Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Iterative Reconstruction in Head CT: Image Quality of Routine and Low-Dose Protocols in Comparison with Standard Filtered Back-Projection

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: IR has recently demonstrated its capacity to reduce noise and permit dose reduction in abdominal and thoracic CT applications. The purpose of our study was to assess the potential benefit of IR in head CT by comparing objective and subjective image quality with standard FBP at various dose levels. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Ninety consecutive patients were randomly assigned to undergo nonenhanced and contrast-enhanced head CT at a standard dose (320 mAs; CTDI, 60.1) or 15% (275 mAs; CTDI, 51.8) and 30% (225 mAs; CTDI, 42.3) dose reduction. All acquisitions were reconstructed with IR in image space, and FBP and images were assessed in terms of quantitative and qualitative IQ. RESULTS: Compared with FBP, IR resulted in lower image noise (P ≤ .02), higher CNR (P ≤ .03), and improved subjective image quality (P ≤ .002) at all dose levels. While degradation of objective and subjective IQ at 15% dose reduction was fully compensated by IR (CNR, 1.98 ± 0.4 at 320 mAs with FBP versus 2.05 ± 0.4 at 275 mAs with IR; IQ, 1.8 versus 1.7), IQ was considerably poorer at 70% standard dose despite using the iterative approach (CNR, 1.98 ± 0.3 at 320 mAs with FBP versus 1.85 ± 0.4 at 225 mAs with IR, P = .18; IQ, 1.8 versus 2.2, P = .03). Linear regression analysis of CNR against tube current suggests that standard CNR may be obtained until approximately 20.4% dose reduction when IR is used. CONCLUSIONS: Compared with conventional FBP, IR of head CT is associated with significant improvement of objective and subjective IQ and may allow dose reductions in the range of 20% without compromising standard image quality.
Broad role for YBX1 in defining the small noncoding RNA composition of exosomes

Significance Cells release vesicles containing selectively packaged cargo, including RNA, into the extracellular environment. Prior studies have identified RNA inside extracellular vesicles (EVs), but due to limitations of conventional sequencing methods, highly structured and posttranscriptionally modified RNA species were not effectively captured. Using an alternative sequencing approach (thermostable group II intron reverse transcriptase sequencing, TGIRT-seq), we found that EVs contain abundant small noncoding RNA species, including full-length transfer RNAs and Y RNAs. Using a knockout cell line, we obtained evidence that the RNA-binding protein YBX1 plays a role in sorting small noncoding RNAs into a subpopulation of EVs termed exosomes. These experiments expand our understanding of EV–RNA composition and provide insights into how RNA is sorted into EVs for cellular export. RNA is secreted from cells enclosed within extracellular vesicles (EVs). Defining the RNA composition of EVs is challenging due to their coisolation with contaminants, lack of knowledge of the mechanisms of RNA sorting into EVs, and limitations of conventional RNA-sequencing methods. Here we present our observations using thermostable group II intron reverse transcriptase sequencing (TGIRT-seq) to characterize the RNA extracted from HEK293T cell EVs isolated by flotation gradient ultracentrifugation and from exosomes containing the tetraspanin CD63 further purified from the gradient fractions by immunoisolation. We found that EV-associated transcripts are dominated by full-length, mature transfer RNAs (tRNAs) and other small noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs) encapsulated within vesicles. A substantial proportion of the reads mapping to protein-coding genes, long ncRNAs, and antisense RNAs were due to DNA contamination on the surface of vesicles. Nevertheless, sequences mapping to spliced mRNAs were identified within HEK293T cell EVs and exosomes, among the most abundant being transcripts containing a 5′ terminal oligopyrimidine (5′ TOP) motif. Our results indicate that the RNA-binding protein YBX1, which is required for the sorting of selected miRNAs into exosomes, plays a role in the sorting of highly abundant small ncRNA species, including tRNAs, Y RNAs, and Vault RNAs. Finally, we obtained evidence for an EV-specific tRNA modification, perhaps indicating a role for posttranscriptional modification in the sorting of some RNA species into EVs. Our results suggest that EVs and exosomes could play a role in the purging and intercellular transfer of excess free RNAs, including full-length tRNAs and other small ncRNAs.
Sustainable Wireless Information and Power Exchange for Energy-Constrained Communication Systems

This paper considers point-to-point wireless communications where an energy-constrained node, which has insufficient energy for data transmission, wants to exchange messages with a node with enough energy. In this system, we study power splitting (PS) based energy cooperation methods by exploiting wireless energy transfer techniques and propose a new concept called sustainable wireless information and power exchange (SWIPE). In this SWIPE protocol, the node which has sufficient energy first transmits the information signal to the energy-constrained node. Then, the received signal at the energy-constrained node is utilized for both information decoding and energy harvesting via a PS circuit. At the consecutive time slot, by using the harvested energy, the energy- constrained node is now able to send a signal to the other node which employs a similar PS technique. This procedure continues by switching the operations of two nodes at each time slot. For the proposed SWIPE protocol, we present the optimal PS ratio computation algorithm in order to maximize the weighted sum throughput performance. Simulation results confirm the efficacy of the proposed SWIPE protocol over conventional schemes.
[Screening of sleep apnea syndrome by ECG derived respiration of ambulatory electrocardiogram].

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the feasibility of screening sleep apnea-hypopnea syndrome (SAHS) by from electrocardiogram derived respiration (EDR) of ambulatory electrocardiogram (AECG) monitoring. METHODS The overnight sleep investigation was administered to 80 subjects by polysomnogram (PSG) and 24 hours AECG monitoring simultaneously during February through November, 2004. The electrocardiogram analyzers did not know the PSG results at all, They were both asked to give the apnea hypopnea index (AHI) by EDR and PSG respectively. The PSG result was considered as the gold standard so as to evaluate the feasibility of screening SAHS by EDR of AECG monitoring. RESULTS The average age, male gender, body mass index, history of hypertension were higher in the SAHS(+) patients than those of the SAHS(-) patients. Automatic analysis was performed with software in a sensitivity of 75%, 87.5% and 100% respectively. When software sensitivity adjusted to 75%, the sensitivity of screening SAHS with EDR was 26.7%, with the specificity of 80%, the positive predictive value of 80%, the negative predictive value of 26.7%, the diagnose accordance rate of 40%. When software sensitivity was adjusted to 87.5%, the sensitivity of screening SAHS with EDR was 55%, with the specificity of 45%, the positive predictive value of 75%, the negative predictive value of 25%, and the diagnose accordance rate of 52.5%. When software sensitivity was adjusted to 100%, the sensitivity of screening SAHS with EDR was 88.3%, with the specificity of 35%, the positive predictive value of 84.1%, the negative predictive value of 50%, and the diagnose accordance rate of 75%. CONCLUSION EDR technique of AECG was useful to screen the suspicious SAHS patients, sensitivity and the diagnosis coincidence rate was higher when the sensitivity of automatic analysis software was adjusted to 100%.
Forecasting Canadian money supply growth using univariate arima and multivariate vector arma models

The money supply growth ;ate is a vital financial variable in any economy. Given its importance, a relevant question is whether or not money supply growth rate can be adequately predicted by professionals outside the Bank of Canada. The objective of this paper is to deal with this question in the Canadian context. We examine how univariate ARIMA and multivariate vector ARMA models can be applied to forecasting the Canadian money supply growth rate. An attempt is made to assess the relative efficacy of our two models' predictive performances. In addition, the roles of the unemployment rate, inflation rate, nominal interest rate, and exchange rate in the determination of the money supply by the Bank of Canada are examined in application of the vector ARMA model. In constructing our univariate ARIMA and multivariate vector ARMA models, an iterative three-stage procedure which includes model identification, model estimation and diagnostic checks on model adequacy, is used. Univariate ARIMA models rely only upon a series' past statistical characteristics to infer its future movements. Because only one time series is involved in univariate ARIMA models, the problem of finding explanatory variables in conventional regression analysis can be avoided. Multivariate vector ARMA models, which can be viewed as a set of reduced form equations associated with a simultaneous system of structural linear equations, allow whatever causal relationships that exists among the variables under study to emerge from the data; no a p r i o r i directional or causal constraints are imposed on the relationships. Hence, the problem involving choice of appropriate lag structures in conventional regression analysis can be avoided. The results show that our chosen multivariate vector ARMA model generates more accurate long term forecasts than the univariate ARIMA models. Also, the results from the vector ARMA model reflect high correlation of the money supply growth rate with the nominal interest rate, exchange rate and inflation rate. The unemployment rate, however, is not significantly correlated with the money supply growth rate. This result suggests that the Bank of Canada had not paid much attention to unemployment in its management of the money supply during the period of analysis. Instead, the concern of the Bank has been to manage the money supply to control inflation.
Isolation and Characterization of Amyloid‐Related Serum Protein SAA as a Low Molecular Weight Protein

With direct immunoprecipitation or gel filtration under dissociating conditions, amyloid‐related serum protein SAA has been isolated as a low molecular weight protein from the serum of two patients with rheumatoid arthritis but without known amyloidosis. The isolated protein SAA showed antigenic identity and an amino acid composition that was similar, but not identical, with isolated fibril protein AA. , Molecular weight estimations suggest that protein SAA is approximately 50%, larger than protein AA and has a molecular weight of 14,000–15,000 daltons Preliminary results indicate that protein SAA from a patient with amyloidosis has a similar small molecular weight subunit.
The association between the rs 11549465 polymorphism in the hif-1 α gene and cancer risk : a meta-analysis

Purpose: The associations between hypoxia-inducible factor-1 alpha (HIF-1alpha) and clinicopathological characteristics of cancers have been evaluated in various studies, with the conflicting results. The common rs11549465 (1772C/T) genetic polymorphism has been reported to be functional and may contribute to genetic susceptibility to cancers. However, the association between rs11549465 (1772C/T) and cancer risk remains inconclusive. Methods: To better understand the role of rs11549465 (1772C/T) polymorphism in global cancer, we conducted this comprehensive meta-analysis encompassing 7807 cases and 8633 controls. Results: Overall, the rs11549465 (1772C/T) genetic polymorphism was associated with higher cancer risk, especially exists in Asians. In the stratified analysis, significant associations were found between the HIF-1 rs11549465 polymorphism and gynecologic cancer among Caucasian population. We observed that the TT genotype might modulate gynecologic cancer (OR=9.92 [2.15-45.66]) risk comparing with the CC genotype. Moreover, a significantly increased lung and breast cancer risk was found among Asian population comparing with Caucasian population. When stratified by study design, significantly elevated susceptibility to cancer was found among hospital -based studies. Conclusions: Our meta-analysis suggested that the HIF-1 rs11549465 (1772C/T) genetic polymorphism is significantly associated with higher risk among Asian population and lower risk among Caucasian population in breast and lung cancer, and this SNP was significantly associated with the gynecologic cancer among Caucasian population. The effect of the rs11549465 polymorphism on cancer especially exists in Asians.
Dual control of the Bradyrhizobium japonicum symbiotic nitrogen fixation regulatory operon fixR nifA: analysis of cis- and trans-acting elements

Aerobic expression of the fixR nifA operon in Bradyrhizobium japonicum was shown to depend on a cis-acting, promoter-upstream DNA sequence located between the -24/-12 promoter and position -86 relative to the transcription start site. An adenine at position -66 was essential for maximal expression. A chromosomal deletion of the upstream activator sequence (UAS) led to a symbiotically defective phenotype which was typical of nifA mutants. B. japonicum crude extracts contained a protein that bound to the UAS. By using chromosomally integrated fixR-lacZ fusions, the level of expression of the fixR nifA operon was found to be fivefold higher under reduced oxygen tension than under aerobiosis. This increase was due to autoactivation by the NifA protein and was partly independent of the UAS. Based on these data, we propose a model for the regulation of nitrogen fixation genes in B. japonicum that involves dual positive control of the fixR nifA operon. At high oxygen concentrations, the operon is expressed at a moderate level, subject to activation by the binding of a trans-acting factor to the UAS. Under such conditions, the nifA gene product is known to be inactive. At very low oxygen concentrations--a condition favorable to NifA activity--the NifA protein is the trans-acting factor which (i) enhances the level of fixR nifA expression (and hence its own synthesis) and (ii) activates other nif and fix genes.
Hardware efficient, neuromorphic dendritically enhanced readout for liquid state machines

In this article, we describe a new neuro-inspired, hardware-friendly readout stage for the liquid state machine (LSM) that is suitable for on-sensor computing in resource constrained applications. Compared to the state of the art parallel perceptron readout (PPR), our readout architecture and learning algorithm can attain better performance with significantly less synaptic resources making it attractive for VLSI implementation. Inspired by the nonlinear properties of dendrites in biological neurons, our readout stage incorporates neurons having multiple dendrites with a lumped nonlinearity (two compartment model). The number of synaptic connections on each branch is significantly lower than the total number of connections from the liquid neurons and the learning algorithm tries to find the best `combination' of input connections on each branch to reduce the error. Hence, the learning involves network rewiring (NRW) of the readout network similar to structural plasticity observed in its biological counterparts. We show that even while using binary synapses, our method can achieve 2.4 - 3.3 times less error compared to PPR using same number of high resolution synapses. Conversely, PPR requires 40-60 times more synapses to attain error levels comparable to our method.
Regulating Emotion in Parent-Child and Peer Relationships: A Comparison of Sexually Maltreated and Nonmaltreated Girls

This study examined emotion regulation skills in 22 sexually maltreated girls and 22 nonmaltreated girls between 6 and 12 years of age to determine how the experience of sexual maltreatment might interfere with normative emotional development. Findings indicated that sexually maltreated girls, compared to nonmaltreated peers, reported different goals (i.e., inhibiting emotion to avoid conflict vs. displaying emotion to rectify a situation) for managing their emotional expressivity with their parents. They also reported expecting less support and more conflict from parents in response to emotional displays. Finally, maltreated girls expected less practical assistance from all social partners (i.e., mother, father, best friend) following their emotional displays. Surprisingly, however, there were no group differences in girls' ability to generate effective strategies for coping with emotionally arousing situations. Findings are discussed from the functionalist approach to emotional development, emphasizing the importance of social context (i.e., maltreating, nonmaltreating) in the development of children's emotion regulation skills.
A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Family Resiliency in Hemodialysis Patients

The purpose of this descriptive comparative survey was to examine differences in family resiliency between hemo-dialysis patients and caregivers across three ethnically diverse samples that included Anglo-Americans, Mexican Americans, and South Koreans. The study was based on the Family Resiliency Model developed by McCubbin, Thompson, and McCubbin. The patients were in end-stage renal disease and were receiving hemodialysis treatments at either a freestanding hemodialysis unit or a 30-bed dialysis hospital unit. South Korean patients on hemodialysis and their caregivers perceived the stressors imposed by their illness to be significantly greater than either of the other ethnic groups, and they also scored lower on the resiliency measure than the other two groups. Findings of the study support the need to understand the dynamics of family resiliency from a cultural perspective.
Functional analysis of repressor binding sites in the iab-2 regulatory region of the abdominal-A homeotic gene.

Spatial boundaries of homeotic gene expression are initiated and maintained by two sets of transcriptional repressors: the gap gene products and the Polycomb group proteins. Previously, the Hunchback (HB) protein has been implicated in setting the anterior expression limit of the UBX homeotic protein in parasegment 6. Here we investigate DNA elements and trans-acting repressors that control spatial expression of the Abdominal-A (ABD-A) homeotic protein. Analysis of a 1.7-kb enhancer element [iab-2(1.7)] from the iab-2 regulatory region shows that in contrast to Ubx enhancer elements, both HB and Krüppel (KR) are required to set the ABD-A anterior boundary in parasegment 7. DNase I footprinting and site-directed mutagenesis show that HB and KR are direct regulators of this iab-2 enhancer. The single KR site can be moved to a new location 100 bp away and still maintain repressive activity, whereas relocation by 300 bp abolishes activity. These results suggest that KR repression occurs through a local quenching mechanism. We also show that the gap repressor Giant (GT) initially establishes a posterior expression limit at PS9, which shifts posteriorly after the blastoderm stage. Finally, we show that this iab-2 enhancer contains multiple binding sites for the Polycomb group protein Pleiohomeotic (PHO). These iab-2 PHO sites are required in vivo for chromosome pairing-dependent repression of a mini-white reporter. However, the PHO sites are not sufficient to maintain repression of a homeotic reporter gene anterior to PS7. Full maintenance at late embryonic stages requires additional sequences adjacent to the iab-2(1.7) enhancer.
Drilling Down Natural Gas Well Permitting Policy: Examining the Effects of Institutional Arrangements on Citizen Participation and Policy Outcomes

Over the past decade the movement of natural gas drilling operations toward more suburban and urban communities has created unique policy challenges for municipalities. Municipal response is manifest in a variety of institutional arrangements, some more enabling than others regarding citizen access to public hearings. This observation lead to the main research question, “How are variations in citizen participation affecting policy outcomes? ” The argument is made that institutions affecting citizen participation, in turn affect policy outcomes. If the general public is given access to public hearings, their preferences for longer setbacks will be taken into account and the approved gas wells will have greater distances from neighboring residences – effectively providing for greater safety. Given the paucity of research on the topic of natural gas drilling, the research first begins with the presentation of a theoretical framework to allow for analysis of the highly complex topic of gas well permitting, emphasizing the rule-ordered relationships between the various levels of decision making and provides a typology of collective action arenas currently used by Texas municipalities. The research uses paired case studies of most similar design and employs a mixed methods process for the collection, analysis and interpretation of the municipal level gas well permitting process. The investigation includes a complete census of 185 approved gas wells from four North Texas cities between the years 2002-2012; 20 interviews comprised of city officials and drilling operators; and archival records such as gas well site plans, ordinances, on-line government documents and other public information. The findings reveal that zoning institutions are associated with a 15% longer gas well setback than siting institutions and institutions without waivers are associated with a 20% longer gas well setback than institutions with waiver rules. The practical implications suggest that citizen participation has a positive effect on public safety within gas well permitting decisions.
Transferred Deep Learning-Based Change Detection in Remote Sensing Images

Supervised deep neural networks (DNNs) have been extensively used in diverse tasks. Generally, training such DNNs with superior performance requires a large amount of labeled data. However, it is time-consuming and expensive to manually label the data, especially for tasks in remote sensing, e.g., change detection. The situation motivates us to resort to the existing related images with labels, from which the concept of change can be adapted to new images. However, the distributions of the related labeled images (source domain) and unlabeled new images (target domain) are similar but not identical. It impedes a change detection model learned from source domains being well applied to the target domain. In this paper, we propose a transferred deep learning-based change detection framework to solve this problem. It consists of pretraining and fine-tuning stages. In the pretraining process, we propose two tasks to be learned simultaneously, namely, change detection for the source domain with labels and reconstruction of the unlabeled target data. The auxiliary task aims to reconstruct the difference image (DI) for the target domain. DI is an effective feature, such that the auxiliary task is of much relevance to change detection. The lower layers are shared between these two tasks in the training process. It mitigates the distribution discrepancy between the source and target domains and makes the concept of change from the source domain adapt to the target domain. In addition, we evaluate three modes of the U-net architecture to merge the information for a pair of patches. To fine-tune the change detection network (CDN) for the target domain, two strategies are exploited to select the pixels that have a high possibility of being correctly classified by an unsupervised approach. The proposed method demonstrates an excellent capacity for adapting the concept of change from the source domain to the target domain. It outperforms the state-of-the-art change detection methods via experimental results on real remote sensing data sets.