Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The History of In Vivo Tuberculin Testing in Bovines: Tuberculosis, a “One Health” Issue

Tuberculosis (TB) is more than 3 million years old thriving in multiple species. Ancestral Mycobacterium tuberculosis gave rise to multiple strains including Mycobacterium bovis now distributed worldwide with zoonotic transmission happening in both directions between animals and humans. M. bovis in milk caused problems with a significant number of deaths in children under 5 years of age due largely to extrapulmonary TB. This risk was effectively mitigated with widespread milk pasteurization during the twentieth century, and fewer young children were lost to TB. Koch developed tuberculin in 1890 and recognizing the possibility of using tuberculin to detect infected animals the first tests were quickly developed. Bovine TB (bTB) control/eradication programmes followed in the late nineteenth century/early twentieth century. Many scientists collaborated and contributed to the development of tuberculin tests, to refining and optimizing the production and standardization of tuberculin and to determining test sensitivity and specificity using various methodologies and injection sites. The WHO, OIE, and EU have set legal standards for tuberculin production, potency assay performance, and intradermal tests for bovines. Now, those using tuberculin tests for bTB control/eradication programmes rarely, see TB as a disease. Notwithstanding the launch of the first-ever roadmap to combat zoonotic TB, many wonder if bTB is actually a problem? Is there a better way of dealing with bTB? Might alternative skin test sites make the test “better” and easier to perform? Are all tuberculins used for testing equally good? Why have alternative “better” tests not been developed? This review was prompted by these types of questions. This article attempts to succinctly summarize the data in the literature from the late nineteenth century to date to show why TB, and zoonotic TB specifically, was and still is important as a “One Health” concern, and that the necessity to reduce the burden of zoonotic TB, to save lives and secure livelihoods is far too important to await the possible future development of novel diagnostic assays for livestock before renewing efforts to eliminate it. Consequently, it is highly probable that the tuberculin skin test will remain the screening test of choice for farmed livestock for the considerable future.
Schizophrenia and the Perception of Emotions

Audiovisual tapes of emotional situations were shown to 34 schizophrenics and 15 controls who were asked to rate the emotional content of the scenes using an adjective check-list. The schizophrenic patients failed to detect the dominant character of the scenes, and perceived the opposite emotions to those perceived by the controls. Such deviant responses were not related to paranoid symptoms, flattened affect, formal thought disorder, general level of morbidity, or duration of in-patient stay.
Combining Signal Processing and Cryptographic Protocol Design for Efficient ECG Classification

We describe a privacy-preserving system where a server can classify an ElectroCardioGram (ECG) signal without learning any infor- mation about the ECG signal and the client is prevented from gaining knowledge about the classication algorithm used by the server. The sys- tem relies on the concept of Linear Branching Programs (LBP) and a recently proposed cryptographic protocol for secure evaluation of private LBPs. We study the trade-o between signal representation accuracy and system complexity both from practical and theoretical perspective. We show how the overall system complexity can be strongly reduced by modifying the original ECG classication algorithm. Two alternatives of the underlying cryptographic protocol are implemented and their corre- sponding complexities are analyzed to show suitability of our system in real-life applications for current and future security levels.
Efficacy and Safety of Bone Marrow Concentrate for Osteoarthritis of the Hip; Treatment Registry Results for 196 Patients

Introduction: We investigated the efficacy and safety of autologous bone marrow concentrate (BMC) for the treatment of symptomatic hip osteoarthritis. Methods: Treatment registry data for 216 hips treated among 196 patients who underwent a BMC procedure for hip osteoarthritis (OA) were analyzed. Data regarding adverse events (AEs), subjective percentage improvement, Oxford Hip Scores (OHS), and numeric pain scale (NPS) scores were assessed and compared to baseline at 1, 3, 6 months, and annually after treatment. Results: The mean reported subjective percentage improvement across all 216 treated hips was 30.2%. The mean OHS change was 6.4 points improved (p<0.001). The NPS scores from baseline to post treatment decreased from 4.5 to 3.3 (p<0.001). Twelve AEs were reported, none of which were serious or persisting. Patients ≤ 55 years old were substantially more likely to report improvement on the OHS [OR: 11.1 (1.6-77.8)] and also more likely to report greater than 50% improvement on the subjective percentage improvement scale [OR: 2.8 (1.2-6.7)]. Conclusion: The present study of BMC injections for hip OA demonstrated encouraging results for improved outcomes with no significant complications. We found that patients younger than 55 years old were more likely to report improvement on the OHS and subjective percentage improvement scales. Further study with randomized trials is warranted to confirm the reported results.
Method and System for Predicting Hydraulic Valve Degradation on a Gas Turbine

This paper examines the development of a data-driven anomaly detection methodology for servo-actuated hydraulic valves installed in a gas turbine fuel delivery system. Degraded operation of these valves is a leading cause of unavailability for gas turbine driven power plants. Nearlyeighty potential features were generated from the limited raw sensors and control system signals through a combination of domain expertise, statistical feature extraction, and insight gains from prior physics-based simulations. Important features were down-selected by examining the behavior of the features using several years of operating data in conjunction with known field failures. Univariate statistical techniques were used to eliminate candidate features with limited capability to distinguish healthy from abnormal operation. A final machine learning model was generated using a process of recursive feature elimination. This paper will also touch on the practical implications of deploying a machine learning model in a real-time production environment.
The Psychology of Middle Power: Vertical Code-Switching, Role Conflict, and Behavioral Inhibition

Decades of research have demonstrated that having or lacking power can influence how people think and behave in organizations. By contrasting the experiences associated with high- and low-power states, however, this research has neglected the psychological and behavioral correlates of middle power, which is the subjective sense that one’s power is neither consistently higher nor lower than the power of one’s interaction partners. In this article we propose that middle-power positions and mindsets lead to frequent vertical code-switching—the act of alternating between behavioral patterns that are directed toward higher-power and lower-power interaction partners. We draw from identity and role transition theories to develop propositions specifying when frequent vertical code-switching will, in turn, result in heightened role conflict. We further situate our theoretical analysis by updating and extending the approach/inhibition theory of power on the basis of insights from revised reinforcement sensitivity t.
Shifting Prevalence of Gallbladder Polyps in Korea

Only a few studies have evaluated the population-adjusted prevalence of gallbladder polyps (GBP). This study aimed to evaluate the changes in GBP prevalence and risk factors at a single health screening center in Korea from 2002 to 2012. Of 48,591 adults who underwent health screening between 2002 and 2012, 14,250 age- and gender-matched subjects were randomly selected to evaluate prevalence. Risk factors were analyzed between the GBP-positive and GBP-negative groups during 2002-2004 (Period A) and 2010-2012 (Period B). The annual prevalence of GBP over the 11-yr period was 5.4%. Annual prevalence increased from 3.8% in Period A to 7.1% in Period B. Male gender and obesity were independent risk factors for GBP in both periods. Hepatitis B virus surface antigen (HBsAg) positivity was a risk factor for GBP in Period A but not in Period B. The risk factors for GBP changed from HBsAg positivity to lipid profile abnormalities. Other variables including age, hypertension, diabetes, impaired fasting glucose, chronic hepatitis C virus infection, and liver function tests did not correlate with GBP. In conclusion, GBP prevalence is increasing and risk factors for GBP have changed in Korea. More attention should be paid to this issue in the future.
A control system using behaviour hierarchies and neuro-fuzzy approach

In agent-based systems, especially in autonomous mobile robots, modelling the environment and its changes is a source of problems. It is not always possible to effectively model the uncertainty and the dynamic changes in complex, real-world domains. Control systems must be robust to changes and must be able to handle the uncertainties to overcome this problem. In this study, a reactive behaviour based agent control system is modelled and implemented. The control system is tested in a navigation task using an environment, which has randomly placed obstacles and a goal position to simulate an environment similar to an autonomous robot’s indoor environment. Then the control system was extended to control an agent in a multi-agent environment. The main motivation of this study is to design a control system, which is robust to errors and is easy to modify. Behaviour based approach with the advantages of fuzzy reasoning systems is used in the system
Effect of microwave radiation on I-V curves and contact resistivity of ohmic contacts to n-GaN and n-AlN

We studied ohmic contacts Au-Pd-Ti-Pd-n-AlN and Au-TiB2-Al-Ti-n-GaN with contact resistivity ρс = 0.18 cm 2 and 2 4 cm 10 6 . 1     , respectively, and the effect of microwave treatment on their electrophysical properties. After microwave treatment for time t up to 1000 s, the contact resistivity dropped by 16% (60%) in the contact to AlN (GaN). This seems to result from increase of the number of structural defects in the semiconductor near-contact region caused by relaxation of intrinsic stresses induced by microwave radiation.
UV-C tolerance of symbiotic Trebouxia sp. in the space-tested lichen species Rhizocarpon geographicum and Circinaria gyrosa: role of the hydration state and cortex/screening substances

Abstract Many experiments were carried out in order to evaluate the survival capacity of extremotolerant lichens when facing harsh conditions, including those of outer space or of simulated Martian environment. For further progress, a deeper study on the physiological mechanisms is needed that confer the unexpected levels of resistance detected on these symbiotic organisms. In this work, the response of the lichenized green algae Trebouxia sp. (a predominant lichen photobiont) to increasing doses of UV-C radiation is studied. UV-C (one of the most lethal factors to be found in space together with vacuum and cosmic-ionizing radiation with high atomic number and energy (HZE) particles) has been applied in the present experiments up to a maximum dose analogue to 67 days in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). For that purpose we selected two extremotolerant and space-tested lichen species in which Trebouxia sp. is the photosynthetic partner: the crustose lichen Rhizocarpon geographicum and the fruticose lichen Circinaria gyrosa. In order to evaluate the effect of the physiological state of the lichen thallus (active when wet and dormant when dry) and of protective structures (cortex and photoprotective pigments) on the resistance of the photobiont to UV-C, four different experimental conditions were tested: (1) dry intact samples, (2) wet intact samples, (3) dry samples without cortex/acetone-rinsed and (4) wet samples without cortex/acetone-rinsed. After irradiation and a 72 hours period of recovery, the influence of UV-C on the two lichen's photobiont under each experimental approach was assessed by two complimentary methods: (1) By determining the photosystem II (PSII) activity in three successive 24 hours intervals (Mini-PAM fluorometer) to investigate the overall state of the photosynthetic process and the resilience of Trebouxia sp. (2) By performing high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC)-quantification of four essential photosynthetic pigments (chlorophyll a, chlorophyll b, β-carotene and lutein) of one sample of each species and dose. Results indicate that the physiological state of the thallus is the most important factor impairing the tolerance of Trebouxia sp. to UV-C radiation in both lichen species. Desiccated thalli were demonstrated to be more resistant to UV-C. No clear influence of UV-C radiation on the carotenoid content was detected. Comparing the respective doses applied, the individuals of R. geographicum are more sensitive than C. gyrosa.
LIFT: Reusing Knowledge from Legacy Systems

Software maintenance tasks are the most expensive activities on legacy systems life cycle, and system understanding is the most important factor of this cost. Thus, in order to aid legacy knowledge retrieval and reuse, this paper presents LIFT: a Legacy InFormation retrieval Tool, discussing since its initial requirements until its preliminary experience in industrial projects.
High‐level data races

Data races are a common problem in concurrent and multi‐threaded programming. Experience shows that the classical notion of a data race is not powerful enough to capture certain types of inconsistencies occurring in practice. This paper investigates data races on a higher abstraction layer. This enables detection of inconsistent uses of shared variables, even if no classical race condition occurs. For example, a data structure representing a coordinate pair may have to be treated atomically. By lifting the meaning of a data race to a higher level, such problems can now be covered. The paper defines the concepts ‘view’ and ‘view consistency’ to give a notation for this novel kind of property. It describes what kinds of errors can be detected with this new definition, and where its limitations are. It also gives a formal guideline for using data structures in a multi‐threaded environment. © US Government copyright
Low-Cost Sorting Network Circuits Using Unary Processing

Sorting is a common task in a wide range of applications from signal and image processing to switching systems. For applications that require high performance, sorting is often performed in hardware with application-specified integrated circuits or field-programmable gate arrays. Hardware cost and power consumption are the dominant concerns. The usual approach is to wire up a network of compare-and-swap units in a configuration called the Batcher (or bitonic) network. Such networks can readily be pipelined. This paper proposes a novel area-efficient and power-efficient approach to sorting networks, based on “unary processing. ” In unary processing, numbers are encoded uniformly by a sequence of one value (say 1) followed by a sequence of the other value (say 0) in a stream of 0’s and 1’s with the value defined by the fraction of 1’s in the stream. Synthesis results of complete sorting networks show up to 92% area and power saving compared to the conventional binary implementations. However, the latency increases. To mitigate the increased latency, this paper uses a novel time-encoding of data. The approach is validated with two implementations of an important application of sorting: median filtering. The result is a low cost, energy-efficient implementation of median filtering with only a slight accuracy loss, compared to conventional implementations.
Dynamic- X-Y: A Tool for Learning Dynamic Alert Suppression Policies in AIOps

Although Cloud Native Network functions (CNFs) provide greater agility, manageability, and significantly lower operational costs, the reliability and performance assurance is getting increasingly complex, therefore observability tools are needed to monitor and detect anomalous events, triggering alert notifications and creation of incidents. However, most of these notifications turn out to be false alarms, leading to alert fatigue, inefficiencies, and the risk of missing critical alerts. Existing approaches for reducing alert noise rely on static policies that can quickly become outdated in dynamic IT environments. We demonstrate a novel unsupervised approach, Dynamic-X-Y, which learns dynamic alert suppression policies from historical alert data and applies them to incoming events/alerts at runtime, thereby reducing unnecessary alert notifications. Our approach achieves an accuracy of 93.93% in identifying correct alerts, outperforming the baselines by a significant margin. Additionally, we present a case study demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach vis-a-vis the No-Sunnression annroach.
MRE: A Study on Evolutionary Language Understanding

The lack of well-annotated data is always one of the biggest problems for most training-based dialogue systems. Without enough training data, it’s almost impossible for a trainable system to work. In this paper, we explore the evolutionary language understanding approach to build a natural language understanding machine in a virtual human training project. We build the initial training data with a finite state machine. The language understanding system is trained based on the automated data first and is improved as more and more real data come in, which is proved by the experimental results.
Plasma-Tissue Interactions in Argon Plasma Coagulation: Effects of Power and Tissue Resistance

The coagulation properties of the argon plasma coagulation (APC) technique present tremendous potential for a wide range of endoscopic applications. Although several studies have explored the endoscopic application of this technique, there has been no previous research about the relevant argon plasma properties during coagulation. We have investigated the role of power in the interactions between plasma and biological tissue, and have reported on the dielectric properties of the APC treated samples. The data revealed that at a resistance of 1 k , the applied power was within 10% to 15% of the power setting, and the average resistance of the animal samples was between 0.8 and 3.7 k . The data also suggested that the amount of power applied could be adjusted according to the expected tissue resistance range. Additionally, it was determined that the burned surface caused by the APC treatment was on average two to three times less conductive than the untreated surface. The data also revealed that 60%–80% of the power produced by the electrosurgical generator was delivered into the biological tissue, and the plasma channel consumed the remaining 20%–40%. This study establishes a guide for the investigation of optimal argon thermal plasma properties for biological tissue application.
ProgressER

Entity resolution (ER) is the process of identifying which entities in a dataset refer to the same real-world object. In relational ER, the dataset consists of multiple entity-sets and relationships among them. Such relationships cause the resolution of some entities to influence the resolution of other entities. For instance, consider a relational dataset that consists of a set of research paper entities and a set of venue entities. In such a dataset, deciding that two research papers are the same may trigger the fact that their venues are also the same. This article proposes a progressive approach to relational ER, named ProgressER, that aims to produce the highest quality result given a constraint on the resolution budget, specified by the user. Such a progressive approach is useful for many emerging analytical applications that require low latency response (and thus cannot tolerate delays caused by cleaning the entire dataset) and/or in situations where the underlying resources are constrained or costly to use. To maximize the quality of the result, ProgressER follows an adaptive strategy that periodically monitors and reassesses the resolution progress to determine which parts of the dataset should be resolved next and how they should be resolved. More specifically, ProgressER divides the input budget into several resolution windows and analyzes the resolution progress at the beginning of each window to generate a resolution plan for the current window. A resolution plan specifies which blocks of entities and which entity pairs within blocks need to be resolved during the plan execution phase of that window. In addition, ProgressER specifies, for each identified pair of entities, the order in which the similarity functions should be applied on the pair. Such an order plays a significant role in reducing the overall cost because applying the first few functions in this order might be sufficient to resolve the pair. The empirical evaluation of ProgressER demonstrates its significant advantage in terms of progressiveness over the traditional ER techniques for the given problem settings.
Evaluation of an iterative model–based reconstruction algorithm for low-tube-voltage (80 kVp) computed tomography angiography

Abstract. The objective of this study was to investigate the improvement in diagnostic quality of an iterative model–based reconstruction (IMBR) algorithm for low-tube-voltage (80-kVp) and low-tube-current in abdominal computed tomography angiography (CTA). A total of 11 patients were imaged on a 256-slice multidetector computed tomography for visualization of the aorta. For all patients, three different reconstructions from the low-tube-voltage data are generated: filtered backprojection (FBP), IMBR, and a mixture of both IMBR+FBP. To determine the diagnostic value of IMBR-based reconstructions, the image quality was assessed. With IMBR-based reconstructions, image noise could be significantly reduced, which was confirmed by a highly improved contrast-to-noise ratio. In the image quality assessment, radiologists were able to reliably detect more third-order and higher aortic branches in the IMBR reconstructions compared to FBP reconstructions. The effective dose level was, on average, 3.0 mSv for 80-kVp acquisitions. Low-tube-voltage CTAs significantly improve vascular contrast as presented by others; however, this effect in combination with IMBR enabled yet another substantial improvement of diagnostic quality. For IMBR, a significant improvement of image quality and a decreased radiation dose at low-tube-voltage can be reported.
Novel synthesizing method of pH-dependent doxorubicin-loaded anti-CD22-labelled drug delivery nanosystem

The objective of this study was to investigate the anticancer efficacy of dimercaptosuccinic acid-modified iron oxide magnetic nanoparticles coloaded with anti-CD22 antibodies and doxorubicin (anti-CD22-MNPs-DOX) on non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma cells. The physical properties of anti-CD22-MNPs-DOX were studied and its antitumor effect on Raji cells in vitro was evaluated using the Cell Counting Kit-8 assay. Furthermore, cell apoptosis and intracellular accumulation of doxorubicin were determined by flow cytometry. The results revealed that anti-CD22-MNPs-DOX inhibited the proliferation of Raji cells, significantly increased the uptake of doxorubicin, and induced apoptosis. Therefore, it was concluded that a coloaded antibody and chemotherapeutic drug with magnetic nanoparticles might be an efficient targeted treatment strategy for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.