower prediction error and no false-positive or false-negative predictions. However, even when the EC50u value was used, the induction prediction for bosentan, which is a substrate of organic anion transporter proteins, was overpredicted by approximately 2-fold. Accounting for the ratio of unbound intracellular concentrations to unbound medium concentrations (Kpuu,in vitro) (0.5–7.5) and the predicted multiple-dose Kpuu,in vivo (0.6) for bosentan resulted in induction predictions within 35% of the observed interaction.
Continuous decoding of intention to move from contralesional hemisphere brain oscillations in severely affected chronic stroke patients

Decoding motor information directly from brain activity is essential in robot-assisted rehabilitation systems to promote motor relearning. However, patients who suffered a stroke in the motor cortex have lost brain activity in the injured area, and consequently, mobility in contralateral limbs. Such a loss eliminates the possibility of extracting motor information from brain activity while the patient is undergoing therapy for the affected limb. This work proposes to decode motor information from EEG activity of the contralesional hemisphere in patients who suffered a hemiparetic stroke. Four stroke patients participated in this study and the results proved the feasibility of decoding motor information while patients attempted to move the affected limb.
A Spiral Model for Adding Automatic, Adaptive Authoring to Adaptive Hypermedia

At present a large amount of research exists into the design and implementation of adaptive systems. However, not many target the complex task of authoring in such systems, or their evaluation. In order to tackle these problems, we have looked into the causes of the complexity. Manual annotation has proven to be a bottleneck for authoring of adaptive hypermedia. One such solution is the reuse of automatically generated metadata. In our previous work we have proposed the integration of the generic Adaptive Hypermedia authoring environment, MOT (My Online Teacher), and a semantic desktop environment, indexed by Beagle++. A prototype, Sesame2MOT Enricher v1, was built based upon this integration approach and evaluated. After the initial evaluations, a web-based prototype was built (web- based Sesame2MOT Enricher v2 application) and integrated in MOT v2, conforming with the findings of the first set of evaluations. This new prototype underwent another evaluation. This paper thus does a synthesis of the approach in general, the initial prototype, with its first evaluations, the improved prototype and the first results from the most recent evaluation round, following the next implementation cycle of the spiral model (Boehm, 88).
A formal framework for evaluation of information extraction

An important problem in the field of Information Extraction (IE) is the lack of clear guidelines for evaluating the correctness of the output generated by an extraction algorithm. This paper tries to handle this problem by providing a formal framework for IE and its evaluation. We define IE in two different, but frequently used approaches: the “All Occurrences” and the “One Best per Document” settings, and we give a formal approach for evaluating an IE system in both settings. Our approach is based on the observation that most commonly used evaluation measures use the confusion matrix as a basis for their computation. We also shortly discuss the most frequently used evaluation measures.
Nationwide cohort study on the epidemiology and survival outcomes of thyroid cancer

In the past three decades, the thyroid cancer incidence has surged globally. Herein, the Taiwan National Health Insurance database was used to identify thyroid cancer patients and to estimate the prevalence and incidence of thyroid cancer during 1997-2012. The Taiwan Cancer Registry and the National Death Registry databases were crosslinked to obtain information on the histological subtypes and survival rates. Joinpoint regression analysis was used for estimating the average annual percentage changes (APCs) in prevalence, incidence, and survival. The age-standardized incidence of thyroid cancer increased from 5.66 per 100,000 person-years in 1997 to 12.30 per 100,000 person-years in 2012, with an average APC of 5.1 (6.9 in males, 4.6 in females). Thyroid cancer was more prevalent in patients with high socioeconomic status and in urban areas. Papillary carcinoma was the most abundant subtype, with a 2.9-fold increase of incident cases noted during 1998-2012 (from 80.6% to 89.8% of all cases). Among the different treatments, partial thyroidectomy increased the most (average APC, 17.3). The overall survival rates by sex and subtype remained stable over time, with 5-year survival rates of 90.2% in 1997 and 92.4% in 2010. In conclusion, 2.2- and 4.2-fold increases in the incidence and prevalence of thyroid cancer, respectively, were observed during 1997-2012 in Taiwan. The surging incidence of thyroid cancer but stable survival rates, and mainly increased in the papillary subtype, altogether imply enhanced detection of subclinical lesions. A true increase due to environmental carcinogens might also be responsible, but warrant further investigations.
Noisy SAR image classification based on fusion filtering and deep learning

In recent years, Convolution Neural Network (CNN) has achieved a series of breakthrough results in large-scale identification tasks such as image classification and recognition, target location and detection. There are severe speckle noise and distortion in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image, and the traditional classification method has low recognition rate and low robustness to noise. To solve these problems, a novel approach for noisy SAR image classification based on fusion filter and CNN is suggested. Firstly, the noise suppression of the noisy SAR image is carried out by using the fusion filtering algorithm, and then the convolution neural network is used to classify the image. The experimental results show that the classification accuracy can reach 94.23% in the ten categories of target classification, which exceeds the traditional classification algorithm which is classified by artificial annotation. By testing under different noisy conditions, the verification algorithm has strong robustness to noise.
Improved Functional Mappings via Product Preservation

In this paper, we consider the problem of information transfer across shapes and propose an extension to the widely used functional map representation. Our main observation is that in addition to the vector space structure of the functional spaces, which has been heavily exploited in the functional map framework, the functional algebra (i.e., the ability to take pointwise products of functions) can significantly extend the power of this framework. Equipped with this observation, we show how to improve one of the key applications of functional maps, namely transferring real‐valued functions without conversion to point‐to‐point correspondences. We demonstrate through extensive experiments that by decomposing a given function into a linear combination consisting not only of basis functions but also of their pointwise products, both the representation power and the quality of the function transfer can be improved significantly. Our modification, while computationally simple, allows us to achieve higher transfer accuracy while keeping the size of the basis and the functional map fixed. We also analyze the computational complexity of optimally representing functions through linear combinations of products in a given basis and prove NP‐completeness in some general cases. Finally, we argue that the use of function products can have a wide‐reaching effect in extending the power of functional maps in a variety of applications, in particular by enabling the transfer of high‐frequency functions without changing the representation size or complexity.
Evaluating the Effectiveness of Timber-labels: A Consumer Perspective

Sustainable forest management is a relatively recent concept that spawned from the Rio Conference in 1992. Despite being recognised as an important goal to achieve, no universally accepted definition has yet emerged. What has emerged is a plethora of forest certification schemes, each with its own criteria and many with an individual timber-label that is presented on wood-based products certified by accredited verifiers as originating from well-managed forests. Environmental labelling is a voluntary, environmental policy instrument aiming to help in the achievement of market transformation in favour of more environmentally benign products. Its success lies in consumers not only being aware of the labels, but knowing what they mean and then making an ethically “correct” choice in product purchases. This project has evaluated the effectiveness of the label of the Forest Stewardship Council in terms of these consumer criteria. The results show some awareness of the label but poor knowledge of its meaning. The results also indicate that despite consumers valuing environmental issues in general and forests in particular, awareness and even knowledge of the labels does not appear to have a significant impact on purchasing behaviour. Overall, the effectiveness of the label is judged poor and to remedy this, recommendations are made to, for example, improve marketing techniques and encourage mutual recognition between forest certification schemes.
A Probabilistic Optimization Framework for the Empty-Answer Problem

We propose a principled optimization-based interactive query relaxation framework for queries that return no answers. Given an initial query that returns an empty answer set, our framework dynamically computes and suggests alternative queries with less conditions than those the user has initially requested, in order to help the user arrive at a query with a non-empty answer, or at a query for which no matter how many additional conditions are ignored, the answer will still be empty. Our proposed approach for suggesting query relaxations is driven by a novel probabilistic framework based on optimizing a wide variety of application-dependent objective functions. We describe optimal and approximate solutions of different optimization problems using the framework. We analyze these solutions, experimentally verify their efficiency and effectiveness, and illustrate their advantage over the existing approaches.
Digital imaging: an update.

UNLABELLED It is becoming increasingly common for orthodontists and dentists to capture and store their patients' clinical records in a digital format, including photographs, radiographs and even study models. It is useful to have an understanding of what these image files are composed of in order to be able to manipulate, store and display the images efficiently to best effect. CLINICAL RELEVANCE Digital images are becoming a routine part of patients'clinical records and it is important to understand their make-up and how they can be saved and displayed.
A self-learning collaborative filtering algorithm in recommendation system

Recommender systems have made great progress over the past few years and been widely used in e-commerce. Collaborative filtering is the most common method in personalized recommendation systems. Many improvements have been made in order to improve the accuracy of the recommendations, but most of them are too complex and not versatile. Because RMSE is an important measure of recommended accuracy, this paper uses RMSE as the objective function to construct a function on the basis of the original model, so that RMSE is a convex function, which can be optimized by the gradient method. Experiments on a movie dataset show that the method has a good performance, and the method can be combined with a number of different methods of similarity, all of them have a better effect.
Recent advances in iron ore sintering

Sintering is the most economic and widely used agglomeration process to prepare iron ore fines for blast furnace use. Owing to the depleting reserves of traditional high grade iron ore, there have been considerable changes in iron ore resources available throughout the world, especially in steel mills in East Asia. Corresponding to the changes in the availability of iron ore resources, the amount of impurities in iron ore has been slowly increasing. Some of these impurities have been found to have deleterious impacts on sinter quality and sintering performance. In the meantime, an increasing number of large blast furnaces with inner volumes of more than 5000 m3 have been built in East Asia which require more sinter and are often more demanding in terms of the quality requirements of the ferrous materials. Finally, sinter plants are facing increasing pressure due to more stringent regulations regarding their environmental impact. This paper gives an overall review of a variety of technologies developed worldwide to tackle the changing raw material characteristics and mitigate emissions from sintering operations. Given the high sinter usage and volume of their blast furnaces, most of the recent sintering technologies have originated from East Asia, particularly Japan.
Multi-Layer Inkjet Printed Contacts to Si

Ag, Cu, and Ni metallizations were inkjet printed with near vacuum deposition quality. The approach developed can be easily extended to other conductors such as Pt, Pd, Au, etc. Thick highly conducting lines of Ag and Cu demonstrating good adhesion to glass, Si, and printed circuit board (PCB) have been printed at 100-200 deg C in air and N2 respectively. Ag grids were inkjet-printed on Si solar cells and fired through the silicon nitride AR layer at 850 deg C, resulting in 8% cells. Next generation inks, including an ink that etches silicon nitride, have now been developed. Multi-layer inkjet printing of the etching ink followed by Ag ink produced contacts under milder conditions and gave solar cells with efficiencies as high as 12%.
Claudin-19 and the barrier properties of the human retinal pigment epithelium.

PURPOSE The retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) separates photoreceptors from choroidal capillaries, but in age-related macular degeneration (AMD) capillaries breach the RPE barrier. Little is known about human RPE tight junctions or the effects of serum on the retinal side of the RPE. METHODS Cultured human fetal RPE (hfRPE) was assessed by the transepithelial electrical resistance (TER) and the transepithelial diffusion of methylated polyethylene glycol (mPEG). Claudins and occludin were monitored by quantitative RT-PCR, immunoblotting, and immunofluorescence. RESULTS Similar to freshly isolated hfRPE, claudin-19 mRNA was 25 times more abundant than claudin-3. Other detectable claudin mRNAs were found in even lesser amounts, as little as 3000 times less abundant than claudin-19. Claudin-1 and claudin-10b were detected only in subpopulations of cells, whereas others were undetectable. Knockdown of claudin-19 by small interfering RNA (siRNA) eliminated the TER. siRNAs for other claudins had minimal effects. Serum affected tight junctions only when presented to the retinal side of the RPE. The TER increased 2 times, and the conductance of K(+) relative to Na(+) decreased without affecting the permeability of mPEG. These effects correlated with increased steady-state levels of occludin. CONCLUSIONS Fetal human RPE is a claudin-19-dominant epithelium that has regional variations in claudin-expression. Apical serum decreases RPE permeability, which might be a defense mechanism that would retard the spread of edema due to AMD.
Peer volunteers improve long-term maintenance of physical activity with older adults: a randomized controlled trial.

BACKGROUND Using peer volunteers as delivery agents may improve translation of evidence-based physical activity promotion programs for older adults. This study examined whether tailored support from older peer volunteers could improve initiation and long-term maintenance of physical activity behavior. METHODS Participants were randomized to 2 16-week, group-based programs: (1) peer-delivered, theory-based support for physical activity behavior change; or (2) an intervention typically available in community settings (basic education, gym membership, and pedometer for self-monitoring), attention-matched with health education. Moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) was assessed via daily self-report logs at baseline, at the end of the intervention (16 weeks), and at follow-up (18 months), with accelerometry validation (RT3) in a random subsample. RESULTS Seven peer volunteers and 81 sedentary adults were recruited. Retention at the end of the trial was 85% and follow-up at 18 months was 61%. Using intent-to-treat analyses, at 16 weeks, both groups had similar significant improvements in MVPA. At 18 months, the group supplemented with peer support had significantly more MVPA. CONCLUSIONS Trained peer volunteers may enhance long-term maintenance of physical activity gains from a community-based intervention. This approach has great potential to be adapted and delivered inexpensively in community settings.
AMiner-mini: A People Search Engine for University

We present a distributed academic search and mining system? AMiner-mini. The system offers intra- and inter- university level academic search and mining services. It integrates academic data from multiple sources and performs disambiguation for people names, which is a fundamental issue for searching people. We employ a two-phases approach that formalizes the disambiguation problem into a HMRF framework, which significantly improves the disambiguation performance. Based on the disambiguation results, AMiner-mini offers a people search function, which returns experts (or related researchers) for a given query by the user. The user can also choose different metrics to rank the search results and explore the results from different dimensions. The system is designed in a distributed structure. It can be deployed in a university as a stand-alone system for finding the right people who are working on a research topic. Multiple distributed systems can be also connected via Web services and perform search or mining in an asynchronous way and return the combination results. We have deployed the system in Tsinghua University and feedback from university academic users shows that the system worked well and achieved its primary objective.
Laser adhesion test for thermal sprayed coatings on textured surface by laser

The laser shock adhesion test (LASAT) is a technique allowing the generation of high tensile stresses in materials. The LASAT consists in focusing a pulsed laser beam on a water-confined target. The laser pulse crosses the water transparent layer and is absorbed by the target. High energetic plasma is created at the surface of the sample. As a response to the expansion of the plasma, a shock wave is generated and propagates through the sample. This shock wave leads to the generation of high tensile stresses in the sample. These stresses allow the interface solicitation in order to evaluate the dynamic adhesive bond strength of coated systems. In order to determine interface strengths, this technique has already proven its feasibility. In this paper, the adhesion strength of coated system was evaluated using LASAT for two surface pretreatments of substrates obtained by grit-blasting and laser surface texturing techniques. The generation of the high-intensity shock wave by laser plasma in the water-confinem.