Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Role of anterior segment optical coherence tomography in angle‐closure disease: a review

This article aims to review the published literature pertaining to the use of anterior segment optical coherence tomography (AS‐OCT) in the evaluation of angle‐closure disease. Searches on the available published literature were last conducted on 15 June 2017. Rated as Level I evidence, we found that AS‐OCT has shown good sensitivity and moderate diagnostic accuracy to detect narrow angles when compared with gonioscopy. AS‐OCT quantitative and qualitative parameters demonstrated strong association with the presence of gonioscopically closed angles. This technology provides an objective non‐contact method of assessing the angle that is well tolerated by the patient and correlates well with the information provided by gonioscopy.
Investigation of a novel self-healing cementitious composite material system

This thesis describes a portion of the ongoing development of a novel self-healing cementitious material system named LatConX originally proposed by a group of researchers at Cardiff University. The research reported was undertaken with the aim of furthering understanding of the system’s long-term behaviour, ultimately with a view to providing predictions for the performance of the system over a structure’s working life. This aim is accomplished through a combination of experimental and numerical research. An experimental series is presented which investigates the stress relaxation behaviour of polyethylene terephthalate in order to establish how the stress induced by heat-activated restrained shrinkage varies with time. Results of these experiments displayed very little stress reduction from the peak stress, with less than a 5 % loss observed over a 124 day period. The development of a new one dimensional transient thermomechanical model for viscoelastic behaviour of pre-drawn polyethylene terephthalate is then described. This model is shown to be able to reproduce the observed experimental behaviour with good accuracy. The polymer model is coupled with a number of other constitutive models for the behaviour of steel and concrete, thus forming a model for the material system as a whole. This coupling is undertaken within the framework of an idealised simply supported beam with a strong discontinuity for the simulation of a central crack hinge. The model is validated against experimental data and design code predictions. Design considerations for the LatConX system are discussed and modified design equations derived. Parametric studies are presented investigating the structural performance and material costs of beams incorporating the LatConX system compared with that of standard reinforced concrete beams. Encouraging results are reported suggesting that the LatConX system has the potential to simultaneously improve long-term durability and structural performance of reinforced concrete structures and reduce the initial material costs by replacing a percentage of the reinforcing steel with shape memory polymer.
The Use of Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Axial Spondyloarthritis: Time to Bridge the Gap Between Radiologists and Rheumatologists

Objective. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is involved in the assessment of axial spondyloarthritis (axSpA); however, anecdotal evidence suggests diverse practice among radiologists. The objective of this study was to describe current practice in the use of MRI for assessment of axSpA by UK radiologists. Methods. Six hundred ninety-nine UK radiologists were invited to complete an online survey. Availability of MR scanners, familiarity with axSpA disease-specific lesions, and MRI protocols and definitions of positive sacroiliac joint (SIJ) or spinal MRI were assessed. Results. Two-hundred sixty-nine radiologists (38%) from 131/180 (73%) acute UK National Health Service trusts/health boards responded. MRI waiting times < 2 months were reported by 90% of radiologists. Twenty-nine radiologists (11%) used contrast as standard, 256 (91%) used T1 and short-tau inversion recovery, and 172 (64%) also used T2 sequences. Five percent scanned only SIJ, 33% scanned SIJ and lumbar spine, 29% scanned SIJ and thoracolumbar spine, and 30% scanned SIJ and the whole spine. Mean scan time was 34 min. Eighteen percent did not use the subchondral bone marrow edema of the SIJ to help diagnose axSpA and 18% did not use the inflammatory vertebral corner lesions to assist diagnosis. Awareness of axSpA was reported by 75% of radiologists, and awareness of definitions for positive MRI of SIJ and spine by 31% and 25%, respectively. Conclusion. These data highlight the need for better rheumatology-radiology collaboration on the identification of diagnostic axSpA MRI lesions and support the need for a consensus on the most appropriate MRI protocols for the assessment of axSpA.
Synthesis of Nanocrystalline CdS by SILAR and Their Characterization

A simple and cost effective chemical technique has been utilized to prepare cadmium sulphide (CdS) nanoparticles at room temperature. The sample is characterized with XRD (X-ray diffractometer), SEM (scanning electron microscope), TEM (transmission electron microscope), FTIR (Fourier transform infrared), EDX (energy dispersive X-rays), and UV-VIS (ultraviolet visible) spectrophotometer. The particle size estimated using X-ray line broadening method is ~21.5 nm. While particle size estimation, both instrumental and strain broadening was taken into account. The lattice strain was evaluated using Williamson-Hall equation. SEM illustrates formation of submicron size crystallites and TEM image gives a particle size of ~23.5 nm. The characteristic stretching vibration frequency of CdS was observed in the absorption band in FTIR spectrum. Optical absorption study exhibits a band gap energy value of about 2.44 eV.
Leveraging task-based data to support functional testing of web applications

Testing is paramount in order to assure the quality of a software product. Over the last years, several techniques have been proposed to leverage the testing phase as a simple and efficient step during software development. However, the features of the web environment make application testing fairly complex. The existing approaches for web application testing are usually driven to specific scenarios or application types, and few solutions are targeted for testing the functional requirements of applications. In order to tackle this problem, we propose a task-based testing approach that provides high coverage of functional requirements. Our technique consists of reassembling classical graph algorithms in order to generate all the possible paths for the execution of a task. Performed experiments indicate that our approach is effective for supporting the functional testing of web applications.
Oxidation damages and a stiffness model for 2D-C/SiC composites

Two kinds of 2D-C/SiC specimens with different interface strengths were chosen to perform a non-stress oxidation experiment at 700℃ in air.The SEM analysis shows that the oxidation mechanism of the material surface is reaction-controlled kinetics and the fibers become thin uniformly;the oxidation inside the material is diffusion-controlled,and the oxidized fibers exhibit a local notch or "neck-shrink" phenomenon.The oxidation results in the decrease of the modulus and strength by reducing the effective load bearing area.The specimens with strong interface have higher modulus but lower strength,while those with weak interface behave reversely and the fiber pullout is much longer.Based on the SEM analysis results,a micromechanical model was formulated for the initial modulus calculation.The simulation results are in good agreement with the experimental values.
Sustaining mutual cooperation in iterated prisoner's dilemma game

In this paper, we study the conditions under which mutual cooperation among one-step memory evolutionary agents instochastic iterated prisoner's dilemma game platform can be sustained. The agents evolve along the gradient of the payoff field. A metric is introduced to quantify players' ability to sustain cooperation with other players. Numerical experiment indicates each allele's role in sustaining the cooperative relationship by hiding its weaknesses to the opponent. The results were analyzed mathematically via transforming the problem into Markov chain state value problem to obtain partial derivatives of payoff functions. Finally, possible applications of methodology and results in this paper to multi-agent systems control are discussed.
Design and simulation analysis of a terrain adaptable wheeled mobile platform

This paper presents a novel obstacle-surmounting robot with eight big wheels, which is designed for searching and rescuing tasks in cities. Four passive planetary swing wheel structures, each of which is composed of two wheels and a planetary structure, are installed into four corners of the vehicle symmetrically. The planet carrier performs as a swing arm to adjust the relative angle of the vehicle' chassis and ground automatically and passively. Consequently, the necessary actuators for the vehicle are reduced to four. For enhancing the stability and adaptability against complex uneven terrain, analysis and simulation experiments have been done to optimize dimensions of the vehicle, where the diameter of the wheel and the central distance of the neighbor planetary sets are modified to 460 mm and 560 mm in the end. Finally, experimental results demonstrate excellent stability and adaptability of the vehicle, and the vehicle is easy to control without any additional operations.
Relationship of Bar Diameter and Bonding Performance of Reactive Powder Concrete

Bonding capability of bars and concrete plays an important role in practical engineering.There are many factors that affect the coherent behavior of reinforcing steel bar and concrete such as bar diameter,steel bar embedment length,thickness of cover to reinforcement,corrosion of steel bars and so on.A lot of conclusions are summed up,through the general study on the coherent behavior of reinforcing bars and ordinary concrete.But there is no specification of reactive powder concrete because of few study.It is primay to study the effect of diameter on bonding performance through the experiment of bond and draw a number of specific conclusions in the paper.The bonding strength of bars and reactive powder concrete is much larger than the ordinary concrete and reinforcing bar.The cracking resistance performance of Reactive Powder Concrete is better than ordinary concrete.These conclusions are supplied for future design as references.
Shape description based on bag of salience points

Salient points are very important for image description because they are related to the visually most important parts of the image, leading to a compact and more discriminative representation close to human perception. Based on these promising features, in this paper we propose a new shape descriptor, namely Bag-of-Salience-Points (BoSP), using the shape salience points combined with the Bag-of-Visual-Words modeling approach. Each salience point, after extracted from the shape contour, is represented by its curvature value using a multi-scale procedure proposed in this work. Taking advantage of this representation, each salience is assigned to a visual word according to a Dictionary of Curvatures. The final shape representation is given by computing a histogram of visual words detected in the shape, combined with a spatial pooling approach that encodes the distance distribution of the visual words in relation the shape centroid. This proposed new shape description allows to analyze the dissimilarity between shapes using fast distance functions, such as the City-block distance, even if two shapes have different number of salience points. This is a powerful asset to reduce the computational complexity when retrieving images. Compared to other shape descriptors, the BoSP descriptor has the advantage of proving a powerful shape description with high recognition accuracy, a compact representation invariant to geometric transformations while demanding a low computational cost to measure the dissimilarity of shapes.
A robust biped gait controller using step timing optimization with fixed footprint constraints

Humans are able to wrestle each other on plum blossom pole (a kind of Chinese Kong Fu on tiny footholds), while our robots have yet to recover from a push while walking with fixed footprint constraints. We find it remarkable that combining step-timing optimization with classical modification of Center of Pressure (CoP) reduces the margin of instability. In this paper, we propose a simplified multi-objective optimization based algorithm to keep the Divergent Component of Motion (DCM) of the Linear Inverted Pendulum (LIP) model we use within stable margin, and make the robot more agile when recovering from tilted state. We have verified our algorithm robustness via dynamics simulation and hardware experimental results on our THU-Strider Platform.
Modified-MCA Based Feature Selection Model for Preprocessing Step of Classification

Feature subset selection is a technique for reducing the attribute space of a feature set. In other words, it is identifying a subset of features by removing irrelevant or redundant features. A good feature set that contains highly correlated features with the class improves not only the efficiency of the classification algorithms but also the classification accuracy. A novel metric that integrates the correlation and reliability information between each feature and each class obtained from multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) is currently the popular solution to score the features for feature selection. However, it has the disadvantage that p-value which examines the reliability is conventional confidence interval. In this paper, modified multiple correspondence analysis (M-MCA) is used to improve the reliability. The efficiency and effectiveness of proposed method is demonstrated through extensive comparisons with MCA using five benchmark datasets provided by WEKA and UCI repository. Naive bayes, decision tree and jrip are used as the classifiers. The classification results, in terms of classification accuracy and size of feature subspace, show that the proposed Modified-MCA outperforms three other feature selection methods, MCA, information gain, and relief.
Hidden Topic Analysis Based Formal Framework for Finding Experts in Metadata Corpus

As a retrieval task, expert finding has recently attracted much attention. And various methods have been proposed to rank expert candidates against topical query. The most efficient approach is document-based method that treats supporting documents as a “bridge” and ranks the candidates based on the co-occurrences of topic and candidate mentions in the supporting documents.However, such kind of methods models relevance between query and candidates on the much lower and hence less ambiguous level. It lacks of the capability to capture the hidden semantic association between queries and candidates. In this paper, we propose a hidden topic analysis based approach to estimate the relevance between query and candidates. It models query and supporting document as a word-topic-document association instead of the word-document association in language model. In addition, the prior knowledge of supporting document is considered to favor expert ranking. The empirical results on metadata corpus have demonstrated the model can effectively catch the semantic association between queries and candidates, thus improves the performance of expert finding.
A stable recognition system for human gestures based on sEMG signals

In order to generate effective control commands for various devices, researchers mainly have focused on analyzing surface electromyogram (sEMG) signals to identify as many human gestures as possible. However, the sEMG recognition system is unpractical for application without limiting the number of sEMG sensors and recognizing the gradual changes of sEMG signals. Therefore, an ideal sEMG recognition system should not only identify more human gestures with few sEMG sensors, but also respond to changes of the sEMG signals. In this study, we proposed a stable sEMG system, which is able to identify nine human gestures with only three sensors. Root mean square ratio (RMSR) and autoregressive (AR) model were selected to extract the features of the sEMG signals and the linear discriminant analysis (LDA) was adopted as the classifier. Moreover, to adapt to the gradual changes in sEMG characteristics, a update strategy was proposed, in which new data was employed to update the classifier. The experimental results demonstrate the average classification accuracy rate of five subjects is up to 91.42%. Therefore, the system is stable and feasible to be applied in various fields.
Langmuir‐Blodgett Methodology: A Versatile Technique to Build 2D Material Films

The Langmuir‐Blodgett (LB) methodology is based on the transfer process of a monolay‐ er adsorbed at the water interface, Langmuir film, from the air‐water interface onto solids by vertical dipping of the substrate immersed on the subphase. The technique allows the continuous variation of material density, packing, and arrangement by compressing or expanding the film by using barriers. Consequently, it provides the possibility of preparing films with the control of interparticle distance necessary to exploit the two‐dimensional (2D) materials in technological applications. In this chapter, we present some examples of fabrication of thin films of 2D material using this methodology. We show some methodologies based on this technique to build thin films of graphene oxides, Quan‐ tum Dots (QDs), and silver nanowires.
An overview on extractive text summarization

With the increasing of online information and recourse texts, text summarization has become an essential and more favorite domain to preserve and show the main purpose of textual information. It is very difficult for human beings to summarize manually large documents of text. Text summarization is the process of automatically creating and condensing form of a given document and preserving its information content source into a shorter version with overall meaning. Nowadays text summarization is one of the most favorite research areas in natural language processing and could attracted more attention of NLP researchers. There are also much more close relationships between text mining and text summarization. According to difference requirements summary with respect to input text, established summarization systems should be created and classified based on the type of input text. In this study, at first, the topic of text mining and its relationship with text summarization are considered. Then a review has been done on some of the summarization approaches and their important parameters for extracting predominant sentences, identified the main stages of the summarizing process, and the most significant extraction criteria are presented. Finally, the most fundamental proposed evaluation methods are considered.
ERP evidence for consumer evaluation of copycat brands

Copycat brands mimic brand leaders to free ride on the latter's equity. However, little is known regarding if and how consumers confuse copycat as leading brand in purchasing. In this study, we applied a word-pair evaluation paradigm in which the first word was a brand name (copycat vs. normal brand both similar with a leading brand in category), followed by a product name (near vs. far from the leading brand’s category). Behavioral results showed that, when the product is near the leader’s category, the copycat strategy (CN) was more preferred compared to the normal brand (NN) but not different in the far product condition (CF and NF). Event-related potential (ERP) data provided further insight into the mechanism. The N400 amplitude elicited by the CN condition was significantly smaller than NN. However, when products are far from the leader’s category, there was no significant difference in N400 amplitudes. For the late positive component (LPC), the CN gave rise to a larger amplitude than the CF. The N400 amplitude was suggested to reflect the categorization process, and the LPC demonstrated the recollection process in long-term memory. These findings imply that the copycat brand strategy is generally only effective when products are within the category of the leading brand, which offers important implications for marketing practices.
A Quantitative Fluorescence-Based Assay for Assessing LIM Domain-Peptide Interactions.

We have developed Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET)-based experiments for measuring the binding affinity, off-rates, and inferred on-rates for interactions between a family of transcriptional regulators and their intrinsically disordered binding partners. It was difficult to evaluate these interactions previously, as the transcriptional regulators are obligate binding proteins that aggregate in the absence of a binding partner. The assays rely on fusion constructs where binding domains are linked by a flexible tether containing a specific protease site, with fluorescent proteins at either end that display FRET when the complex is formed. Loss of FRET is monitored after cutting the tether followed by dilution or competition with a non-fluorescent peptide. These methods allowed a wide range of binding affinities (10-9 -10-5 m) to be determined. Our data indicate that interactions of closely related proteins can have surprisingly different binding properties.